Geniza Lab

Letter from Jerusalem from the middle of the 11th century, with a document from the Egyptian office of treasurer on the free space on the back. (Gil: Letter from Ḥayyim ha-ḥaver b. Shelomo/Salāma in Jerusalem to Yiṣḥaq b. Yiṣḥaq he-ḥaver in Fustat regarding a debt owed to the latter. On verso, accounts of very large amounts of money in the hand of Barhūn b. Mūsā al-Tāhirtī, the cousin of Nahray b. Nissim. Ed. Gil, Palestine vol. 3, #463.) (NB: The Goitein material scanned here covers DK 2, DK 333 and DK 11. MR)

State receipt? In Arabic script. وصل الى بيت المال المعمور...

Recto: Fragment of a state document, probably Fatimid. In Arabic script, chancery hand, huge letters, wide (but variable) space between the lines. The basmala appears twice, and one line begins, "Qāla Amīr al-Muʾminīn..." Verso: Also a state document; the relationship to recto is not clear. Opens with a reference to an employee of the treasury (al-mustakhdam fī bayt al-māl al-maʿmūr) and possibly the date Ṣafar 548 AH, which would be 1153 CE, and then the funds of Dīwān al-Abwāb.

Quittance granted by [...] bt. ʿAbdallāh al-[...] to Abū l-Faraj Sulaymān(?) b. Hārūn al-Khaybarī(?) known as Ibn al-Sulūkī(?) and who was somehow associated with the treasury (bayt al-māl al-maʿmūr). (Information in part from Goitein's index card.) "In a few surviving quittance documents from the Fatimid period the early opening formula is attached to the beginning of the iqrār, e.g. T-S Ar. 41.99: hādhā kitāb barā'a li-fulān ibn fulān... katabathu lahu fulāna ibnat fulān wa-aqarrat lahu bi-mā fīhi wa-ashhadat lahu ʿalā dhālika shuhūd hādhā l-kitāb... annahu lā ḥaqq lahā qibal fulān ibn fulān...." This is a document of quittance for so-and-so son of so-and-so... which so-and-so daughter of so and-so wrote for him and she acknowledged to him what is contained herein and called the witnesses of this document to bear testimony to it for him... that she has no claim on so-and-so son of so-and-so...". The witnesses of the document attached autograph witnesses clauses with the formula: shahida fulān ibn fulān ʿalā iqrār al-mubri'a bi-mā fīhi fī tārīkhihi..." "So-and-so son of so-and-so bore witness to the acknowledged of what is contained herein by the woman granting the quittance on its date." Geoffrey Khan, "An Arabic Legal Document from the Umayyad Period," Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 4, no. 3 (1994), p. 368. On verso there are Hebrew writing exercises.