Recent works in the field of medieval Islamic history have established the importance of archives for the study of social, economic, and political history. This presentation uses legal texts, papyri, and local histories from Khurasan and Egypt (eighth-tenth centuries) to turn our attention to the logic of archives that existed among communities in Khurasan and Egypt (and, indeed, elsewhere). Looking beyond a single cache of documents or one literary genre promises broader insights into how different kinds of documentation depict and represent social, economic, political, or religious realities. An ethnographic account of how jurists, administrators, tax collectors, scribes, and chroniclers produced documentation for archiving raises questions about the singular conception of archives in modern scholarship and the epistemological force that we sometimes accord to archival materials. Closer attention to this social logic, via diverse ethnographies of documentation in eighth-tenth century Khurasan and Egypt, can help us move beyond the lure of the archive to consider indigenous conceptualisations of record-keeping, storage, use of documents, archival sensibilities, and memory among the subjects and communities we study.

Documents tell their own story, not just through text, but through their material qualities, including format, layout, folds and holes. In my recent book, I argued for the existence of a complex Fatimid bureaucracy and archiving system. In this paper, I will extend that analysis to new documents, offering examples of registration marks, summaries, annotations, folds and binding holes that attest to systems of document storage and retrieval. Expanding our historical detective work from text to paratext can offer a more realistic picture of how premodern states and legal courts worked, and, in turn, can support a richer understanding of medieval Middle Eastern society and power relations.

Although no pre-Ottoman archives have survived intact, scholars have recently demonstrated that Arabic documentary archives were carefully maintained by various actors during the Middle Ages. This paper examines the documents currently housed in the Coptic Patriarchate Archive in Cairo (CPA), specifically indirect evidence from extant communal endowment deeds (waqfiyyas), to reconstruct archival practices within these non-Muslim communal archives. These traces—from internal references to related legal documents, on the one hand, to ‘external’ markings, like archivists’ cross-referencing notations, on the other—allow us glimpses of a pre-Ottoman documentary culture with its unique social logic. The documents of the CPA are, by and large, endowment deeds issued by Islamic courts. The paper discusses the special import of this legal instrument (charitable endowment) to the long-term survival of dhimmī communities like the Coptic Christian community and the effects this had on Coptic archiving practices. Last but not least, the paper considers how Coptic reliance on such legal instruments (and their specific documentary forms) had on the ‘shape’ of these dhimmī communities and the nature of authority within them.

Around 200 local manuscripts from pre-Mongol Afghanistan form the largest set of earliest Persian documents and literary manuscripts surviving, which were only made available online for research a few years ago. Arabic local texts from the pre-Mongol Islamicate East include sets found in Afghanistan dated to the 8th and the 11th-13th centuries CE. Some have been edited and translated, while others have only recently been made available for research and are being edited and translated by the Invisible East programme. Some questions that guide this presentation are: What do the Arabic and Persian texts tell about archival practices in the Islamicate East, and how do they relate to practices elsewhere in the medieval Islamicate world? What can we learn about the scribes from their use of Persian and Arabic in this largely non-Arabic speaking environment? The paper will summarise initial findings on archival and scribal practices that are exhibited from this set based on new research by the Invisible East programme.