Ṭuṭūn: An Egyptian Provincial Town of the 9th-11th Centuries as Mirrored in Arabic Documents

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Andreas Kaplony
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 461123607

This project is part of Arabic Papyrology’s ongoing initiative to publish the at least 200,000 pre-modern Arabic documents preserved in European, Arabic and American collections, with the aim of analysing them linguistically and historically in cooperation with the research on Greek, Coptic and Judeo-Arabic documents, and to place them at the disposal of researchers in Arabic and Islamic Studies. This initiative, however, suffers from two current downsides: on the one hand, only 10% of all documents have ever been described and only 2.5% published, and on the other hand, only 2.5% have been traced back to archives, while all others are preserved as single documents with next to no information on how they were found and acquired. This is why reflecting on how to reconstruct archives has a very high priority.

 While exploring the holdings of the Berlin collection, we came across a dossier of about 200 Arabic documents from the Egyptian provincial town Ṭuṭūn, 9th-11th centuries. This dossier enables us to describe, for the first time ever, everyday life in a pre-modern provincial town of the Islamic World: its social structure; spatial arrangement; tax collecting; regional and interregional trade and commerce; the coexistence and cooperation of languages, religions, confessions, and law traditions; and the blossoming and fading of the town as an administrative centre. By applying basic criteria of document analysis (key terms; formal document types; paleography; and acquisition history), we will reconstruct who, in Ṭuṭūn, had compiled, administered and used the original archives. Our final goal is to develop an easy-to-use method to identify archives in a bulk of scattered documents, exemplified by our method of handling the Ṭuṭūn dossier.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants