The Lost Archive: Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue

By Marina Rustow

A compelling look at the Fatimid caliphate's robust culture of documentation

The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer.

Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper’s westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities suggest the strength of Middle Eastern institutions, not their weakness. Tracing the complex routes by which Arabic documents made their way from Fatimid palace officials to Jewish scribes, the book provides a rare window onto a robust culture of documentation and archiving not only comparable to that of medieval Europe, but, in many cases, surpassing it. Above all, Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to understand preindustrial documentary ecology.

Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical artifacts, showing how the records of the Fatimid caliphate, once recovered, deciphered, and studied, can help change our thinking about the medieval Islamicate world and about premodern polities more broadly.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jan 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691189529

Book preview

The Lost Archive

JEWS, CHRISTIANS, AND MUSLIMS

FROM THE ANCIENT TO THE MODERN WORLD

Edited by Michael Cook, William Chester Jordan, and Peter Schäfer

A list of titles in this series appears at the back of the book.

The Lost

Archive

TRACES OF A CALIPHATE

IN A CAIRO SYNAGOGUE

Marina Rustow

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Publication is made possible in part by a grant from the Barr Ferree Foundation Publication Fund,

Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Copyright © 2020 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

LCCN 2018966986

ISBN 9780691156477

ISBN 9780691189529 (e-book)

Version 1.0

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Fred Appel and Thalia Leaf

Production Editorial: Sara Lerner

Text and Jacket Design: Leslie Flis

Production: Jacquie Poirier

Publicity: Nathalie Levine and Kathryn Stevens

Jacket Credit: Zakariya al-Qazwini (c. 1200–1283 AD). From Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous Aspects of Things Existing. Gouache on paper, folio size: 30.5 × 20.5 cm. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich

For Petra, with love

Contractual time is a dimension of chancery practice that, though variable according to class of document, will determine the effective life of the archive. Preservation beyond that point, of course, enables its history to be written.

—John E. Wansbrough, Lingua Franca in the Mediterranean, 86

Contents

Technical Note  xi

Introduction: Middle East History’s Archive Problem  1

I. Source Survival

1. The Geniza: Blind Spots and Cataclysms  23

2. The Storage Capacity of State Power  55

3. The Corpus: Its Shape and Coherence  83

II. Chancery Practice

4. Paper: The Search for a Sustainable Support  113

5. Layout: Early Arabic Chancery Norms  138

6. Script: The Impact of the Abbasid East  160

7. Imperial Norms: The Abbasid Chancery  173

8. The Fatimid Petition-and-Response Procedure  207

III. The Ecology of the Documents

9. Supply: A Proliferation of Decrees  247

10. Administrative Manuals and Nonmanuals  274

11. The Source: The Chancery  296

12. Copying, Storage, and Dissemination  319

13. The Probative Value of Documents: Archiving and Registration  343

Appendix to Chapter 13: Fatimid ʿAlāʾim and Registration Marks  368

IV. The Problem of Archives

14. The Rotulus as an Instrument of Performance  381

15. The Ontological Status of the Decree  402

16. Archives, Documents, and the Persistence of Despotism  424

Notes  451

Acknowledgments  529

Bibliography  535

Subject Index  577

Index of Manuscripts with Shelfmarks  589

Photo Credits and Permissions  597

Technical Note

Most of the geniza documents cited in this book are available in high-resolution images through the Friedberg Genizah Project (fjms.genizah.org), abbreviated FGP in the documentation. Editions, translations, and descriptions of many of the texts are available online through the Princeton Geniza Project (https://geniza.princeton.edu/pgp/pgpsearch/), abbreviated PGP in the documentation. See there as well for the data infrastructure for chapter 13.

Citations of the Encyclopaedia Iranica refer to the online version at www.iranicaonline.org. The Encyclopaedia of Islam is abbreviated EI¹, EI², and EI³. These refer, respectively, to M. Houtsma et al., eds., The Encyclopaedia of Islam: A Dictionary of the Geography, Ethnography and Biography of the Muhammadan Peoples (Leiden: Brill, 1913–38); H. A. R. Gibb et al., eds., The Encyclopaedia of Islam: New Edition (Leiden: Brill, 1954–2007); and Kate Fleet et al., eds., The Encyclopaedia of Islam Three (Leiden: Brill, 2007–).

I give manuscript measurements height by width. Where I give dual dates, the first date is according to the Islamic (hijrī) calendar, and the second according to the Julian calendar. Single dates or centuries are Julian only.

All transcriptions and translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

Fatimids and Abbasids in the early tenth century.

Fatimids and Abbasids in the late tenth century.

Fatimids and Abbasids in the mid-eleventh century.

Fatimids and Abbasids in the mid-twelfth century.

The Lost Archive

Introduction

MIDDLE EAST HISTORY’S ARCHIVE PROBLEM

There is a widespread but mistaken notion that few documents have survived from the Islamicate Middle East before about 1500. Even specialists in the medieval Middle East have drawn invidious (or perhaps merely envious) comparisons between what they study and the Ottoman Empire on the one hand or Latin Christian Europe on the other. S. M. Stern, who identified and published more than two dozen Arabic state documents in a period when there were still believed to be virtually none, called the number of extant documentary sources pitifully small compared to those of Europe.¹ The Ottomans were profligate consumers of paper, prolific producers of documentation, and scrupulous organizers of records; there are hundreds of thousands of documents in archives in Istanbul, more than enough to fuel the work of many generations of historians. By comparison, the preceding rulers—the Abbasids, Fatimids, Ayyubids, and Mamluks, in addition to countless shorter-lived dynasties—are imagined to have produced few documents and preserved fewer.²

The purpose of this book is to lay such notions to rest. The Islamicate Middle East developed complex systems of documentation that have not yet been well understood. I have set out to understand one of them here: that of the Fatimid caliphate in Egypt and Syria in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

The Fatimids (297–567/909–1171) were only one dynasty, albeit the dominant one of their era, a Mediterranean superpower. But their habits of document production were not sui generis: they drew on those of their predecessors and influenced those of their successors. Fatimid documents are, then, one starting point for understanding the documentary habits of pre-Ottoman Islamicate states, and arguably even of complex agrarian ones more broadly.

Surprisingly, though—and not a little paradoxically—most of the documents that survived from the Fatimid period in Egypt survived in the attic of a medieval synagogue. A significant amount of what survived was written by government officials; of the official documents, most survived because they were reused as scrap paper. That is the paradox this book attempts to explain.

GENIZAS AND ARCHIVES

The attic where they survived—and by metonymy, the cache it contained—is known as the Cairo Geniza. The name refers to their find spot in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, and, in turn, to the Jewish custom of geniza, the long-lived habit of consigning worn-out texts in Hebrew script not to outright destruction but to a slow decay in dignified limbo, usually in a storage chamber or cemetery. Christians and Muslims in the medieval Middle East followed similar customs for texts in Arabic, Syriac, and other languages.

When the Ben Ezra Geniza chamber was emptied between 1888 and 1897 and its contents dispersed to manuscript dealers, private collectors, and libraries, it held roughly four hundred thousand pages of books and documents.³ The vast majority of these were, indeed, in Hebrew script. But the cache also held documents in other scripts, Arabic among them. Of the Arabic-script documents, many had nothing whatsoever to do with Jews except that Jews had later reused them.

The geniza contained, in other words, precisely the sort of Arabic document that should have survived in a state archive had any state archives survived. But the geniza was not an archive, and that brings us to a second paradox.

Like archives, genizot exist to store texts. But unlike genizot, archives are arranged for storage and retrieval. Archives contain live documents that substantiate real claims, and to be useful, they must be orderly. Genizot contain dead writings in search of a final resting place, including worn-out copies of works of literature, cancelled orders for payment, the marriage contracts of people long deceased, and grocery lists planning meals long consumed.⁴ The Fatimid state documents from the geniza survived not because they were archived, but because they were jettisoned. Many of the documents show evidence of having spent some time in the archives of the Fatimid state. But their later traces demonstrate that they entered the geniza not because of some cataclysm like regime change, but while the Fatimid caliphate still stood.

Why did government officials discard them? And how did the documents arrive in Jewish hands? What can their migration tell us about methods of document storage and retrieval? If states in the medieval Middle East kept archives, what happened to those archives, and when did it happen? This book attempts to reconstruct the patterns of use, preservation, and reuse that led to this doubly paradoxical situation—that our most abundant source of Islamic state documents was a Jewish house of worship; and that the archive of an Islamic polity is susceptible of reconstruction not because it survived intact, but because it was dismembered.

As to how those documents migrated from the palace in Cairo to the synagogue in Fustat, there is no single answer that covers all the documents. The very fact that they survived in Egypt means we can’t assume the Ottomans took the documents to Istanbul when they conquered Egypt in 1517. Catastrophic displacement in times of regime change is only one path to an archive’s dispersion. Mundane routine is another. Fatimid officials not only filled their archives; they also pruned them, as any efficient record-keeping institution does.⁵ It is to the pruning that we owe much of what has survived.⁶

DOCUMENTS, DESPOTISM, AND THE DISCIPLINE

Hence the move from talk of archives to talk of archiving practices. In writing this book, I have heeded the warnings of some recent essays to widen the focus from the search for surviving documents—solving the empirical problem of the gaping evidentiary lacuna while leaving a larger conceptual question unanswered—and reconstructing instead the wider system of document production, use, and storage.⁷

What can the documents themselves tell us about the state and the culture of documentation that brought them into being? Studying Fatimid documents has convinced me that we cannot understand the workings of a polity without getting down to the micro level of its bureaucrats, high officials in the chancery of the capital, and lowly paper pushers of the peripheries alike.

Sometimes misconceptions are so deep-seated that neither empirical evidence nor conceptual overhaul suffices to consign them to the reputeless banishment they deserve. Documents from the medieval Middle East have lain neglected in part because of the belief that the region had no use for them. Where does that belief come from? I have therefore also tried to reflect on the assumptions that have led generations of scholars of the Middle East to imagine the region as uninterested in producing, let alone preserving, documentation. What expectations does this reflect of the nature and capacity of Islamicate political power?

The polities of the medieval Middle East tend to be characterized as either laissez-faire to the point of indifference or despotic to the point of authoritarianism. Both arguments have mustered the supposed dearth of documents in their favor. One cause, two opposite effects. Because few have looked for the documentary evidence of the quotidian functioning of these states, the states appear weak or despotic; few have looked for the documents because weak or despotic states—either way, states led by arbitrary and unpredictable rulers—would have had little need of them.

