Thinking with the dispersal of Middle Eastern artifacts

This paper considers a corpus of fragmented administrative and legal documents from the Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, once housed in Egyptian monastic libraries, and now scattered in many collections. Viewing archives as both practices and spaces, it postulates that monastic officials and scribes played a role in early Islamic provincial administration, neither as state officials nor as ḏimmī subjects. Rather, they did so as groups of people at the margins of, but not entirely outside, the state administration, by overseeing and transferring resources. These monastic archives, however, are reconstructed from scattered documents in libraries, museums, digital exhibits, and catalogues. They illustrate both the dispersal of Middle Eastern cultural heritage and the shifting historical narratives shaped by archival fragmentation. The study highlights tensions between historical Islamicate archival practices and the present arrangement of documents in modern repositories. Rather than resolving this tension, acknowledging it allows for alternative historical interpretations

Biological dispersal · Cultural heritage · Islam · Middle Ages · Middle East · Narrative · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Eurasian Exchange Networks · Islamic Studies and History