Qusayr and Geniza documents on the Indian Ocean trade.

• Author: Friedman, Mordechai A.
• Position: Report

Hundreds of paper fragments from the early thirteenth century written by participants in the India trade have been discovered in excavations in a warehouse at the Red Sea port of Qusayr (hereafter: Quseir) since 1978. In light of the momentous contribution of this commerce to medieval economy, this find is potentially of major significance for researching the Indian Ocean trade in general and Red Sea commerce in particular. It is a most welcome addition to the limited quantity of manuscripts, mostly still unpublished, available for studying this activity. The documents from the Cairo Geniza identified by the late S. D. Goitein are the main source for research on the medieval India Ocean trade and its extensions in the Mediterranean. Goitein collected over four hundred manuscripts that deal with broad aspects of what he called the India trade. His unfinished study, tentatively entitled "India Traders of the Middle Ages" (for the sake of brevity, the "India Book"), is currently being supplemented and prepared for publication by this reviewer.

The writers of the Geniza documents and the Quseir fragments were participants in the same commercial enterprise. Members of both groups wrote in Middle Arabic, roughly during the same period. There are nevertheless major differences between the two collections of manuscripts. The obvious distinctions include the alphabet, the religious affiliation of the writers and the geographical setting. One of the underlying hypotheses of Goitein's Geniza studies, elaborated especially in his six-volume A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1967-93), is that the phenomena depicted in these documents apply not only to the Jewish society based in Egypt but also to the Islamic milieu in general.

As Goitein emphasized repeatedly, the Geniza papers supply abundant data on contacts between Jews and Arabs and, inter alia, their shared business ventures. Guo's depiction of the Geniza as a Jewish repository is technically correct, but his inference that its letters do not represent the Muslim community (p. 91) is a deceptive oversimplification. In pointing out the uniqueness of the Quseir collection, he also fails to appreciate the wide geographical dispersion of large numbers of the Geniza papers, written any place from Spain to the Far East, and Goitein's contribution to the research of the Indian Ocean trade. (Cf. p. 92: "Goitein's discussion of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean commerce, for example, stopped short for lack of sources coming from outside of Cairo"; Guo's emphasis.)

The Quseir collection nevertheless provides an opportunity to complement the Geniza data and test Goitein's hypothesis on the commonality of experience. At first blush, the texts edited by Guo seem both to confirm similarities and to attest distinctive characteristics. By and large, most Quseir documents are identical in language and content to the Geniza letters. Many more examples of this can be adduced than those noted expressly in Guo's book. This will be demonstrated below, where familiarity with the Geniza letters is shown to be an indispensable tool in deciphering the Quseir texts. On the other hand, Guo's editions appear to demarcate distinct features between the societies reflected in the two collections. I am not referring to intrinsically religious texts, such as the sermons and prayers discussed on pp. 70ff., but rather to the phraseology used in personal correspondence--even when expressing pious wishes--and to social realities. Two outstanding examples, ignored as such by Guo, are the letter that purportedly has correspondents pray that "the Prophet" may reunite them and a mother's appeal to her son, who was abroad on business, to spend all his money and "have fun," something very different from what is found in the Geniza correspondence between mothers and sons. As we shall see below, both texts actually have something else to say.

The Quseir fragments are written in Arabic script and almost all of the Geniza texts in Judeo-Arabic, in the Hebrew alphabet. While both are in Middle Arabic, the difference in script is significant because of the major difficulties in deciphering the manuscripts. Not only are these often in a poor state of preservation, but also each of the two alphabets has different letters that resemble each other or are identical in form. Finding the same term in another script can assist with its decipherment.

The three chapters of part one serve as an introduction and discuss the characteristics of the warehouse (the "Sheikh's House"). Particular issues concern Red Sea Commerce (e.g., weights and measures, business practices, trade routes, commodities) and some aspects of religion and culture ("Life, Death and God").

If Quseir played such an important role in the Indian Ocean trade, as suggested here, it is curious that no mention of it has been discovered among the hundreds of Geniza documents that deal with this trade. The nearby Red Sea ports of 'Aydhab and the city of Qus are however mentioned quite frequently. Possibly some of the activity described in the texts took place in Quseir as well. A number of letters in the collection are addressed to sahil al-qusayr. Guo usually translates the first word as "shore of" Quseir (e.g., p. 166), but the correct translation is "port of" (see R. Dozy, Supplement aux dictionnaires arabes (Leiden 1881; rpt. Paris 1967), 1: 636b; Guo gives the correct translation on p. 245.

As explained by Guo (pp. 90ff.), the importance of the Quseir documents lies both in their contribution to understanding the broader questions concerning Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade and the specific details they provide. The synthesis for understanding the former is, of course, largely dependent on the details of the latter. In general, one is impressed by the fact that the perceived potential wealth of information is greater than the proven results.

The foundation of the study comprises the second and main part of the book, which occupies about two thirds of its length and contains editions of eighty-four texts. For the sake of convenience, these are divided into several categories: commercial letters, shipping notes, accounts, official and semi-official correspondence, private letters and miscellanies. For each text, Guo provides a brief description and introduction, transcription of the Arabic original, translation and commentary. The data culled from these texts form the basis for the introductory studies in Part One. References there to the documents are made according to the manuscript registration number (RN) rather than the number of the text in this book; despite the table at the end of the book, this system makes checking references to the texts cumbersome, a situation exacerbated by the lack of headers on the pages for the text number.

A glimpse at the few plates in the book with undersized reproductions of the manuscripts gives the reader an inkling of the almost insurmountable difficulties that faced the editor in deciphering the texts. More often than not they are written in a scrawl and without diacritical dots, let alone vowel signs, so that any one character might represent several letters; and even...