But it turns out that the notion that the medieval Middle East has preserved fewer documents than medieval Europe requires rethinking from the other side, too: what it assumes about Europe. Most medieval Latin documents survived because they were copied or summarized in cartularies—registers containing transcriptions or summaries of documents—not because they were kept as originals in archives. For the period before 1100, the Near East has, in fact, preserved far more original documents than Europe, whether they’ve been stored in limbo or recovered archaeologically.⁸ But the vast majority of them languish neglected in library collections: more than 99 percent of extant Arabic papyrus and paper documents remain unpublished.⁹

It’s important to get the proportions right because of the centrality of documents to legal and political claims. The strongest version of the invidious comparison to Europe holds that while in the Latin West, documents served as tools for the preservation and reproduction of legal and social privileges, in the Islamicate world, they were of little use because rulers monopolized the power to grant privileges and granted them arbitrarily if at all. The survival of documents in European archives, on this logic, demonstrates the stability and strength of Western social institutions, or even a nascent concept of rights. The medieval Middle East supposedly lacked the institutional structures that could have supported or produced a robust culture of documentation, let alone a presumption of legally or politically defensible rights.¹⁰

It’s also important to get this right because of the consequences for the field of Middle East history. Medieval Middle East historians have a marked preference for narrative and prescriptive sources—texts meant for posterity, or what historians refer to as literary sources, though the category encompasses more than literature, extending to chronicles, juristic works, and encyclopedic compendia of many kinds. The problem with literary sources—with relying on narrative and normative works nearly exclusively—is not that their authors consciously crafted them for an audience: so did the authors of documents. But the kind of audience matters. Chronicles were acts of memorialization, generally of elites, directed at nameless future generations. They were written on speakerphone, as it were. Legal works tell us how a handful of religious specialists wanted Muslims to comport themselves, but less about how they did, and they say little about areas of life that Islamic law had little interest in regulating, let alone about non-Muslims, who for the first several centuries of Islamic rule constituted the majority of subjects.

Middle East studies has flourished despite these constraints and even, to some extent, because of them. The educational trajectory of medievalists entering the field has for a long time mirrored that of the elites they study. They focus on classical Arabic texts of the high religious, juristic, and literary traditions. Sooner or later, for many students, love for those traditions takes over. Many go on to specialize in the classical Islamicate disciplines, such as philosophy, theology, poetry, or the study of the learned elite (ʿulamāʾ) and the makings of the Islamic legal tradition. All this is, in and of itself, not a bad thing.

But there is a problem with ignoring documents, and that problem is both methodological and substantive. The tendency toward the literary has resulted in a body of knowledge tilted disproportionately toward the lettered elites and their engagement in religious thought, literary pursuits, and high politics. It has starved medieval Arabic and Persian documentary sources of attention. It has also kept historians of the pre-Ottoman Middle East at the margins of the historical discipline, at the risk of mutual impoverishment. Finally, and centrally to this book’s argument, ignoring documents has exacerbated a long Western habit, already evident in early modern European writings on the Orient, of depicting Middle Eastern sovereigns as ruling their patrimonial domains as personal fiefdoms.

Viewed through the lens of the chronicle tradition, rulers appear to have governed in a manner that was ad hoc and unpredictable. This is unsurprising: the chroniclers’ gaze tended to focus on the colorful anecdotes and intrigues in the upper echelons of the court, rather than the midlevel bureaucrats and the relatively stable administrative infrastructures that remained intact across dynasties. Their preference was for stories about powerful individuals; modern historiography has followed suit. Students of Islamic law, conversely, have tended to focus on prescriptive law and jurisprudence to the exclusion of the documents legal courts produced, the personnel who wrote them (whom one could characterize as the standing armies of Islamic civil law), and how litigants’ demands shaped the law.¹¹

The notion that there was a dearth of written instruments has, then, played into the image of a Middle East ruled despotically and arbitrarily, pervaded by pious prescription, while virtually assuring that such an image go unchallenged. Subjects of a polity without written records lack a means of asserting their rights or contesting official injustice. Their only choice is to throw themselves on the whims of the powerful. Where there are no archives—documents stored and organized so as to facilitate retrieval—there can be neither administrative memory, nor procedural predictability, nor political stability.

One historian has argued that the Muslim elite competed for social power and defended its privileges not by presenting documents in their defense, but by writing (or appearing in) works that staked claims to juristic and literary expertise, such as biographical dictionaries. On this argument, social historians can cease to lament the paucity of documents preserved in archives and, instead, should think carefully about biographical compendia and the preference for them.¹² The abundance of biographical dictionaries is a worthwhile historical problem, no less than the dearth of surviving archives. But those problems are not necessarily related. And not to seek out the documents that have survived, let alone those that haven’t—to suggest that Middle East historians should remain content with their chronicles and biographical dictionaries—is to make a virtue of a false necessity.

The disavowal of the ephemeral documentation on which most complex cultures rely has led to an impasse from which I would like, in this book, to trace a path backward in order to find a new one forward.

The medieval Middle East possessed a robust culture of written documentation. State officials produced records including decrees, memoranda, orders, accounts, registers, and receipts, and they form a corpus so coherent in their graphic presentation that anyone with a modicum of exposure to them can recognize them at first sight. Courts of law and government offices produced written acts and maintained consistent procedures for authenticating them; their personnel had an interest in ensuring that rights claims depended on more than personal whim—the ruler’s or anyone else’s.¹³ Scribes developed diverse technical specializations in the art of record keeping. Along with these came a division of labor among administrative and legal personnel. And along with those, in turn, came systems of document organization and retrieval.

