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...
Thinking with the dispersal of Middle Eastern artifacts: lost and imagined monastic archives from the Umayyad and the Abbasid periods
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.
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Keywords :
histoire de l’Islam ancien, documents islamiques, archives, monastères, dispersion du patrimoine culturel, commerce des antiquitésIndex by keyword:
early Islamic history, Islamic documents, archives, monasteries, cultural heritage dispersal, antiquities tradeIndex by keywords:
تاريخ الإسلام القديم, وثائق إسلامية, أرشيف, محفوظات, أديرة, تشتّت التراث الثقافي, تجارة الآثارExcerpt
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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
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