Petra Sijpesteijn - Reading beyond the Words: What Arabic Papyri Can Tell Us

This talk will be hosted on Thursday, 7 November 2024 at 6:00 pm.

Papyrus was the writing material in use in the Mediterranean and Near East from the moment of its discovery in the 3rd millennium BCE until it was replaced by paper around the year 1000 CE. The Arabs who conquered Egypt in the mid-seventh century continued to use papyrus to write letters, accounts, receipts, lists and any other kind of imaginable text on.

These documents form an invaluable source to reconstruct the daily life experience of the Muslims and non-Muslims living in Egypt under the first four centuries of Islamic rule. This information is not only obtained from the words and texts written on the papyri, but also from material and scriptural features that can be found on the papyrus. The lay-out of the text, the use of blank spaces, the application or absence of diacritical dots, the presence of different scripts and languages, what kind of papyrus was used and how it was employed all participated in the exchange between the sender and addressee, the producer or scribe and the user or reader of the text.

In this presentation, examples will be given of which messages were conveyed in papyri beyond the content of the texts written on them and what this tells us about documentary culture in early Islamic Egypt.

About the speaker

Petra Sijpesteijn is professor of Arabic at Leiden University. She studied Arabic and History in Leiden, Damascus, Cambridge, Oxford, Cornell and Princeton Universities and also at NVIC. In her work she recovers the daily life experience of Muslims and non-Muslims living under Muslim rule through the documents that they produced. She is about to embark on a five year VICI project entitled ‘Land, Space, Power: Landscapes of the Early Caliphate’ which uses inscriptions, documentary and archaeological sources to examine the spatial and environmental system in which the Arab-Islamic project was enacted and by which it created a culturally invested landscape that embodied, reflected and perpetuated a specifically Arab-Islamic experience of the environment, even for its non-Arab, non-Muslim inhabitants.

Attention!

The lecture starts at 6 pm. The number of seats is limited and we work on a first-come, first-served basis. We open our doors at 5:30 and close them at 6:15 or earlier in case the lecture room reaches its full capacity. This talk will not be recorded nor livestreamed.