My aim in this book is, in part, to contribute to the reconstruction of those systems. I want to use the documents that have survived to understand not only the process of their production, but also their patterns of use, preservation, displacement, destruction, and reuse—in short, their afterlives.

AN ABUNDANCE OF DECREES

How, then, did Fatimid state documents survive in the Cairo Geniza?

The question is not entirely new, even if the complexity of the answers still needs to be fathomed. S. M. Stern explained the migration of state documents from the palace to the geniza via the shortest route possible: a straight line. Jewish officials who worked in government offices, he surmised, held on to at least some of them and eventually deposited them in the geniza chamber because that was their habitual method of discarding documents.¹⁴

It may be that some documents from the palace in Cairo reached the synagogue in Fustat this way, but I have become convinced that those are the minority.

In an early article on this subject—when I published it, I had just begun making my way into the corpus of documents—I argued that Jewish officials brought state documents into the synagogue to provide communal leaders with effective models to copy. Such a scenario would explain why many of the Fatimid petitions that survived in the geniza are whole: they served as exemplars for the art of writing documents. And this is especially true of petitions: when what’s at stake is defending or contesting one’s rights, privileges, and social and legal status, the need for exemplars is pressing.¹⁵

But neither of these scenarios—catastrophic displacement or hunger for diplomatic models—explains a type of document that has survived in surprising abundance: state decrees, especially the kind of decrees written wastefully on long vertical scrolls (rotuli) with very wide line spacing. The Fatimid chancery drew up these impressive-looking edicts and had them delivered to lower officials or to petitioners, or had them read aloud in public. The geniza has preserved hundreds, maybe thousands, of them, all of them fragmentary, and all of them reused for Hebrew-script texts. Those form much of the documentary infrastructure of this book.

The problem of the Fatimid decree is the problem of Islamicate state archives writ small. All the original Fatimid decrees that have survived in the geniza are fragmentary. There are a few whole decrees, but they are all private copies. Of the grand, wasteful originals, all we have are fragments. There are whole decrees that survived outside the geniza, and other types of Fatimid state document that have survived intact inside it, including petitions to sovereigns and other dignitaries; memoranda and reports to higher-level officials; and fiscal records, tax receipts, accounts, and ledgers. But the decrees are fragmentary, and they are also perplexingly abundant. They also look as though they have been cut deliberately, not merely ripped apart by the ravages of time and haphazard storage. They are so systematically dismembered as to suggest that they may have been intended not for the archives at all, but for some other life trajectory. (The phenomenon is not exclusively a Fatimid one; I shall return to it in chapter 2.)

The material is so much more abundant than I had anticipated that at some point, I had to admit that working through it was a project for a team rather than a single scholar, and for a series of publications rather than just one, even one as long as the book you’re now reading.¹⁶ This book represents my attempt to make sense of the system of state documentation, not just the system of archiving and deaccessioning, because only in light of the whole problem of document production and exchange do the parts become legible and comprehensible. The seeming paradoxes begin to make sense when one reconstructs the larger documentary ecology of circulation, discard, migration, reuse, and preservation.

What is needed, then, is an understanding of the broad ecology of Fatimid state documentation—as well as the proximate reasons why documents may have circulated and migrated.

THE SIDE OF DEMAND

When I began research for this book, about one hundred Arabic documents from the Fatimid and Ayyubid periods had come to light through the labors of four scholars: S. D. Goitein, S. M. Stern, D. S. Richards, and Geoffrey Khan.¹⁷ One hundred is a respectable number if you are a medievalist. All of them had emerged from a small handful of repositories: the Cairo Geniza, the archives of the Jewish and Coptic communities in Cairo, the monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai, and the Italian state archives. The find spots all happen to be non-Muslim institutions, a fact so striking that many assumed keeping archives was specific to dhimmīs, as though their legal status gave them reason to keep archives, while the rest of the medieval Islamicate world lacked institutional structures persistent enough to allow for long-term document preservation.

In fact, it was only because those Jewish and Christian institutions had received the documents rather than issuing them that they had survived. This is a common enough phenomenon—the recipients of privileges are more likely to hold onto the documents attesting to them than the issuing institutions, a pattern not only in the Islamicate world, but in Japan and Europe as well, where documents tended to survive in monastic and family archives, and to enter public repositories only with the birth of the modern state.¹⁸

Such was the situation when I began. As I trawled the geniza collections, I expected the total number of state documents to reach perhaps four hundred, a figure I published and immediately began to fear was too high.¹⁹ The current number now exceeds sixteen hundred, and this is only the number I happen to have seen personally. The largest geniza collection, at the Cambridge University Library, has yet to be searched and could yield many more. (If the prospect sounds exciting to you, consider this an invitation to join in the trawling.)

The current number is sizable not just compared to what I expected. It is also a significant proportion of the documentary texts in the geniza. I would currently estimate the documentary geniza at forty thousand texts.²⁰ By that measure, Arabic documents of state make up 4 percent of the whole documentary hoard—a surprisingly high percentage given that the geniza was a repository for worn manuscripts in Hebrew script. That proportion demands an explanation not just on the side of supply—how did state offices deacquisition documents?—but also of demand: what was the larger set of assumptions that impelled Jewish scribes, and many others besides, to use official documents as writing material?

