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

Another Fatimid tax receipt for your viewing pleasure. This one leapt out of the pile this morning, from the collection of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in Paris. /1 The AIU collection contains lots of Ottoman texts. Geniza document specialists have neglected it; we cluster in the 1000–1500 range. Ottoman Ladino and Arabic from AIU are getting attention now from Alan Elbaum of the PGP team; the Ottoman Turkish material awaits its Goitein. /2

Multihanded documents for your #fragmentfriday! I like these, despite their illegibility: they suggest that bureaucracy was not a modern invention.

By bureaucracy, I don't mean annoying paperwork, though there was some of that, but regularity and predictability of procedure. /1 This is a Fatimid tax receipt from 1015 (405H).

It's housed @theULSpecColl. There are others at @JTSVoice and @egyptlibrary. /2

For your #fragmentfriday: A letter from a Libyan Jew in 1103 who gripes, in rhyming Judaeo-Arabic, about a string of Red Sea ports on his way to Aden. I find it hilarious; your mileage may vary. cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-TS-000… 2/“I arrived in ʿAydhāb, which is truly a city of tribulations (Arab. adhāb). Then we left al-Maqlaʿayn and set sail in a ship that had in it not a single nail of iron, but rather was tied together with ropes, may God protect us with his shield.”

Some fun facts for your #fragmentfriday: medieval Samaritans, caliphal tax officials, and #Latin terminological fossils in #Arabic. All converge in a Cairo geniza document from @theULSpecColl. 2/This tattered yet beautiful Arabic parchment is a 12th c qadi court record. Legal documents from medieval Egypt were written on both parchment and paper after about 900, and on papyrus before that. (Here’s another 12th c parchment deed regarding a sharābī, a seller of potions.)

For your #fragmentfriday (tho’ I‘m vaguely aware it’s Sunday): a long vertical scroll (rotulus) from the #cairogeniza with an equally long social history. A winding thread: I’ll tell the story backwards, pts. 1-7 are modern, pts. 8-23 medieval: 1/This fragment comes from the Lewis-Gibson collection, now owned by Oxford and Cambridge. They jointly acquired these 1700 mss in a model of cooperation under the leadership of @richove of @bodleianlibs and @annejarvispul of @theUL (now of @PULibrary). bodleian.ox.ac.uk/news/2013/hist…