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Arianna D’Ottone

Manuscripts as Mirrors of a Multilingual and

Multicultural Society: the Case of the Damascus Find*

“We had so many expectations of the result! A very old manuscript of the New Testament, a rival of the Codex Vaticanus or Sinaiticus, the Fragments of Hegesippus’ Memorabilia —so hard to find— the

Diatessaron by Tatian, Papias’ Exegesis of the Words of our Lord were soaring in front of us! But they remained only images in a dream.”1

Despite this reflection on the documents discovered in 1900 inside the Qubbat al-khazna —in the Umayyad Great Mosque courtyard— the find en-compassed documents related to the very same mosque, certificates of pil-grimage to Mecca, Qur’anic fragments, Arabic and Turkish literary texts, parchment fragments in Latin language and script, Latin fragments in Greek script, fragments in Old French, in Hebrew (including Samaritan), in Armenian, in Coptic, in Syriac, in Aramaic and in Greek —as well as in Arabic language and Greek script. This ensemble of manuscripts, which ranges in date from Late Antiquity to Modern Times, exemplifies the so-called phenomenon of ‘absolute multigraphism’ that had a long history, particularly in the Middle East, across Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the multilingual material found in the Umayyad Great Mosque, the Qubbat al-khazna. The particular way of preservation of this material, a clear case of Genizah-like practice in an Islamic context,2 offers a unique opportunity to apprehend what cultural life

* This paper is a modified version in English of a paper I wrote in collaboration with the

late Paolo Radiciotti (Rome, 2 october 1963 – 12 april 2012), published with the title ‘I frammenti della Qubbat al-khazna di Damasco. A proposito di una scoperta sottovalu-tata’, Nea Rh�m� 5 (2008), pp. 45–74 + 7 plates. The bibliography there integrates this contribution.

1 D. H. Freiherr von Soden, ‘Bericht über die in der Kubbet in Damaskus gefundenen Hand-schriftenfragmente’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissen-schaften. Philosophisch-historische Classe (1903), p. 826.

2 The concepts of Genizah and Genizah-like practices have been masterly explained by Joseph Sadan, ‘Genizah and Genizah-like Practices in Islamic and Jewish Traditions’, Bibliotheca Orientalis 43/1–2 (1965), pp. 73–85; idem, ‘New Materials Regarding Purity

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in Damascus might have been like, animated as it was by different lan-guages and identities, throughout many centuries.

What Was Found and Where

The discovery was announced officially by Hermann von Soden in Berlin on 30 July 1903, during a meeting of the Academy of Sciences. However, information about the find was already available thanks to the publication, between 15 October and 15 December 1901, of three papers by Bruno Violet concerning a bilingual Greek-Arabic Psalter in Greek script. This damaged two-folios fragment, containing Psalm 78 (77 in the Septuagint version), is written in two columns per page, with the Greek text on the left and the Arabic version, in Greek script, on the right.3 From the accurate drawing of the fragment that was published, it is possible to tell that the script is an example of slanting ogival uncial, typical of the Syro-Palestinian area. Bruno Violet dated the fragment to the period straddling the eighth and the ninth centuries.4

The prompt —and correct— understanding of the documentary en-semble as a case of Arabic Genizah is noteworthy. This identification was facilitated by the fact that just a few years before, in 1897, Salomon Schech-ter had transferred about 140.000 fragments —circa two-thirds of the

and Impurity of Books in Islam in Comparison with Judaism. Al-Burzul� and Other Mus-lim Scholars on Defiled Parchment, Papyrus and Paper’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 33 (2007), pp. 193–218. For a different type of Genizah, see M. Perani, ‘ “The Italian Genizah”. Hebrew Manuscript Fragments in Italian Archives and Libraries’, Jewish Studies 34 (1994), pp. 39–54.

3 On the importance of the Greek transcription of an Arabic text, and in particular the extreme value of the fragment found in the Qubbat al-khazna that contains a continuous text, see J. Blau, A Grammar of Christian Arabic, Based Mainly on South-Palestinian Texts from the First Millenium, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, Subsidia 27–29 (Louvain, 1966–67), p. 31, and S. Hopkins, Studies in the Grammar of Early Arabic, Based upon Papyri Datable to before 300 A.H./912 A.D., London Oriental Series 37 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 1–2. See also F. Corriente, ‘The Psalter Fragment from the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus. A Birth Certificate of Naba�� Arab-ic’, in Eastern Crossroads. Essays on Medieval Christian Legacy, ed. by J. P. Monferrer-Sala (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007), pp. 303–20; G. Petrantoni, ‘La traslittera-zione greca del salmo 78,77 di Damasco e la diglossia nel mondo arabo’, Rivista di cul-tura classica e medievale LIV/1 (2011), pp. 285–307, esp. pp. 301–04.

4 However Hopkins seems to have a different opinion about the date of the fragment, see Hopkins, Studies in the Grammar, p. 2, n. 4.