Here, too—on the supply side—patterns have emerged. Most of the fragmentary decrees have Hebrew-script texts on the verso, and sometimes between the lines on the recto as well, and they are texts intended for public performance, such as liturgical poetry and parts of the Bible written out for public recitation in synagogue. Liturgical texts are well represented in the geniza overall, but the correlation between them and the decree fragments is so striking as to suggest that the prolific recyclers of state decrees were the cantors who worked within the walls of the synagogue where the geniza was found. What connection, if any, did the cantors who reused state decrees have to the state? And did they cut up the decrees themselves, or did they acquire them only when they were already in pieces? The scenarios I propose are not as cataclysmic as regime change, whether attempted or successful.

The survival of Arabic state documents in the geniza is not just an unlikely circumstance. It is a fortunate one for the historian: recycled documents provide better evidence of archiving practices than continuously existing archives would. The documents themselves have convinced me that the best way to understand how a culture of written documentation worked is to pull forensic evidence from the documents themselves.

This is, then, a book about documents and their afterlives. But it has, over the course of the writing process, become larger than that as the material has suggested another set of questions. What would the history of the medieval Middle East look like if its historians took documents seriously? How would the field evolve if documents formed a regular part of our source base, as they have for medieval European historians since the early modern age of antiquaries? What would happen if we read them not just as containers for textual information, but as artifacts in their own right?

THE IMPORTANCE OF DIPLOMATICS

Like many books on premodern documentary texts, this one sits astride the discipline of history and a number of technical fields: philology (the comparative linguistic study of historical texts), papyrology (the study of ancient documents, not just on papyrus), paleography (the study and decipherment of old writing), and diplomatics (the structural and institutional analysis of historical documents). Starting in eighteenth-century Göttingen, these fields developed under the rubric of sciences that are secondary or ancillary to historical writing, the historisches Hilfswissenschaften. That rubric also includes epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), numismatics (of coins), sigillography (of seals), codicology (of books from a material perspective), chronology, geography, and others. Together these form an arsenal of techniques that historians deploy—in admittedly variable measure—in order to make historical evidence legible and make it yield meaning.²¹

Astride history and the Hilfswissenschaften is not always a terribly comfortable place to sit. Historians who work with difficult or very old documents tend to fear the judgment of philologists, because we suspect (often with justification) that they are linguistically better equipped to understand them, yet our history writing depends on understanding them deeply. Philologists experience a reciprocal measure of fear and trembling in facing—or avoiding—the epistemological dilemmas, interpretive constraints, and narrative decisions that historians regularly handle in the course of their work. Historians may worry that philologists will say they have read their evidence sloppily; but they are also likely to dismiss the technicalities of reading because they believe history comes alive at the writing table, in the course of argumentation. Once a historical narrative is complete, the technical skills that undergird it are passed over in silence—like money, religion, and politics in polite company. Philologists risk a reciprocal judgment: in handling historical evidence, they have been known to adhere to a kind of naive positivism, believing that once they have identified, transcribed, translated, and contextualized a text, their work is finished. The historian’s work has just begun.

This book tiptoes ever so quietly away from this dilemma to begin from a different standpoint. The technical skills required to read documents—above all, very old and difficult ones—are not merely a means to an end. They are a bridge to the past, a means of understanding the scribes who wrote them and the institutional practices those scribes established and perpetuated. In the technical details, in other words, lies otherwise irrecoverable information about documentary culture. Those details must, then, be handled like any other type of historical evidence: interpreted and discussed—not ignored or assumed to hold self-evident meaning.²²

There is a related problem. Medieval Middle Eastern documents, to the extent that they are read at all, tend to be read as vehicles for individual case studies of the type that has long engrossed both historians and papyrologists. We somehow possess a prurient interest in the singular, the contingent, the anecdotal—the exception. Historians in particular tend to strip documents of their boilerplate, their repeated verbiage, their characteristic look, their repeatable features—to debone them, as Tamer el-Leithy has put it.²³ We divest them of their formulaic text and go straight for the variable free text, the meat of good narrative. The grandfather of documentary geniza studies, S. D. Goitein, tended to read documents this way, and many in the field of geniza studies have followed him in doing so, myself included.²⁴ There is nothing inherently wrong with this: focusing on one-off information yields the kind of historical narrative that thrives on human drama, and permits one to judge a society’s norms from its exceptions and limit cases. Specialists in the geniza are not, to be sure, the only historians to work this way. But we have, perhaps, fewer excuses for leaving so much text lying on the floor of the shop: our constant contact with the Hilfswissenschaften should prevent us from discarding any part of the animal. The bones contain otherwise unrecoverable information.

It was difficult not to debone documents when we knew them primarily via printed editions, microfilms, or—if one had the proper funding and few competing commitments—long-distance travel, accommodation in spartan rooms, and a steady diet of library cafeteria food. It was like salvage archaeology: get in, get what’s important, get out. But now, the nearly ubiquitous availability of digital images means that no interpreter of the past has to settle for reading documents as containers for one-off information: their material qualities and diplomatic vestiges are right there before us.

