Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Notes on Transliteration, Place Names, Dates, Editions, and Translations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Ties that Bound the Societies of the Islamic Empire
- Part I Personal ties
- Part II Institutions
- 6 Messengers in Byzantine and Early Muslim Egypt: Small Cogs, but Systemically Relevant. With Some Remarks on the Dossier of Menas, Stratiōtēs
- 7 The Epistolary Imamate: Circular Letters in the Administration of the Shiʿi Community
- 8 Early Arabic Decrees on Papyrus from the Abbasid Period
- 9 A State Letter from a Marwanid Caliph to his Governor of Iraq: A Historiographical Investigation into Khālid b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Qasrī’s Downfall
- 10 Between the Arabs and the Turks: Household, Conversion and Power Dynamics in Early Islamic Bactria
- 11 Emotion in Early Islamic Social Hierarchies: Affection, Threats, and Appeals to Piety in Official Documents from the Umayyad and Abbasid Periods
- Part III Communities
- Index
8 - Early Arabic Decrees on Papyrus from the Abbasid Period
from Part II - Institutions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 December 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- Notes on Transliteration, Place Names, Dates, Editions, and Translations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Ties that Bound the Societies of the Islamic Empire
- Part I Personal ties
- Part II Institutions
- 6 Messengers in Byzantine and Early Muslim Egypt: Small Cogs, but Systemically Relevant. With Some Remarks on the Dossier of Menas, Stratiōtēs
- 7 The Epistolary Imamate: Circular Letters in the Administration of the Shiʿi Community
- 8 Early Arabic Decrees on Papyrus from the Abbasid Period
- 9 A State Letter from a Marwanid Caliph to his Governor of Iraq: A Historiographical Investigation into Khālid b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Qasrī’s Downfall
- 10 Between the Arabs and the Turks: Household, Conversion and Power Dynamics in Early Islamic Bactria
- 11 Emotion in Early Islamic Social Hierarchies: Affection, Threats, and Appeals to Piety in Official Documents from the Umayyad and Abbasid Periods
- Part III Communities
- Index
Summary
A large number of Arabic decrees (ar. sijill, manšūr or marsūm) from the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk periods have been preserved in Christian, Jewish and Muslim caches. Besides original pieces, dozens of documents that are now lost have survived through copies made in chancery manuals. Although S. M. Stern and more recently Marina Rustow have sought to find continuities between the Fatimid decrees and their Abbasid forerunners, so far there is very little concrete evidence and, above all, no identified decree for the Abbasid period. In this article, Naïm Vanthieghem argues, as both suspected, that this genre indeed had forerunners in the Abbasid period, of which five have survived. Besides a study of their formulary, structure and script, the article tries to reconstruct how they worked and were used and how far this genre spread out through the Empire.
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- Mechanisms of Social Dependency in the Early Islamic Empire , pp. 232 - 257Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024
- Creative Commons
- This content is Open Access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/cclicenses/