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original find— from the Hebrew Genizah in Cairo to Cambridge University Library.5 These piles of documents, often described in Western literature as ‘book cemeteries’, are typical of Hebrew and, later on, Arabic written cul-ture. But they are more than simple cemeteries. To prevent any misunder-standing, it seems important to stress and define the concept of Genizah and Genizah-like practices. As J. Sadan pointed out,

the researchers’ concept of the Genizah material as an archive or treasury is [...] only a figure of speech, its positive connotations reflecting the elated frame of mind of those who began to study the material in modern times rather than an accurate description of the intention of those who disposed of it. The existence of Genizah-like practices in Arab countries is evi-denced by the following examples: 1. (a) The “storeroom” of the Great Mosque of Damascus [...]; 2. The storeroom known to exist at the Great Mosque of Kairouan [...]; 3. The storage spot or construction at the Great Mosque of Sanaa [...]. In this context, reference should perhaps again be made to the Cairo Genizah, because it is the most famous book “storage” situated in the Middle East, and because it would not be surprising to find a connection between the customs of all communities, Muslim, Jewish, etc., in medieval Cairo, in light of the particular harmony, or symbiosis, in which they usually lived.6

According to Sadan’s categories, the Damascus find is definitely a case of Islamic Genizah.7

Considering the fundamental difference in the nature, way and purpose of conservation in Genizah-like deposits, it would be a methodological mis-take to make any comparison between the material preserved in archives and libraries (such as M�r S�b� or St Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai) and the material found in the Great Mosque’s Qubba at Damascus. In fact, the way in which the manuscript material is preserved in archives and libraries, highly organized institutions since ancient times, is totally different from a

5 An echo of the international scholarly interest in Genizah finds is evident in Ch. Cler-

mont-Ganneau, ‘La mosaïque de la Synagogue de Ain Doûq’, Syria 2 (1921), pp. 172–74, at p. 173.

6 See Sadan, ‘Genizah and Genizah-like Practices’, pp. 38–43. 7 For a recent comparison between the Cairo Geniza and the Damascus find, see A.-M.

Eddé, ‘Documents et archives d’Orient: conclusions provisoires et tendances de la re-cherche actuelle’, in L’Autorité de l’écrit au Moyen Âge (Orient-Occident), XXXIXe Congrès de la SHMESP (Le Caire, 30 avril–5 mai 2008), Histoire ancienne et médiévale 102 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2009), pp. 385–400, at p. 394.

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pile that grows out of the stratification of worn-out material or material considered to be no more useful (for language or textual reasons). For these reasons any attempt at comparison between the Qubba’s materials and con-temporary archives and/or libraries is misleading and ought to be avoided.

Damascus is an ideal city for a study of the phenomenon of urban con-tinuity between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Umayyad Great Mosque is built on the site of the temple of the Semitic god Hadad, who was later equated with Damascene Jupiter in the Graeco-Roman pantheon. In Late Antiquity the temple was replaced by the Cathedral of St John the Baptist, which, in 705, was in turn converted into a mosque.

In the north-western corner of the mosque courtyard (Figures 1 and 2) there is an octagonal dome, standing on small columns with capitals sal-vaged from the Late-Antique church. It was inside this dome, which could be entered only by means of a removable stair and through a door usually walled up, that the documents were found.

In the mid 1960s, two French scholars, Dominique Sourdel and Janine Sourdel-Thomine, set out the traditional account —ever since repeated by other scholars— of how, following the fire that ravaged the Umayyad Great Mosque in 1893, the fragments were transferred to Istanbul by the Ottoman authorities. However, a picture of the mosque after the fire (Figure 3) re-veals that the Qubbat al-khazna was intact, despite the collapse of the mosque’s transept. Moreover, a confused and somewhat different account of the discovery of the manuscripts was given, in a very laconic way, already in 1917 and in 1931 by other French scholars.8

To understand the circumstances of the discovery and of the transfer it is useful to recall the atmosphere of the so-called ‘Oriental Question’ —or the slowly developing crisis that affected the Ottoman empire from the Napo-leonic period onwards. From the middle of the nineteenth century, episodes of sectarian violence took place in Mount Lebanon, and religious tensions were high in various towns across Greater Syria (Bil�d al-Š�m). In 1860 a riot broke out in Damascus that led to the death of several thousand Chris-tians, resulting —for the first time— in French military intervention in inter-

8 See La Syrie antique et médiévale illustrée, ed. by R. Dussaud, P. Deschamps and H. Sey-

rig (Paris: Librairie Orientaliste P. Geuthner, 1931), p. 88. The discovery was already known to F. Cumont in 1917, see F. Cumont, Études syriennes (Paris: A. Picard, 1917), pp. 345–46.

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nal Syrian affairs.9 From then and until the First World War Damascus was a centre of political and diplomatic struggles between France and Ger-many.10

In 1898 the German emperor and Prussian king, Wilhelm II, and his wife, visited Damascus, where they were shown the Umayyad mosque.11

Germany was allied with Turkey in the First World War: this German-Turk-ish connection helps to explain the transfer of the thousands of manuscripts to Istanbul, especially if one recalls the Ottoman attitude towards antiquities found in the provinces of the empire and the lack, at least in the Bil�d al-Š�m of that time, of any museum. Although Hamdi Bey (1849–1910), di-rector of the Imperial Museum and founder and director of the Archaeologi-cal Museum in Istanbul, oversaw in 1884 the promulgation of a regulation prohibiting historical artifacts from being smuggled abroad, the description of his policy by J. Chamonard, director of the National Museum of Damas-cus at the beginning of the French Mandate in Syria (1920–45), is, in its turn, significant.12

Phases of a Discovery

On 16 May 1900, the Kirchenväter-Kommission of the Berlin Academy of Sciences charged Bruno Violet with searching out Christian manuscripts in Damascus. Under von Soden’s supervision, and thanks to Elise Koenigs’s patronage, he arrived in Damascus on 30 May and contacted w�l� N��im

9 See E. L. Rogan, ‘Sectarianism and Social Conflict in Damascus: the 1860 Events Recon-

sidered’, Arabica 51/4 (2004), pp. 493–511. 10 See S. H. Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate (Oxford: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1958), pp. 40–1. 11 On the Wilhelm’s visit to Syria and Palestine, see Voyage en Orient de Guillame II en

1898, ed. by H. I. El-Mudarris and O. Salmon (Aleppo: Dar al-Mudarris-Ray Publishing, 2010).