The diplomatists, for their part, have always maintained that documents are records of their own production, of scribal traditions, of storage habits, of patterns of deposit and deacquisition—that they are material artifacts and our best witnesses of their trajectories and afterlives. A historian might put it differently: they are records of the workings of power. But as both diplomatists and historians know, documents can also be diffident. They will relax enough to divulge their pasts only if questioned with empathy, and they speak more volubly in groups than singly. (This in itself is an argument for treating documents in groups by genre, not just by narrative concern.)

I’ve come to see the rubric of ancillary sciences, then, as dismissive and unfair, as though technical skills are a mere scaffolding. If, as students of a long forgotten past, we are honest about how we work, the technical skills are not ancillary to what we do: they are central to it. They are conduits for historical empathy, tools for entering the minds and bodies of the scribes on whom our work depends, ways of getting to know the ordinary people on whose behalf they wrote them, of watching the officials who used and discarded them do their work. I believe in discussing the ancillary techniques and even making them central to what we do, not only as a bridge to the past, but also as a way of bringing the research process out into the open, of making it teachable and reproducible. The ancillary sciences are hardly to blame for the naive positivism with which they have been applied. Now, after the material turn, they are practically begging us to transcend it.

I have begun, then, from the premises that historical information lies embedded not only in the texts of documents but also in their material features—and that documents must, therefore, be studied both as vehicles for texts and as physical artifacts. That means that it will not suffice to study them from printed editions, to read the recto without asking what was later written on the verso, or not to ask how the document found its way from the first scribe who wrote on it to the second.

But documents are also more than mere artifacts, precisely because they contain texts. The Fatimid state documents I study here not only shared a common fate. They also have a set of features in common, a range of verbal and graphic styles that mark them as specifically Fatimid. Taken together, those features demonstrate that the dynasty developed a coherent set of diplomatic norms, conventions, and protocols that scribes transmitted over the course of generations. They attest, in other words, to a set of institutions—a socially legible code of habits that opened and constrained future possibilities. Some Fatimid diplomatic norms—wide line spacing, upward-curving lines, and word-stacking at the ends of lines—were remarkably long-lived in Arabic script documents of state: they began at the Abbasid chancery and would survive in petitions and decrees down to the Ottomans, Safavids, Qajars, and Zaydīs.²⁵ Their longevity itself bespeaks their semiotic force and the continuity of the institutions they represented. That, in turn, suggests that we abandon the shopworn notions of a Middle East devoid of documents, let alone of institutions.

Fatimid state documents are worth studying, then, on several counts: in their own right; as a material record of Fatimid statecraft; as probable and not-so-pale reflections of what the long-lamented central Abbasid archives might have looked like had they survived; and as a watershed in a much longer tradition of Middle Eastern document production. But even stopping there would be to sell them short. They are also some of our best evidence of how administrative traditions in the premodern world evolved. A certain basic conservatism of scribal praxis stands to reason when much was at stake in a document’s legibility, predictability, and legitimacy. Fatimid state documents were milestones in the establishment of a characteristic Islamic chancery style that would persist for a millennium through changes of regime, capital, and religious ideology. I take that persistence itself as evidence of precisely the sort of institutional stability that many histories of the medieval Middle East have denied. The inflection points, conversely, when scribes adopted new styles are also significant: to innovate in a basically conservative milieu, as the Fatimids also did, is a decision that begs interpretation.

DOCUMENTS, ARCHIVES, AND GENIZOT: A USER’S MANUAL

The geniza is not the only place where Fatimid state documents have survived. The vast riches of Arabic paper documents in the non-geniza collections of Cairo, Vienna, Utah, and elsewhere will surely yield more of them.²⁶ I have not looked systematically through these collections, partly for reasons of manageability, but also in the interests of maximizing my own utility to scholarship. An unplanned intellectual trajectory led me to the skills required for working with geniza documents, and also to an abiding curiosity about how premodern empires work.²⁷ Those two roads converge in this book, and now that I’m here, I am determined to make what I have learned useful to others.

I have focused on the geniza, though, not only for reasons of manageability and utility. I have come increasingly to work Janus-like—making geniza material face inward toward the Jewish community and outward toward the broader society. If you’re curious about the convoluted circumstances in which ordinary Fatimid subjects submitted petitions, or about the mix of reverence and glee with which an otherwise unknown Jew of Fustat beheld the chancery rescript he had just received in response to his petition, or about the difficulties one man faced in tracking down a stray tax receipt because of his fear of being caught without one—if you’re a student of any premodern empire and these questions excite your curiosity, an excellent way to satisfy it is to read letters and legal testimonies documenting the user end of the Fatimid state, and most of those are in Hebrew script.²⁸ It is not always possible to find such fine-grained texture in premodern history—to access the social tensions that resulted, after who knows how many turns of the screw, in administrative documents. I thought this was an opportunity not to be missed.

Conversely, I felt I couldn’t go further in my exploration of the Jewish communities of medieval Egypt and Syria without some understanding of bureaucratic procedures they encountered and sometimes mastered in the normal course of business. That, in turn, led me to an interest in diplomatics, which I’ve since realized is essential to the historian’s craft, all the more so for social historians. Taking a diplomatics-based approach to documents turbocharges the process of interpreting them, casting sharper light on texts that would otherwise be mined for colorful anecdotes while leaving the scribes, institutions, and archives that lay behind them invisible.

