Miriam Wagner - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Miriam Wagner
This Festschrift is a collection of papers in honour of Geoffrey Khan, the Regius Professor of He... more This Festschrift is a collection of papers in honour of Geoffrey Khan, the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge, written by his former and current students and post-doctoral re ...
Language, Gender and Law in the Judaeo-Islamic Milieu, 2020
Arabica, 2020
The Geniza BLIND SPOTS AND CATACLYSMS Many improbable contingencies have linked up to bring sourc... more The Geniza BLIND SPOTS AND CATACLYSMS Many improbable contingencies have linked up to bring sources to the present, including patterns of human settlement, geographical and environmental constraints, evolving maps of political sovereignty, and uneven distributions of power. It is an indescribable stroke of good fortune for historians that the oldest and largest geniza in the world happens to have survived three kilometers south of the first capital of Islamic Egypt (fig. 1.1). The Fatimids entered Egypt in 359/969 from the West, ousting the Abbasids-in the form of their governors, the Ikhshīdids-and beating them back to the deserts of Syria and Iraq. They began building their capital and palatine complex, Cairo, as soon as they arrived, thus becoming the first fully sovereign dynasty in a thousand years to rule Egypt from Egypt. 1 Soon after, between 1025 and 1041, the synagogue now known as the Ben Ezra was built (or rebuilt on the site of two previous synagogues) and outfitted with a chamber for worn documents large enough that for a thousand years after, it didn't need to be emptied. 2 The building of a capital and a geniza within half a century and seven kilometers of one another was a fortunate confluence whose consequences have not yet been spelled out. Egypt is the only Islamicate setting that permits the luxury of examining original documentation from every medieval century. This is not because Egypt housed an abundance of medieval archives. It probably did, but in this it was not alone. Rather, Egypt's environmental conditions granted us what the discontinuity of archives withheld: traces of repositories that once served living purposes. This is owing to a rare confluence of factors. 3 First, there is geography. Egypt is cut through by the Nile, on which human habitation and civilization depended for the entire history of the country until recently. The rest of the place is huge swaths of desert, with the exception of the Fayyūm, the agricultural oasis southwest of the delta. Settlements have snaked along the course of the Nile for millennia, and the proximity of settled civilization and desert is ideal for the intact survival of human artifacts-texts among them. As the towns and cities along the Nile grew, they stretched into the desert (as Cairo is still doing today). As they shrank, they drew closer to the river, leaving archaeological deposits in the dry-as-dust no-man's-land. One fine example of this is the survival of an enormous cache-estimated at half a million pieces, though I do not know how accurately-from Roman Oxyrhynchos
Journal of Semitic Studies, 2015
This Festschrift is a collection of papers in honour of Geoffrey Khan, the Regius Professor of He... more This Festschrift is a collection of papers in honour of Geoffrey Khan, the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge, written by his former and current students and post-doctoral re ...
Language, Gender and Law in the Judaeo-Islamic Milieu, 2020
Arabica, 2020
The Geniza BLIND SPOTS AND CATACLYSMS Many improbable contingencies have linked up to bring sourc... more The Geniza BLIND SPOTS AND CATACLYSMS Many improbable contingencies have linked up to bring sources to the present, including patterns of human settlement, geographical and environmental constraints, evolving maps of political sovereignty, and uneven distributions of power. It is an indescribable stroke of good fortune for historians that the oldest and largest geniza in the world happens to have survived three kilometers south of the first capital of Islamic Egypt (fig. 1.1). The Fatimids entered Egypt in 359/969 from the West, ousting the Abbasids-in the form of their governors, the Ikhshīdids-and beating them back to the deserts of Syria and Iraq. They began building their capital and palatine complex, Cairo, as soon as they arrived, thus becoming the first fully sovereign dynasty in a thousand years to rule Egypt from Egypt. 1 Soon after, between 1025 and 1041, the synagogue now known as the Ben Ezra was built (or rebuilt on the site of two previous synagogues) and outfitted with a chamber for worn documents large enough that for a thousand years after, it didn't need to be emptied. 2 The building of a capital and a geniza within half a century and seven kilometers of one another was a fortunate confluence whose consequences have not yet been spelled out. Egypt is the only Islamicate setting that permits the luxury of examining original documentation from every medieval century. This is not because Egypt housed an abundance of medieval archives. It probably did, but in this it was not alone. Rather, Egypt's environmental conditions granted us what the discontinuity of archives withheld: traces of repositories that once served living purposes. This is owing to a rare confluence of factors. 3 First, there is geography. Egypt is cut through by the Nile, on which human habitation and civilization depended for the entire history of the country until recently. The rest of the place is huge swaths of desert, with the exception of the Fayyūm, the agricultural oasis southwest of the delta. Settlements have snaked along the course of the Nile for millennia, and the proximity of settled civilization and desert is ideal for the intact survival of human artifacts-texts among them. As the towns and cities along the Nile grew, they stretched into the desert (as Cairo is still doing today). As they shrank, they drew closer to the river, leaving archaeological deposits in the dry-as-dust no-man's-land. One fine example of this is the survival of an enormous cache-estimated at half a million pieces, though I do not know how accurately-from Roman Oxyrhynchos
Journal of Semitic Studies, 2015