Thread by @mrustow

A Fatimid palace memorandum from the caliphate of al-Mustanṣir: another multi-handed document, as promised in the last #fragmentfriday. This one is datable to 1049–50 (441H). But it's only a piece of some larger whole. /1

@theUL @theULSpecColl @CamDigLib

S. M. Stern of Oxford published this fragment in 1962. /2

Based on what he had of the text, Stern thought it was part of a petition to the caliph al-Mustanṣir. /3

He also spotted a name, Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad, whom he identified in two 12th-13th c works. The guy was vizier for just a few months—hence Stern's dating of 1049–50. For those of you who love your colorful Fatimid viziers, he was the brother of the better known al-Jarjarāʾī. /4

Did Stern know this was actually the *signature* of said vizier? Unclear.

Then, in 1993, Geoffrey Khan republished the text, improving the reading of one line and reinterpreting the administrative frame as a "response to the endorsement of a petition." /5

When I started researching Fatimid petitioning a few years ago, I got curious about this fragment. What administrative procedure did it represent? Not one for which I had other good evidence. What was a response to an endorsement, and where was the petition? /6

So I started digging or other fragments of the document. The first place I looked was not the Arabic, but the denser Hebrew-script text written around the Arabic. If I could find other fragments of the Hebrew-script text, maybe it would yield another fragment of the Arabic. /7

Luckily for me, Tzvi Stampfer had meanwhile identified the Hebrew-script text as a treatise by a well-known gaʾon of Sura in Baghdad, Shemuʾel b. Ḥofni (d. 1013), Kitāb aḥkām al-shurūṭ, a Judaeo-Arabic treatise on writing legal documents. /8

Stampfer generously sent me a list of shelfmarks he'd identified with Shemuʾel b. Ḥofni's text. On it was not just one additional fragment, but two. This is the join. /9

If you look at the three fragments together, you can see that the original fragment at bottom was written not in one hand but in four (hands 2–5). An additional hand (hand 1) spans the top and middle fragment. One document, five hands ... things were getting interesting. /10

The administrative procedure was starting to come into vew. As with those Fatimid tax receipts, there were 5 hands, sums, and, presumably, checks against embezzlement. /11

But there was one thing that still bothered me. I now had a request for authentication and a number of authentications, including records of copies made for the archives. But copies of what? What was being authenticated? I still didn't know. /12

I forgot about the problem until last fall, when I rechecked the email from Stampfer. Turns out I'd missed a fragment on his list. It's a larger piece than the other three together, and not a contiguous join, which is why I'd first ignored it. /13

It turned out to be the missing piece. It contains a report of fiscal expenditures, and explains the procedure: like tax receipts, it had sums changing hands; but this is about expenditures, not revenue. /14

That's why the vizier's signature appears on it: expenditures required high level approval. There you have it: eleventh-century bureaucracy and the signature of the brother of al-Jarjarāʾī. /end