12 «Attentif au moindre bruit de découverte en un point quelconque de l’empire, il se faisait envoyer, allait parfois chercher lui-même, toutes les pièces nouvellement trouvées qu’il jugeait intéressantes. Et il accordait avec bonne grâce des autorisation de fouilles aux missions étrangères, sans doute, l’arrière pensée du nouvel accroissement qu’il en atten-dait pour ses collections l’inclinait-elle à cette libéralité avisée. [...] Les fouilles ache-vées, les pièces plus précieuses prenaient la route de Constantinople, hors le cas, où le Sultan, cédant aux sollicitations d’un souverain ami, en abbandonait une part [...] à quel-que musée européen»: J. Chamonard, ‘A propos du service des antiquités de Syrie’, Syria 1/2 (1920), pp. 81–98, at pp. 81–2.

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B�š�, who was his local patron.13 In order to locate the Genizah Violet had to rely on oral tradition and transmission of knowledge. He had been told that the Qubbat al-khazna was the repository of the Christian books that the Muslims had confiscated when they entered the city.

It is clear that this did not accord with the historical events. Although Damascus was conquered twice during the first period of Arab military activity in Syria, and Muslims occupied the town from 638 onwards, the basilica of St John the Baptist was not converted into a mosque until 705.

In spite of the fact that the oral tradition was not reliable, Violet decided —with the agreement of the Ottoman authorities— to open the dome, and removed from it about 150 sacks of handwritten material in parchment and paper. As far as it is known, no inventory was made. The intention was simply to identify the items of greatest interest to patristic studies and any-thing else that might stimulate Western curiosity.

Violet recorded the dates on which certain manuscripts were found: on 11 August, for example, a group of Aramaic texts was identified. The ana-lysis of these materials was carried out from December 1900 to March 1901, during which a first, very selective, photographic campaign was un-dertaken. However, the Arabic texts were not neglected and in his first pub-lication dedicated to the discovery, Violet mentions some Qur’anic frag-ments on parchment dating back to the second or even the first century of the Hijra (7th–9th cent. AD).

The following autumn the first scholarly studies were published and the idea was mooted that a selection of these materials should be brought to Berlin in order that a group of specialists in patristic studies, oriental lan-guages, and medieval French literature could evaluate the most interesting and valuable items. The result of this research was presented on 30 July 1903. A group of fragments from the Damascus Genizah remained in the Berlin Museumsbibliothek (the modern Staatsbibliothek) until 1909, when they were sent back to Damascus.

13 The description of N��im B�š� written on the occasion of Wilhelm II’s visit to Damascus

helps to explain the willingness of the w�l� to cooperate with the German scholars, see G. Gaulis, La ruine d’un empire: Abd-ul-Hamid, ses amis et ses peuples (Paris: Armand Colin, 1913), quoted in Voyage en Orient, ed. by El-Mudarris and Salmon, pp. 201–27, at p. 220. On the visit of Wilhelm II and his wife to N��im B�š�’s house, see I. N. Al-Aswad, Kit�b al-ri�la al-imbir���riyya f�-l-mam�lik al-‘U�m�niyya, in Voyage en Orient, ed. by El-Mudarris and Salmon, pp. 422–46, at p. 427.

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The circumstances of the First World War broke off the research and Syria became a mandate under French administration. In March 1929 Wil-liam Hatch identified in the National Museum of Damascus a Gospel fragment that had come from the Qubbat al-khazna find. When checking whether the museum held other manuscripts from the same discovery, he found another biblical fragment, which was already known to von Soden, together with many new items in Greek, Syriac, Armenian, Coptic, Arabic. Apart from some Qur’anic manuscripts that I personally examined, none of these fragments has been properly studied since.14 However, it seems of some interest to reconsider here the ensemble of the Damascus Genizah, using the descriptions and illustrations published in various studies, mostly carried out in Berlin at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Greek Fragments and the Late Antique Heritage

The Greek manuscripts, together with the nucleus of those in Arabic, are the best known part of the discovery. These include biblical codices. The re-cently revised edition of Alfred Rahlfs’s publication dedicated to the manu-scripts of the Old Testament includes 11 fragments that came from the Qubbat al-khazna.15 There are also fragments of the New Testament, which appear in the addendum volume to Kurt Aland’s work.16 Moreover, 19 frag-ments are listed in van Haelst’s catalogue of papyri.17 This ensemble is evi- 14 Unfortunately A. George’s 2010 account of the traditional story of the fire that ravaged

the Damascus mosque in 1893, leading to the direct transfer of over 200,000 early Islam-ic folios and fragments to Istanbul, ignores the complexity of the circumstances of the discovery and simplifies the history and fate of the Damascus fragments. The involve-ment of the German Academy of Sciences and the transfer to Berlin of other fragments as well as the existence of a core of classical fragments still in Damascus are overlooked in his reconstruction: see A. George, The Rise of Islamic Calligraphy (London: Saqi, 2010), p. 17.

15 See A. Rahlfs, Verzeichnis der griechischen Handschriften des Alten Testaments, I/1: Die Überlieferung bis zum VIII. Jahrhundert, ed. by D. Fraenkel, Septuaginta. Vetus Testamentum Graecum, auctoritate Academiae scientiarum Gottingensis editum. Supple-mentum (Göttingen, 2004), pp. 62–7.

16 See K. Aland, Die griechischen Handschriften des Neuen Testaments. Ergänzungen zur «Kurzgefaßten Liste» (Fortsetzungsliste VII), II: Fortsetzung der «Kurzgefaßten Liste», in Materialien zur neutestamentlichen Handschriftenkunde, Arbeiten zur neutestament-lichen Textforschung, 3/1 (Berlin, 1969), pp. 22–37, at p. 23.

17 See J. van Haelst, Catalogue des papyrus littéraires juifs et chrétiens, Série «Papyro-logie» I (Paris, 1976).

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dence of the continuous presence of Greek Christian texts in the Damascus region from the fourth to the tenth century —that is, even during the critical seventh century, when Arab domination began. Such documents become increasingly rare in the tenth century, when Christian communities gave up the use of Greek as liturgical language in favour of Arabic.18

The immediate impression given by these manuscripts and the cultural continuity to which they attest is that the Greek Christian community flour-ished during the period of transition from Late Antiquity to the Islamic era and that the cultural gap between Antiquity and the Middle Ages was not especially large. This image of continuity is comparable with what is known of contemporary Palestine.

Probably the oldest manuscript in the group is a three-folio parchment fragment, dating from the fourth or fifth century, containing the Song of Songs according to the Septuagint version. The text —a palimpsest under-neath a religious Islamic text in Arabic script— is written in Greek uncial and arranged per cola et commata. A more recent fragment, datable to the fifth century, seems to contain a passage of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. This also is a palimpsest text with Arabic as scriptio superior. Among the other palimpsests are two other parchment fragments, both dating from the fifth century, containing, under the Arabic script, the Old Testament (Judith and a couple of folios from the Book of Proverbs), and a two-folio fragment of the New Testament with the Epistle to the Galatians.

Two fragments of the Books of Kings can be dated to the fifth or sixth century. One of these, consisting of four parchment folios, written in Greek uncial (maiuscula biblica) and arranged in two columns, was, after having been carefully cleaned, re-employed to write in Arabic part of an Old Testa-ment Book (Exodus). Datable to the same period is another parchment folio, containing the Book of Esther in Greek uncial with Arabic as scriptio supe-rior (a Qur’�n in “Kufic” script). From the seventh century, the critical pe-riod of transition from the Late Antique world to the Arab-Islamic empire, there are fragments of the New Testament. A two-folio fragment with the end of the Gospel according to Matthew and the beginning of John’s Gospel dates from the eighth century. 18 On the adoption of Arabic as an ecclesiastical language in the oriental Christian com-

munities, see S. H. Griffith, The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque. Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 48–51. Noteworthy is the development, besides a distinctive Arabic idiom, of “a characteristic manuscript hand”, Griffith, The Church, p. 50.

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Violet dated the Greek-Arabic Psalter mentioned above to the end of the eighth or beginning of the ninth century. Other fragments, among which two folios containing Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels written on a Syriac palim-psest text, go back to the ninth century. Finally, to represent the period from the ninth to the tenth century, there are two parchment folios of a Greek-Arabic Psalter written in two columns: the Greek text on the left and the Arabic one on the right.

Beside these biblical fragments (all in uncial), other Greek codices were found, the oldest of which dates back to the sixth century. Among them is a folio from a seventh-century Homeric codex still written in uncial.19 There are also a substantial number of Greek minuscule manuscripts. Some of these fragments, which date from the eighth century, or even later, are on paper. It is worth noting that no Greek minuscule fragment of the New Testament was found —a detail that reveals that by that time Christian com-munities had chosen to use Arabic as their liturgical (and thus Scriptural) language instead of Greek.20

Even this outline does not convey the full variety of manuscripts that were discovered. Among the Syriac manuscripts were some Peshitta frag-ments, a Commentary to the Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) by Theodore of Mopsu-estia and many other palimpsest materials, the reading and the identification of which is made difficult by the Arabic scriptio superior.

There are an impressive number of Armenian manuscripts, the most an-cient dating back to the tenth century. These include biblical fragments, liturgical books, patristic texts, hagiographies and literary texts as well as writing exercises —the last being very useful for an understanding of the significance of maintaining their language and writing for the Armenian people at that time. The Armenian manuscripts, which range from the Middle Ages until the beginning of the modern era, all derive from the Armenian Christian community, which was —and still is— the largest Christian community in Damascus.

19 For the Greek fragments, see also Répertoire des bibliothèques et des catalogues de

manuscrits grecs de M. Richard, 3rd edn by J.-M. Olivier, Corpus Christianorum (Turn-hout: Brepols, 1995), pp. 257–59; this ms is cited by F. D’Aiuto, ‘Un antico inno per la Resurrezione (con nuove testimonianze di «scrittura mista» d’area orientale)’, Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Neollenici 45 (2008), pp. 3–135, at p. 24, n. 49.