Working with a cache that was fragmentary to begin with, and then was acquired chaotically and scattered abroad, also entails its share of frustrations. (For how the geniza survived and what its early collectors were looking for when they found it, see chapter 1.) Documents and archives are the basic building blocks of historical technique. Most archival historians begin from archives the coherence of which is virtually guaranteed by mere virtue of its having been assembled and maintained. If you are among this fortunate group, you will read through documents that are in some way related and then use them to tell a convincing story. You may even sit down to conduct research with a certain sense not just of wonder but of entitlement: here are the traces of the past, offering themselves up and practically begging to be understood and contextualized. Many historians have, of course, thought long and deeply about the power relations that brought their archives into being. But do we really think enough about what has not survived, or what has survived in an altered state—for instance as scrap paper, or in bookbindings?²⁹

That sense of entitlement is something I confess I haven’t really known, and if this sounds like a lament, it sort of is. Not having a ready-made archive at my disposal has, in many passages below, impeded me from offering the kind of coherent narrative historians love to write, myself included. Or else it has forced me to compose a narrative about my attempt to recreate the archive or imagine it into existence, with all the lacunae and frustrations that suggests. I have tried to be as transparent as possible about the process of imaginative reconstruction and the moments of narrative aporia I faced—to break down the fourth wall, the conceptual barrier between the performers and the audience, or the convention that allows the audience to see and appreciate the action on stage but not the converse. I have tried to make the interpretive process transparent because I fear that historians who remain silent on the technical elements of their craft, or dismiss them as sterile, boring, or ahistorical, are selling their own interpretive skills—and their subjects—short.

Finally, I have attempted to offer what I believe is a reasonable approximation of what we might expect to find in a medieval Arabic state archive and what the Fatimids would have deposited in one. When it came to decrees, scribes produced different formats for distinct purposes. These differences were neither as codified or as systematic as they would become (like so much else) under the Mamluks (648–922/1250–1517). But there were patterns. The decrees that officials read aloud were long, lavish rotuli of an impractically large format—half a meter wide by several meters long. They were meant to look impressive and embody sovereign authority. They were not, however, meant for the archives: they were large, and when rolled they were round rather than flat. This is fine if you have a finite number of items to store, or if you have an interest in limiting what you want to store, as in ancient libraries that were repositories of classicizing traditions, for instance. But if you are part of an administrative apparatus producing paperwork constantly, you might prefer compact, flat documents to long, unwieldy three-dimensional ones. The versions state officials kept on hand were small and sensible—normally 17 × 27 cm—and designed with the practical needs of the archivist in mind. The scrolls could then be jettisoned.

The ephemeral nature of some state documentation should not, however, suggest that the state was an ad hoc organization with few procedures or principles of storage or continuity. Studying the archival system the Fatimids developed has convinced me of its complexity and its coherence as a system, and that complexity and coherence mean that power inhered not in the charisma of a sovereign whose decisions were arbitrary and immune to contestation, but in the routines of bureaucrats, for whom consistency was a stock-in-trade. And anyway, we should not expect medieval Middle Eastern states to prove to us their complexity and procedural consistency. The onus should fall, rather, on us as historians to understand those states on their own terms, so that their approaches to documentation, archiving, and governance reveal themselves, and, in turn, shed light on how they handled the problem of their own legitimacy.

A ROADMAP OF THE BOOK

This book has four parts. The first introduces Fatimid state documents, the second the longue durée history of how Arabic state documents came to look the way they did under the Fatimids. The third and fourth parts trace the biographies of Fatimid documents from the moment of their production to their archiving, dismemberment, and reuse, and then consider what all this means for both the documents and the discipline that studies them.

Part 1 begins by taking up the problem of source survival and discussing some previous attempts to solve it. Chapter 1 introduces the Cairo Geniza and explains how (and why) the Fatimid state documents preserved there went overlooked for nearly a century. It does not go into the problem of why they survived in the geniza in the first place, since the answers are many and complex, and form the substance of much of the rest of the book. Chapter 2 introduces two influential attempts to explain the seeming dearth of archival material from the medieval Middle East: Frédéric Bauden’s illuminating account of how the Mamluk-era historian al-Maqrīzī came to possess official government documents and repurpose them as scrap paper; and Wael Hallaq’s postulate that courts of law before the Ottoman period recorded information in registers rather than storing original documents. The procedure Hallaq outlines runs parallel to the medieval European cartulary and finds striking parallels in Fatimid practice as well, but his thesis rests on prescriptive sources. And while both arguments have advanced the question of archiving practices and the cause of answering it, one must resist the temptation to elevate them to the status of general theories. Neither quite explains the phenomena I discuss in this book, though they raise many of the same questions.

Chapter 3 surveys the Fatimid state documents that have survived in the geniza, both bureaucratic and fiscal. I also argue on behalf of the existence, in the medieval Middle East, of something that can—and, indeed, must—be called a state. Those who avoid applying that term to premodern polities, I believe, define the term too narrowly and also misunderstand how premodern states functioned. The chapter also introduces a striking characteristic of Fatimid documents: their similarity, both visually and verbally, to documents from the Abbasid chanceries at Baghdad and Sāmarrāʾ (that is, the few that have survived or that we can reconstruct from circumstantial clues). This raises the question: What does it mean for a Shīʿī dynasty whose raison d’être was the supersession of the old Sunnī caliphate to have adopted its system of documentation, or at least its semiotics? Then, no less than now, written texts—portable and monumental—were laden with semiotic cues. That the Fatimids carried over Abbasid elements of style speaks to the dynasty’s strategies of self-legitimation—its efforts to make the new dispensation legible, comprehensible, and authoritative to those who had lived under the old. Part 1 establishes, then, that the Fatimid state was a state, that it produced documents, that many of those documents have survived, and that they imitated Abbasid precedents.

