Watha'iq madinat al-Qasr bi-l-wahat al-Dakhla: Masdaran li-ta'rikh Misr fi l-'asr al-'uthmani.

• Author: Varisco, Daniel Martin
• Position: Book review

Watha'iq madinat al-Qasr bi-l-wahat al-Dakhla: Masdaran li-ta'rikh Misr fi l-asr al-'uthmani. Silsilat Dirasat Watha'iqiyya. By RUDOLPH PETERS. Cairo: MATBA'AT AL-'AMMA LI-DAR AL-KUTUB WA-L-WATHA'IQ AL-QAWM1YYA, 2011. Pp. 610.

Despite the oft-cited claim by Herodotus that Egypt is the Nile, in this volume Rudolph Peters demonstrates that there is much more to Egypt, including the famous Dakhla oasis, one of seven oases in the Western Desert of Egypt. Today this site is best known for the archaeological research on the Pharaonic period, with much less information available about the Islamic era. Peters analyzes and documents a cache of over two hundred documents first discovered in 2003 by Fred Leemhuis of Groningen University's Dakhleh Oasis Project. These documents date from the Ottoman period of the late sixteenth through early twentieth centuries. They cover a variety of subjects, especially in relation to local agriculture and to legal contracts. In addition to shedding light on administrative, customary, and family documents for the town of al-Qasr, this collection is of significant comparative value for any scholar working on similar documents in the wider region.

In his introduction Peters notes that he was assisted in this major archival undertaking by a variety of scholars, both European and Egyptian. The first part of the volume consists of Peters's analysis of the materials (pp. 23-73): this has been translated into Arabic by 'Imad Ahmad Halal of the University of the Suez Canal. There is a brief history of the town of al-Qasr, from the Roman occupation, which gave the town its name, to the twelfth- or thirteenth-century Ayyubid mosque and subsequent Ottoman presence.

Dakhla Oasis was populated primarily by farmers, with local production of dates, rice, wheat, olives, and various fruits. Artesian well water was the most important resource here; thus it rather than agricultural land per se was taxed (p. 35). Peters describes the local water allocation system from the wells. Time was traditionally reckoned at night by the stars and during the day by shadow lengths, both calculation systems widely distributed throughout North Africa and the Middle East. Many of the documents relate to the sharing of water and its distribution. As Peters notes, the importance of water shares...