20 See D. J. Wasserstein, ‘Why did Arabic Succeed where Greek Failed? Language Change in the Near East after Muhammad’, Scripta Classica Israelica 22 (2003), pp. 257–72.

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There are also Georgian manuscripts and some eleventh-century Coptic fragments that provide evidence of relations between Damascus and Egypt during the Islamic era. The Hebrew and Samaritan manuscripts are an im-portant component of the find. They are mainly sacred texts —Old Testa-ment, liturgical and synagogal— but there are also Jewish marriage con-tracts and a Samaritan calendar.

Last but not least, there is a nucleus of 21 Aramaic Christian fragments of sacred texts —almost all palimpsests and datable between the ninth and the thirteenth century.

It may be true that, among all these fragments, according to the judge-ment of the French scholar L. Jalabert: “il n’y avait vraiment pas un mor-ceau de premier rang”, but when considered as a whole, they document im-portant phenomena in the history of writing. First, they are evidence of the high degree of multilingualism and multigraphism in the Middle East be-tween the fourth and the seventh century. In this context the Greek script re-presented the prevailing written culture in the area to such a degree that it was still in use after the Arab conquest. An important source that needs to be taken into account for understanding the history, language and cultural transition in the Syrian area, is the numismatic material.21 The post-conquest coinage in Syria, with its regular Byzantine issues of Constance II imported from Constantinople c. 640 until the late 650s, a vast and complex series of Arabic imitations of Byzantine issues (late 650s–670s), the Umayyad Impe-rial Image series (675–690), the standing Caliph series (690–697) and fully epigraphic gold dinars dated 77 AH (696–697)22 testify to the progressive centralization of the government and a major linguistic and cultural shift. As for the legends, it is worth noting that despite the questioning of the tradi-tional assumption that the Greek legends on Byzantine coins gradually gave way to the all-Arabic legends of the Standing Caliph series, the numismatic evidence at Damascus still seems to suggest that the Graeco-Latin reverse indicate the earliest issue.23 Moreover it has already been pointed out that

21 See C. Foss, Arab-Byzantine Coins. An Introduction, with a Catalogue of the Dumbarton

Oaks Collection, Dumbarton Oaks Byzantine Collection Publications 12 (Washington, DC: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 19.

22 See S. Album and T. Goodwin, Sylloge of Islamic Coins in the Ashmolean. Volume 1. The Pre-Reform Coinage of the Early Islamic Period (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2002), pp. 74–112, esp. pp. 106–07.

23 See Album and Goodwin, Sylloge of Islamic Coins in the Ashmolean, p. 105.

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it is not just the archaeology that supports the picture of a comparatively flourishing urban life and cultural continuity across Syria after the Islamic conquest. The thriving debates among representatives of the different churches in the east, as well as between Christians and Muslims, exempli-fied in the cultural life of late 7th- and early 8th-century Edessa and the writings of men such as Jacob of Edessa, a contemporary of Anastasios of Sinai, are illustrative.24

The situation changes between the ninth and tenth century. After more than a millennium of intellectual supremacy, Greek ceases to be the prevailing script in the region. This phenomenon is well known from the history of literature of this period: the pupil of John of Damascus (Yu�ann� al-Dimašq�), the famous Greek Christian author of the Orient, is Theodore Ab� Qurrah (c. 755–830), who wrote in Arabic.25

The key to understand this change is the Arabization and Islamization of the bureaucracy. Bureaucratic documents —the fundamental means of written communication in ancient societies— start to be written in Arabic at the beginning of the eighth century, and the shift from Greek to Arabic was completed a century later.26 John of Damascus, like his grandfather and father, worked in his youth as an official and tax collector, a position he en-joyed thanks to the continuous role played by his family from the late By-zantine period until the Islamic era. The institutional change produced a cul-tural innovation: the end of the use of the traditional intellectual language of the area —Greek— and with it the abandonment of literature in that lan-guage.

The fact that in addition to Syriac fragments connected with the local Christian community, there appear, from the ninth century on, Christian fragments in Aramaic and Armenian, is clear linguistic and graphic evi-

24 J. Haldon, ‘Greater Syria in the Seventh Century: Context and Background’, in Money,

Power and Politics in Early Islamic Syria. A Review of Current Debates, ed. by J. Hal-don (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 1–20, at pp. 10–11.

25 “Ab� Qurrah is important. Ab� Qurrah was one of the first Christians to write in Arabic”: J. C. Lamoreaux, ‘The Biography of Theodore Ab� Qurrah Revisited’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 56 (2002), pp. 25–40, at p. 25.

26 In the late 3rd/9th and early 4th/10th centuries, at the same time as a new social class of Muslim, Arabic-speaking state officials appeared, a body of literature devoted to the con-cerns of functionaries emerged, see P. L. Heck, The Construction of Knowledge in Islam-ic Civilization. Qud�ma b. Ja‘far & his Kit�b al-khar�j wa-in�‘at al-kit�ba, Islamic History and Civilization. Studies and Texts 42 (Leiden-Boston-Köln: Brill, 2002), p. 26.

