The past fifteen years have seen a significant increase in scholarly publications on medieval Nubia, the vast region to the south of Egypt’s First Cataract (modern Aswan). Geoffrey Khan’s edition and translation of 53 Arabic documents from Qasr Ibrīm represents an important addition to our knowledge of the border region between Egypt and Nubia during the years of Fatimid rule.
The documents in question date to between the 1030s and the 1170s and were found during excavations at Qaṣr Ibrīm between 1966 and 1974. Situated just south of the First Cataract, Qaṣr Ibrīm was continuously occupied from Antiquity to the early nineteenth century and has seen many seasons of excavations in the mid-to-late twentieth century. In terms of medieval documents, the site has yielded Christian liturgical texts and administrative records in Old Nubian, Coptic, and Greek, as well as eighth-century Arabic papyri and other documents. Some of the material published here by Khan has appeared previously, particularly by Elizabeth Sartain, but this is the first study to include all the Arabic documents found and initially catalogued between 1966 and 1978. This is a project that, by Khan’s admission, has been decades in the making.
Unfortunately, the precise archaeological context of many of the documents remains uncertain: some were found in a looted tomb during the 1966 season, though they may have been combined later with other texts found elsewhere and not fully catalogued then (25). Subsequent seasons included excavations of individual houses that yielded further Arabic documents. Khan’s introduction succinctly introduces the problems of this multi-year project while proposing a plausible context for the documents included in his study, which likely consisted of several distinct archives or personal collections of documents by Nubian and Egyptian officials. This lack of a relatively cohesive, institutional archive (or “anti-archive,” to use Goitein’s term for the Cairo Genizah) is frustrating but also exciting, as the documents give us a glimpse into many different types of social and institutional relationships, from court cases to letters to legal contracts, and even a poem by a traveler.
The book begins with a brief historical introduction to medieval Nubia--the broad geographic region south of the First Cataract, which in the eleventh century included three Christian kingdoms: Dongola, Makuria, and Alwa. According to later Arab authors, a formal peace treaty (baqt) existed between Muslim Egypt and Christian Nubia, following the Islamic conquest of Egypt, under whose terms the Nubians agreed to deliver slaves as a form of tribute. What Khan and others make clear, however, is that in practice this human “tribute” was simply part of a widespread trade in human beings and may not have been recognized by the Nubians as a badge of subjection (34-36). Qaṣr Ibrīm marked a point of transition from Egypt to Nubia. For much of the period covered by the documents, the place was ruled by a representative--the eparch (Arabic: Ikshīl)--of the king of Dongola. One of the eparch’s roles was to supervise the presence and activities of Egyptian Muslim merchants, who required Nubian assent to travel up the Nile to Dongola. Many of the documents in this collection include letters by Muslim merchants to the eparch, asking for protection, legal intervention, and so on.
After establishing the historical context, Khan offers an analysis of the documents by type--letters, court documents, legal contracts--before offering an interpretation of their contents in a series of short thematic essays. These include reflections on “Coinage,” “Taxes,” “Slaves and Servants,” and so on, culminating in a kind of capstone essay about the “Socio-Economic Situation Reflected by the Documents.” Throughout this preliminary analysis, Khan sticks close to the documents themselves, though he also invokes a broader historiographical tradition on trade with his discussion of land between the First and Second Cataracts as a kind of “open trade zone” like those found in later colonial contexts (253). At stake here are several questions: how porous was the Egypt/Nubia border? What did it mean for Muslim merchants to trade upriver in Nubian territory? How freely could they move, and to what extent were their actions and movements subject to local control?
