Archival Practices Materialised

The Persian and Persianate Documents (13th–14th centuries) from al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf in Jerusalem

When: Tuesday, 12 September 2023, 9:00 am CEST – Wednesday, 13 September 2023, 12:15 pm CEST
Where: Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg, Room 3015, and online

This workshop aims to investigate the material, textual and archival logic of multilingual and multiscriptural documents bringing together experts based in Germany, Georgia and Japan. It centres on the corpus of 980 documents preserved in the Islamic Museum located on the Temple Mount (al-Ḥaram al-Sharīf) in Jerusalem – a collection of outstanding importance for the history of pre-Ottoman Western Asia. Until now most research on these documents has focused on the larger corpus of Arabic documents produced locally in fourteenth century Mamluk Jerusalem. The present workshop aims to investigate the lesser known transregional sub-corpus of “Persian“ and “Persianate“ documents produced outside Jerusalem. These documents written in multiple languages and scripts including Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Georgian, Mongolian and Turkic consist of legal deeds and administrative orders dating from the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries related to three neighbouring geographic regions: Transcaucasia, Anatolia and north-western Iran. The workshop aims to analyse for the first time the Armenian, Georgian and Arabic documents of the sub-corpus, alongside the Persian documents relating to the Mongol Chubanid official, Amīr Ādūjī (d.ca. 1331), and his family, including newly discovered documents relating to the Ādūjī family archive which have come to light in 2019 (Aljoumani, Hirschler and Bhalloo 2024).

Workshop Organisers:

Zahir Bhalloo (Universität Hamburg), Masatomo Kawamoto (Nara University)