1/🧵This is Nabia Abbott. She was a groundbreaking scholar of #Arabic manuscripts, the first woman to be a professor at @UChicago’s Oriental Institute, and once sent me on a wild goose chase spanning 3 continents. She deserves a lot more than one thread, but here's a start. 2/Nabīha ʿAbūd (نبيهة عبود), later known as Nabia Abbott, was born in 1897 to a Christian family in Mardin (then the Ottoman Empire, now modern Turkey). Her family moved around a lot, which led to her attending school in India and completing a BA degree in Lucknow in 1919.

1/🧵So there’s this box in the Genizah Research Unit at @theUL. It’s labelled “Worman Archive.” It’s supposed to be full of stuff associated with Ernest James Worman, a librarian who catalogued the #Genizah collection 120 years ago. Yesterday I found out that’s not all true. 2/See, Worman’s story is actually quite tragic. He was born in 1871 to a working-class #Cambridge family. That’s not the tragic part. In 1895, @theUL hired him as a “Library Assistant.” He then taught himself Arabic and Hebrew to catalogue the #Genizah manuscript collection.

1/Centuries before the #printingpress took off in Europe, printers in Egypt employed a type of woodblock printing known as “tarsh” (طرش). Only around 100 of these tarsh prints are known to exist. They are also very cool, so here’s a 🧵on #Arabic block prints in @theUL. #Cambridge 2/“Woodblock printing” is a term historians use to talk about making a big stamp and slapping paper onto it. Block printers would carve wood so the negative space looked like whatever image or text they wanted to print. Then they’d coat it in ink and stamp some paper. Easy.