Khan draws several conclusions. Above all, this was a highly porous border zone, not only because of the dense activities of Muslim merchants within Nubia, but also due to the willingness of Christian Nubians and Muslim Egyptians to seek employment, honors, and legal redress within different religious-legal systems. In the late twelfth century, the (Christian) Nubian eparch employed several Arabic-speaking Muslim scribes, and Christian Nubians also held Fatimid titles and lands in Egypt, in what that Khan proposes are examples of “dual allegiance” to both Nubian and Egyptian states. This interpenetration of Nubian and Egyptian lives also existed at the level of everyday life. The eparch Uruwī appears to have had two wives, despite being a Christian (390). In one of the collection’s most striking episodes, in the 1040s, a Christian Nubian woman named Maryam litigated a divorce and re-marriage to a new husband within a Muslim court setting, leading to several court documents with Christian and Muslim participants. Khan points out how the formalities of court procedure and legal formulas obscure the facts of the case. Despite having given birth to a baby daughter from her first marriage, Maryam is described as a virgin in the contract for her second marriage (609). Had the earlier documents relating to her divorce (and her child’s birth) not survived alongside the subsequent remarriage, we might not have been able to identify this clause as evidence of sloppy legal writing: the insertion of a boilerplate description flagrantly at odds with reality. It is a humbling thought and a useful warning to legal historians operating with individual documents in isolation.
A second, equally important conclusion is the existence of close ties between Nubian state agents, notably the eparch, and Egyptian merchants, many of the Banū al-Kanz family. These merchants depended on Nubian--and Fatimid--state patronage and support to transit the Nile safely; many also entered business relations with the eparch and acted on his behalf as public servants, especially during times of famine, while also forming partnerships with local Nubian shipowners and merchants. The effect of these observations is to blur the lines, not only between Nubia and Egypt, but between merchant and state officers. In part, of course, this closeness reflects the bias of the surviving material, as many of the letters seem to have formed part of the eparch’s personal archive.
The documents themselves occupy the central portion of the book, from pages 291-622. Each individual document bears a title of its own in the table of contents, though many are identical (e.g., “Letter to the Eparch,” “Letter”). This approach rewards patience and careful reading, but renders quick content searches more difficult. However, following the editions of the documents, there are several useful finding indices, including a list of names, places, and a general index. Each document is introduced with its physical dimensions, inventory number, and photograph numbers. The Arabic follows, both recto and verso, followed by textual notes, and a full English translation.
Khan’s edition and translation is meticulous, with great attention paid to ambiguities of script, reading, and meaning. In another introductory essay, the author describes the script of the documents as “popular” (muṭlaq), broadly speaking, albeit with differences in layout between letters to officials, court documents, and so on. There is also a significant degree of non-standard Arabic, from spelling to vocabulary to syntax. Elsewhere, Khan suggests that some of the eparch’s scribes lacked familiarity with formal, chancery script as practiced in Fatimid Egypt and may have been recent Nubian converts to Islam (255-256). The volume concludes with black and white images of all 53 documents.
At 854 pages, including photos, maps, and indices, this book is a significant scholarly achievement. It will be useful not only to specialists on Fatimid Egypt and medieval Nubia and Arabic chancery and scribal culture, but also to scholars with a broader interest in the economic and social history of the Islamic world and its neighbors. Given the scope of the project, it seems unreasonable to ask for more material. That said, given the ambiguities of the documents’ provenance, readers with only a general background in medieval history would have benefited from more thorough discussion of Qaṣr Ibrīm’s history in this period. Since the documents do not form part of a coherent “archive” of their own, the main criterion for inclusion is the fact that they were written in Arabic in or near Qaṣr Ibrīm over a two-century period. Would a discussion of the abundant Nubian and Coptic material alter our perspective on the socio-economic integration of Egypt and Nubia? Khan is well aware of Giovanni Ruffini’s extensive work on the Old Nubian material from Qasr Ibrīm and cites it throughout, including his 2015 edition of Nubian administrative documents. Without necessarily duplicating Ruffini’s work, might we have learned something more about the Nubian-Egyptian relationship from a more open discussion of his conclusions?
Nonetheless, these are minor quibbles. Geoffrey Khan has produced a comprehensive, scholarly edition of these precious documents and made a significant contribution to our evolving knowledge of this part of the medieval world. Future generations of researchers will be grateful.