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dence of the diversity of the Christian community, which was no longer dominated by the graphic cultural system that the Greek alphabet enjoyed. Arabic script, born to record the Qur’anic text, could not immediately play the role of a linguistic or graphic unifying element for the eastern Christian communities. Instead, Arabic contributed to the variety of the manuscript fragments. This condition of polyglossia, well reflected in the Damascus materials of the transitional phase from Greek to Arabic, signals, as M. Bakhtin wrote, the simultaneous death of two myths: “the myth of a lan-guage that presumes to be the only language and the myth of a language that presumes to be completely unified”.27

The Early Qur’anic Fragments

In 2006, I was able to gain access in situ to the collections of the National Museum at Damascus. There I examined some Qur’anic fragments coming from the Qubbat al-khazna find that had not been transferred to Istanbul, where the majority of Islamic materials is now kept.28 This group of five parchment fragments dates from the mid-second century to the fifth century AH (second half of the eighth/eleventh century AD).29 The oldest (Figure 4) has some interesting palaeographical and codicological characteristics.30 We can limit ourselves to pointing out here the peculiar form of the final k�f, which is the so-called k�f of the ‘épingle à cheveux’ type. Its shape recalls that of the final k�f attested in a fragment in the Bibliothèque nationale,

27 M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, ed. by M. Holquist, English transl.

by C. Emerson and M. Holquist, University of Texas Press Slavic Series 1 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 64. At p. 68, Bakhtin writes: “But the Orient, which was itself always a place of many languages and many cultures, crisscrossed with the intersecting boundary lines of ancient cultures and languages, was anything but a naïve monoglottic world, passive in its relationship to Greek culture. The Orient was itself bearer of an ancient and complex polyglossia”.

28 On the Qur’anic fragments in Istanbul, see F. Déroche, Collections de manuscrits an-ciens du Coran à Istanbul, in Études médiévales et patrimoine turc. Volume publié à l’occasion du centième anniversaire de la naissance de K. Atatürk, ed. by J. Sourdel-Thomine (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1983), pp. 145–66.

29 For a lenghty discussion of the characteristics of these fragments, see Radiciotti-D’Otto-ne, ‘I frammenti della Qubbat al-khazna’, pp. 65–74.

30 Another folio of the same codex would be in the collection of the Library of Congress (Washington), AL–17.

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Paris, the script of which has not yet been classified in the Déroche system of Qur’anic script classification,31 and in an Istanbul fragment not yet catalogued. In the Damascus fragment, as in these other two fragments, there is an example of the asymmetrical final k�f of the ‘épingle à cheveux’ type —the base of the letter is at least twice as long as its upper horizontal stroke. The presence of this shape of final k�f in an undated fragment could, as has been stated, be ‘un indice décisif en faveur d’une datation antérieure au début du IIIe/IXe siècle’.32

Another Qur’anic fragment (Figure 5), which dates from the third/ninth century, is an example of the so-called ‘Ir�q� script. The characteristics of this type of Qur’anic manuscripts —their small format and the frequent pre-sence of notes of a private nature— suggests that they were originally made for private use.

The Arabic scriptio superior of a palimpsest fragment (Figure 6), a bo-tanical text, has been erroneously described as maghrib�.33 But there are some maghrib� fragments in the Turkish and Islamic Art Museum in Istan-bul.34

Another Qur’anic specimen (third or fourth/ninth or tenth century) pro-vides an example of a script (Figure 7) that can be connected with the ‘Clas-sical Kufic’ group, according to the Déroche classification system. The graphic sub-type illustrated by this fragment is attested in most of the four manuscript deposits known, in Cairo, Sanaa, and Kérouan, as well as Da-mascus.

31 See F. Déroche, The Abbasid Tradition. Qur’ans of the 8th to the 10th Centuries AD (Lon-

don: Khalili Collections, 1992), pp. 27–47, 132–37. 32 F. Déroche, ‘Un critère de datation des écritures coraniques anciennes. Le k�f final ou

isolé’, Damaszener Mitteilungen 11 (1999), pp. 87–94 and plates XV–XVII. 33 See F. Schulthess, ‘Christlich-Palästinische Fragmente aus der Omajjaden-Moschee zu

Damaskus’, in Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göt-tingen, Philologisch-Historische Klasse, Neue Folge 8 (1904–05) (Berlin, 1905), III, p. 11 and pl. I.

34 See F. Déroche, ‘Deux fragments coraniques maghrébins anciens au Musée des arts turc et islamique d’Istanbul’, Revue des Etudes Islamiques 59 (1991), 229–35. For the maghrebine community in 7th/13th-century Damascus and some hints on its presence in previous periods, see L. Pouzet, ‘Maghrébins à Damas au VIIe/XIIIe siècle’, Bulletin d’Études Orientales 28 (1975), pp. 167–99, at p. 188, and idem, Damas au VIIe/ XIIIe siècle. Vie et structures religieuses d’une métropole islamique, Collection publiées sous la direction de la Faculté des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de l’Université Saint-Joseph, Beyrouth. Nouvelle Série: A. Langue arabe et pensée islamique XV (Beyrouth: Dar Machreq, 1988), pp. 96–105.

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The most recent Qur’anic fragment (Figure 8), which dates from the fifth/eleventh century, is a good example of one of the graphic varieties that form the so-called ‘New Style’.35 The manuscript’s vertical format reflects the spread of the use of paper as writing material. It marks the return to this format following two centuries (third to fourth) in which the oblong format was predominant.

