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Description of  Catalogue of the New Corpus of Documents from the aram al-shar f in Jerusalem

The documents from the aram al-sharf in Jerusalem constitute one of the most important corpora from the pre-Ottoman Middle East covering broad areas of social, political, cultural and economic history. The first documents from the aram al-sharf in Jerusalem were discovered in the 1970s and described by Donald Little (Catalogue of the Islamic Documents, Beirut/Wiesbaden 1984). In recent years, approximately 100 new documents have been discovered that are described in this catalogue. This catalogue sets the new corpus in relation to the 'old' corpus and highlights its potential for future scholarship. The main part is a description of all documents, including size, materiality, summary, editions of beginning/end of document as well as a list of personal names, place names and names of witnesses. The volume also includes the edition of ten fascinating documents (five Persian, five Arabic) with high-quality reproductions of the originals. Finally, the volume includes a list of all aram al-sharf documents edited so far. Read more