Skip to navigation – Site map

HomeNumérosLXXDossier thématiqueThinking with the dispersal of Mi...

Dossier thématique

Thinking with the dispersal of Middle Eastern artifacts: lost and imagined monastic archives from the Umayyad and the Abbasid periods

À propos de la dispersion des artéfacts du Moyen-Orient : archives monastiques perdues et imaginées des périodes omeyyade et abbaside
حول تشتّت أثريّات الشرق الأوسط : الأراشيف الرهبانية المفقودة والمتخيّلة من العصرَين الأموي والعبّاسي
Cecilia Palombo
p. 45-68

Abstracts

This paper considers a corpus of fragmented administrative and legal documents from the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, once housed in Egyptian monastic libraries, and now scattered in many collections. Viewing archives as both practices and spaces, it postulates that monastic officials and scribes played a role in early Islamic provincial administration, neither as state officials nor as ḏimmī subjects. Rather, they did so as groups of people at the margins of, but not entirely outside, the state administration, by overseeing and transferring resources. These monastic archives, however, are reconstructed from scattered documents in libraries, museums, digital exhibits, and catalogues. They illustrate both the dispersal of Middle Eastern cultural heritage and the shifting historical narratives shaped by archival fragmentation. The study highlights tensions between historical Islamicate archival practices and the present arrangement of documents in modern repositories. Rather than resolving this tension, acknowledging it allows for alternative historical interpretations.

Top of page

Excerpt

Cairn

Full-text article available to subscribers or on a "pay per view" basis. It will be available on this URL in January 2027.
Read it

Outline

Connecting the documents
Monastic libraries, chancery documents
Fragmented archives
Dispersed archives
Material archives

First lines

Recent historical scholarship on the medieval Middle East has been strongly impacted by its own “archival turn.” For a long time, scholars had shared a vague notion that it was only with the Ottoman empire that veritable archives could arise in the region. The study of archives before the Ottomans had remained hindered by debates over the place of orality in the transmission of Islamic religious knowledge, as opposed to written documents, as well as by the widespread misconception that there would be a lack of written sources from the early Islamic centuries. Both premises have contributed to building the argument that archives, and especially state archives, could not fully exist in the Islamicate Middle East before the later medieval period. These discussions have entirely shifted after the publication of Michael Chamberlain’s Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350, a foundational and debated book on the social value of Islamic knowledge in the later medieva...

Top of page

References

Bibliographical reference

Cecilia Palombo, “Thinking with the dispersal of Middle Eastern artifacts: lost and imagined monastic archives from the Umayyad and the Abbasid periods”Bulletin d’études orientales, LXX | 2025, 45-68.

Electronic reference

Cecilia Palombo, “Thinking with the dispersal of Middle Eastern artifacts: lost and imagined monastic archives from the Umayyad and the Abbasid periods”Bulletin d’études orientales [Online], LXX | 2025, Online since 02 January 2027, connection on 13 February 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/beo/15051; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15c1l

Top of page

About the author

Cecilia Palombo

The University of Chicago

Top of page

Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

Top of page
Search OpenEdition Search

You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search