The Latin Fragments and the Middle Ages

Von Soden’s report on the Qubbat al-khazna find records some Latin frag-ments in Greek script. The use of the Greek alphabet for a Latin text goes back to Antiquity and it is typical of the oriental area at the end of the Roman-Hellenistic period. It accompanied the spread of Latin as the lan-guage of Roman law and, more generally, was a means of Romanization for the Late Antique eastern elites. Latin texts in Greek script come to an end in the seventh century. Nonetheless it is possible that some of these fragments could be more recent, since a complex, continuous relation existed between the Greek and Latin graphic and linguistic systems during the Middle Ages.36

The Latin manuscripts for which more information is available are in the Latin alphabet and date from the late ninth century to the thirteenth century. Noteworthy is a group of fragments in Old French that comprise, among other things, a bifolio containing the Fierabras chanson de geste, a fragment of a hagiography of St Mary of Egypt and a small parchment codex contain-ing a poetic text on the birth of Jesus as well as a charm formula in Latin. This latter manuscript in particular looks like a codex owned by a pilgrim and poses a question about the precise provenance of these Latin texts that is not easy to answer without having personally examined them.

Von Soden’s report does provide some help. He mentions, among the Latin texts, a safe-conduct issued by the fourth king of Jerusalem, Baldwin III (1143–62), to a Muslim merchant, a certain ‘Bohali’ (probably Ab� ‘Al�), for sea trade between Lebanon and Egypt. The group of Latin manu-scripts in Old French could, therefore, have been booty following the suc-

35 For the definition of the Déroche NS script as Mashq-Ri’�s� and its characteristics, see

A. Gacek, ‘Early Qur’anic Fragments’, Fontanus 3 (1990), pp. 45–64. 36 See P. Radiciotti, ‘Il problema del digrafismo nei rapporti tra scrittura latina e greca nel

medioevo’, Nea Rhom� 3 (2006), pp. 5–55.

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cessful Muslim campaigns that started after 1187 and ended with the con-quest of Tyre in 1291. It seems unlikely that this kind of Latin manuscripts could have been written in Damascus, especially as the town always held out against the Crusader assaults. It would not be correct, however, to as-sume that all the Latin fragments are connected to the presence in the east of Christians who had come from Europe for religious, trade or military purposes. The existence of manuscripts dating back before the eleventh cen-tury and, even more, the presence of fragments in Latin written in Greek script, suggests that part of this material was produced for the Christian Palestinian communities who used Latin as a liturgical language.37

In any event, the Latin texts should be seen as proof of a deep change in the middle-eastern written culture. After a long period of Arabic cultural domination (7th–10th century), there was a crisis period during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, followed by a substantial graphic and linguistic simplification process mirrored by the Damascus fragments: in the main, only Arabic and, to a lesser extent, Armenian, continued.

The Late Arabic Fragments

Among the Arabic texts dating from the fourth/tenth to the seventh/thir-teenth century now in the Istanbul Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, there are private documents such as sales agreements,38 letters,39 and a very interesting type of certificate: the pilgrimage certificate. The Damascus find includes certificates of �a (big pilgrimage) and ‘umra (small pilgrimage). These include the ‘umra certificate by proxy of the Ayyubid Sultan of Egypt and Syria �al�� al-D�n Y�suf b. Ayy�b (1138–93).40

37 See Pouzet, Damas au VIIe/XIIIe siècle, pp. 305–38, at p. 338. 38 See D. Sourdel and J. Sourdel-Thomine, ‘Trois actes de vente damascains du début du

IVe/Xe siècle’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 8 (1965), pp. 164–85 and ‘Nouvelle lettre d’un docteur hanbalite de Damas à l’époque ayyoubide’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies 40/4 (1981), pp. 265–76.

39 See D. Sourdel, J. Sourdel-Thomine and J.-M. Mouton, ‘Une attaque de Damas par les Qarmates au Xe siècle d’après la lettre d’un marchand’, Archiv für Papyrusforschung 56 (2010), pp. 64–76 and pl. VII.

40 See D. Sourdel and J. Sourdel-Thomine, Certificats de pèlerinage d’époque ayyoubide. Contribution à l’histoire de l’idéologie de l’Islam au temps des croisades, Documents

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Conclusions

The existence of the Genizah phenomenon in the Arabic world, the fact that the remains of books made for churches and synagogues, as well as personal texts belonging to travellers, merchants and soldiers, have been stored all together with Islamic worn out Qur’ans and documents, forming, in this way, a single documentary pile —even if destined to be no longer useful— shows the respect reserved for the Holy Word in any written text.

Considering the multilingual manuscript material found in the Qubbat al-khazna and its chronology, it is possible to make some observations. For example, the language shift from Greek to Arabic41 only after the 9th–10th centuries testifies to the survival of Greek-speaking communities, wealthy and literate enough to have books written for their use.42

The texts from the Damascus find, most of them literary ones, show no language interference.43 This means that we cannot find among them spe-cimen of a “polyphonic text” that reflects the simultaneous presence and active interaction of Latin, Old French and Arabic, nor the hybrid and lin-guistically diverse culture that characterized contemporary Levantine so-ciety, such as Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières reflected that of the Anglo-Norman courts in the middle of the twelfth century.44 The Damascus fragments therefore do not exhibit the same language ‘intimacy’ that has

relatifs à l’histoire des Croisades XIX (Paris: L’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2006), in particular pp. 141–42 and pl. XIV.

