Contents: How to Use the Glossary | About the Authors | A Debt of Gratitude | Tech

How to Use the Glossary in Estimating a Fragment’s Dating

The shelfmark below demonstrates how certain numismatic references can assist us in tracing a chronological “bottom line” for a given fragment. Although this debt acknowledgement ENA NS 19.17 is brief and undated, the designation of the dirhams as Kāmilīyye (כאמליה) in line four makes it possible to estimate the year of recording as no earlier than 1225 CE (622 AH). At this point in time, Sultan al-Kāmil Nāṣr ad-Dīn Muḥammad (r. 1218-1238 CE) implemented new mintage standards for dirhams in an effort to curtail the circulation of lower-quality silver currency in the Ayyūbid realm. Accordingly, the Paleographical Glossary designates this coinage type with the tag regnal variant. There are two other methods in which numismatic references can help us determine the earliest year in which a fragment could have been recorded. The first method relies on the instances in which state entities founded new coinage types: a phenomenon that became more common with the onset of Ottoman imperial rule in Egypt. The third method is the most rare and is attested in a handful of documents that reference the standards implemented by heads of the local mint in Cairo (see: mint standard). Taken together, these three chronological lines of analysis have yielded the metadata behind the CCG Paleographical Glossary. For further examples of this methodology, see the Princeton Geniza Project tag numismatic dating.

Shelfmark: ENA NS 19.17 Provenance: Image courtesy of the Jewish Theological Seminary Library (JTSL) - Image Link - Rights Statement

Transcription:

1 נשהד עלי סלימאן אן ענדה

2 ופי דמתה לשיך לטף אללה

3 מאיתין תמאניה ותמאנין

4 דרהם ונצף כאמליה מקצטה

5 כל שהר אתני עשר נקרה

6 יקום לה קסט כל שהר פי

7 סלכה ואנה אדא אעאק ענה

8 קסט שהרין לה אן ידפעה

9 לדיני גויים בגיר משאורה

10 בית דין ולה דלך

Translation: “We testify that Sulaymān owes a debt to Luṭfallāh of 288½ kāmilī dirhams, to be paid in monthly installments of 12 nuqra (high-value silver coinage), the installments due at the end of each month. If he misses two months of payments, he will be obligated to pay in gentile courts…”

edited and translated by Alan Elbaum

About the Authors

Matthew Dudley is a research assistant at the Princeton Geniza Lab and a Ph.D. candidate in History at Yale University where he is completing a dissertation titled: “Into the Anti-Archive: Jewish Law and Ottoman Imperial Administration in the Early Modern Cairo Geniza.”

Alan Elbaum is a senior research assistant at the Princeton Geniza Lab and a psychiatry resident at the University of California San Francisco.

Thanks to Our Colleagues and Mentors

Our work toward building a companion database website for the DPUL exhibition would not have been possible without access to the open source coding framework CollectionBuilder– which was developed by a team at the Center for Digital Inquiry and Learning at the University of Idaho. To the CDIL Co-Directors Devin Becker, Olivia Wikle, and Evan Williamson– thank you for building such an accessible and powerful coding framework for digital humanists.

Since this project began in November 2020 we have accrued a debt of gratitude to many colleagues and mentors on-campus at Princeton and across other institutions. First and foremost, we’d like to thank our mentors at the Princeton Geniza Lab and Princeton University Library, Professor Marina Rustow and Dr. Alan Stahl, who have supported this project throughout each stage of its development. At the PGL, we must also thank: Professor Eve Krakowski, Professor Amir Ashur, Dr. Lorenzo Bondioli, Jessica Parker, Yusuf Umrethwala, Rachel Richman, Ksenia Ryzhova, Grace Masback, and so many others who have contributed to the PGP cataloguing data that enabled the completion of this project. At Princeton University Library, our thanks go to: Dr. William G. Noel, Kimberly Leaman, Emma Sarconi, Esme Cowles and at The Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton: Dr. Rebecca Koeser. Beyond Princeton University campus, we also owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. Benjamin Outhwaite and Dr. Melonie Schmierer-Lee for making it possible to display images of geniza fragments from the collections of Cambridge University Library. Likewise, we thank the University of Manchester, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America for making images in their collections available through IIIF and Creative Commons. For their review of the companion database metadata and advising over the years, many thanks go to Professor Francesca Trivellato (Institute for Advanced Study) and Professor Alan Mikhail (Yale University). We also wish to thank Dr. Nancy Um (Getty Research Institute) for her feedback on our metadata.