Geniza Lab

Legal document. Dated Thursday 26 Elul 1386 Sel. (September 1075 CE). There is an invocation of the Nagid Yehuda b. Seʿadya at the beginning. Yiṣḥaq b. Musāfir b. Pinḥas b. Zurayq, heir to his maternal uncle Yūsuf b. ʿAbdallāh's estate registers a claim against Avraham b. Naṣīr ha-Levi, with whom his uncle had deposited some of his belongings. In the deposition before the Fusṭāṭ tribunal, Avrahām acknowledged that he had stored the items in his house in Malīj. However, "his house had been plundered (nuhiba) during the pillage which affected Malīj and the whole region" when the entire population was affected by the plunder (nahb). Avraham had managed to secure some of Yūsuf's possessions but he was "intercepted and waylaid by the Lawāta Berbers who robbed him of his clothes and those of Yūsuf that he was carrying" (Cohen, Self-government, pg. 59). The pillage had most likely taken place during the period of lawlessness and famine, 1062–74 CE. (Information from Goitein’s index card and Med Soc V, p.524, n.110.) The document was written around the text of a fiscal account in Arabic relating to the kharāj payments of 437 Kharaji (ca. 1046 CE) (PGPID 34343). YU