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The Life of the People in the Fayyūm: A Network Analysis Approach to the Berlin Arabic Papyri Collection
Abstract
For early Islamic scholarship, documentary evidence has become an important resource for recovering the social, economic, and even cultural history of the early Islamic world. However, the plethora of often unorganized material presents scholars with difficulties in tracing broader patterns across space and time. In many cases, the historical context of the 200.000 Arabic documents remains unclear to papyrologists. In my paper, I present the early stages of my research tracing broader social, administrative, and fiscal changes in early Islamic Egypt through a micro-historical analysis of some of the Berlin papyri from Ṭuṭūn in the Fayyūm. The Berlin collection consists of over 1000 Arabic documents, raising the question of how to approach a collection of that size. Instead of focusing on this whole corpus or on single cases, my paper takes a network analysis approach focusing on a mini corpus of 200 documents. I adopt a social history approach to recover the everyday workings of the social, administrative, and fiscal systems. By connecting these everyday vignettes, the paper identifies patterns in the papyrological record, tracing how professional titles, personal names, and place names form temporal and spatial clusters that can enrich our understanding of personal, administrative, and economic interactions between people. I compare the data points derived from the Berlin papyri with already-existing ones in the Arabic Papyrology Database (APD) to excavate and visualize the multi-layered network of Arabic place names, persons, and temporalities. Visualizing this network will contribute to existing scholarship on documentary sources and the everyday aspects of social life in Egypt and serve as a starting point for incorporating aggregated data points on Egypt’s administration, trade, and judicial apparatus in the APD.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Egypt
Islamic World
Sub Area
None