41 Considering all the differences between the production of books and of documents (whether official or private), these data seem chronologically coherent with Egyptian papyri, which testify that Greek stopped being used by the administration at some time in the ninth century. On the passage from Greek to Arabic in Egyptian papyri, see P. M. Sijpestein, ‘Multilingual Archives and Documents in Post-Conquest Egypt’, in The Multilingual Experience in Egypt from the Ptolemies to the Abbasids, ed. by A. Papa-constantinou (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 105–26.

42 On intellectual Syrian elites, see A. Cameron, ‘Democratization Revisited: Culture and Late Antique and Early Byzantine Elites’, in The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East – VI – Elites Old and New in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, ed. by J. Hal-don and L. I. Conrad, Studies in Late Antiquity and Early Islam 1 (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 2004), pp. 91–107, at p. 102.

43 There seems to be also little linguistic interference in the administrative, military and political texts, see Sijpestein, ‘Multilingual Archives’, p. 106.

44 For a detailed discussion about Etienne de Fourgères’s Livre de manières, its plurilin-gualism and its cultural context, see S. Amer, Crossing Borders. Love Between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures, The Middle Age Series (Philadelphia, PA: Uni-versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), pp. 29–49.

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been observed for Andalusian Spain, where a peculiar form of sung poems, the muwaššah and the zaal, mixed literary Arabic (or Hebrew) with a ver-nacular language (Romance dialect, vulgar Hebrew or colloquial Arabic).45 Instead, the uses of different alphabets for different languages, and the large number of palimpsests, testify both to the cultural wealth of a multi-language society, and to the progressive linguistic adaptation and eventual change.46

Convivencia as co-existence and ‘intimacy’ are thus different concepts, pointing to different cultural realities and networks: “Once they began to be drawn, communal boundaries were suggested and maintained, not only by continued competition or strict antagonism between Muslims and Christians in medieval Syria, but by the growth of elaborate traditions within Islamic culture”.47

45 “Indeed, in a number of poems the language of the kharjas have become infamous, and

endlessly —at times bitterly— scrutinized by scholars, precisely because it is not clear whether the language is really one or the other: for some it looks like Arabic with inflections of Romance, but for others it is more obviously Romance saturated with Arabic”: J. D. Dodds, M. R. Menocal and A. K. Balbale, The Arts of Intimacy: Chris-tians, Jews and Muslims in the Making of the Castilian Culture (New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 145. On the influence of muwaššah and zaal on the songs dedicated to the Virgin Mary (Cantigas de Santa Maria), composed by Alfonso X, see M. P. Ferreira, ‘A Case of Cross-Fertilization. The Mediaeval Andalus, Islamic Music, and the Cantigas de Santa Maria’, Pol-e Firuzeh. Journal of the Dialogue Among Civilizations 3/12 ([Tehran], 2004), pp. 91–117.

46 In this respect, the continuous presence of Greek manuscripts until the tenth century seems to balance, to some extent, the loss of identity, by death in battle or by emigration, of the Greek-speaking Syrian communities, as remarked by H. Kennedy, ‘Syrian Elites from Byzantium to Islam: Survival or Extinction?’, in Money, Power and Politics in Early Islamic Syria. A Review of Current Debates, ed. by J. Haldon (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 182–200, at p. 193.

47 N. Khalek, Damascus after the Muslim Conquest. Text and Image in Early Islam (Ox-ford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 177.

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List of Figures

Figure 1: Plan of the Umayyad Great Mosque [after Wissenschaftliche Ver-öffentlichungen des Deutsch-Türkischen Denkmalschutz-Kom-mandos, ed. by Th. Wiegand, vol. 5: Wulzinger K.-Watzinger C., Damaskus. Die Islamische Stadt (Berlin-Leipzig: W. De Gruyter & Co., 1924), fig. 50].

Figure 2: The Qubbat al-khazna [after Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichun-gen des Deutsch-Türkischen Denkmalschutz-Kommandos, ed. by Th. Wiegand, vol. 4: Watzinger C.-Wulzinger K., Damaskus. Die antike Stadt (Berlin-Leipzig: W. De Gruyter & Co., 1921), fig. 17].

Figure 3: The Umayyad Great Mosque after the 1893 fire [after R. Dus-saud, Le Temple de Jupiter Damascénien et ses transformations aux époques chrétienne et musulmane, Syria 3 (1922), pp. 219� 50, pl. LV].

Figure 4: Damascus, National Museum, Qur’an fragment, Inv. n. ‘ayn 444: recto.

Figure 5: Damascus, National Museum, Qur’an fragment, Inv. n. ‘ayn 346� 349: fol. 348 verso.

Figure 6: A fragment with Greek OT scriptio inferior (Gen. 19, 1�6) and a botanical Arabic text scriptio superior [after F. Schulthess, Christlich-Palästinische Fragmente aus der Omajjaden-Moschee zu Damaskus (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905, pl. I)].

Figure 7: Damascus, National Museum, Qur’an fragment, Inv. n. ‘ayn 350� 351: fol. 351 recto.

Figure 8: Damascus, National Museum, Qur’an fragment, Inv. n. ‘ayn 344� 345: fol. 345 verso.

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Figure 1

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Figure 2

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Figure 3

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Figure 4

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Figure 5

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Figure 6

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Figure 7

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Figure 8