Part 2 moves backward in time, situating the dynasty’s diplomatic language in the broader context of Islamicate chancery practice. Chapter 4 opens the discussion of the Abbasid legacy by tracing the diffusion of the writing support universally characteristic of Fatimid documents of state: paper. Paper technology reached Egypt in the tenth century, by which time it was already the medium of choice for state documents farther east. The story of the diffusion of paper technology from Central Asia westward has been told before, but new archaeological discoveries and documentary evidence make it possible to tell it with the emphasis on how real states functioned and how they deployed the semiotics of written media. Against the prevailing consensus, I argue that the transfer of paper to the Islamicate world took place not when Abbasid armies vanquished Chinese forces in Central Asia in 751, but in the 720s, when the Umayyads conquered Khurāsān (the land straddling today’s Iran, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan). Geoffrey Khan has described Khurāsān as the engine room of Islamic sovereignty; he has posited, among the other key innovations of the province, scribal and administrative habits that would come to shape Arabic documents as far afield as Egypt. Throughout this book, the greater Iranian world will play a recurring role as the source of administrative innovations that had long afterlives. Those innovations began with paper.³⁰

But paper was not merely a technological innovation. It was also a prestige good that, by the time it reached Egypt in the tenth century, had become the medium par excellence of state administration and indissolubly linked to it. That prestige explains its rapid spread and the precipitous decline of papyrus. That precipitousness, in turn, explains some of the changes to the layout and script of state documents in the decades preceding the Fatimid takeover of Egypt. The shift to a new medium loosened the old writing habits and broke up the soil in which new diplomatic seeds would take root.

In the following chapters, I trace the Abbasid documentary habits that shaped the work of Fatimid bureaucrats: layout (chapter 5), curvilinear script (chapter 6), and the proportioning of scripts (chapter 7). Though some elements of the chancery style on which the Fatimids drew can be detected in earlier Egyptian documents, most of them came from the Abbasid capitals of Iraq: Sāmarrāʾ (from which original documents have survived), Baghdad (whose documents can be triangulated, more or less, on the basis of the codices and descriptions of writers who worked in the court and bureaucracy), and Baṣra. The use of paper in Central Asia had a decisive impact on the Fatimid chancery’s choice of writing support; the scribal culture of Khurāsān had made its way to Egypt long before they arrived. But the look of Fatimid state documents owed nearly everything to a more proximate model: the metropolitan norms of the Iraqi capitals. Paradoxically, the Fatimids succeeded in tying the documentary norms of Egypt more closely to Baghdad than they had been under the Egyptian dynasties that were loyal to the Abbasids. The Fatimids of Egypt were, when it came to diplomatics, more Abbasid than the Abbasids of Egypt had been. At the same time, building on the work of both Nabia Abbott and Alain George, I argue that the aesthetic and philosophical ideal of proportioned script, which is usually attributed to the Abbasid vizier Ibn Muqla (272–328/885–940), emerged from a network of bureaucrats, philosophers, and polymaths in and around the Buyid courts whose works Fatimid officials (such as Ibn al-Ṣayrafī) continued to idealize long after the Buyid demise.

But there was one type of document that the Fatimids completely rebuilt once they arrived in Egypt: the petition.³¹ The Fatimid decree of the eleventh century was not terribly different from the Abbasid one of the tenth, or even from the standard high-level official letter. But the petition was different. Subjects had petitioned the Abbasids and the Umayyads, not to mention the Romans and Ptolemies before them; plenty of evidence survives of petitioning in Egypt before the Islamic conquest. But the Fatimid petition took an independent course in its wording and layout. In chapter 8, I explain why. The petition-and-response procedure was vitally important to the architects of the Fatimid state. Before the dynasty entered Egypt, high officials—the caliph and the chief qāḍī—had begun to advocate for a petition-and-response procedure and build it into the rules of government. When the dynasty arrived in Egypt, it began to implement these rules. The regime granted taxpaying subjects the right to petition the sovereign because they would not extract revenue without offering justice in return. By responding to petitions caliphs could also bestow mercies and benefactions on their subjects, and this would help win their loyalty—or, put another way, sap their will to revolt. And by petitioning the caliph about the injustices that their local officials had inflicted on them, subjects kept the caliph apprised of recalcitrant, rogue, or corrupt appointees whom he could then remind that they served at his pleasure and sack, punish, or make pay staggeringly large fines to the fisc. Petitions served the ruler by keeping subjects happy and lower officials in check.

The political uses of the petition-and-response procedure was not new to the Fatimids. The innovation that they brought to it was to redesign the petition as a distinct type of document rather than the variant on the common letter it had been under the Abbasids. Requiring official petition writers to draw up petitions in a new and recognizable style also meant requiring them to enact their loyalty to the new state—a particularly useful thing to do when some of those scribes had worked for the Abbasids and you might suspect their loyalties. By writing new-style petitions, scribes physically enacted their loyalty to the new regime. They also listened to subjects as they recounted the kind of limit cases that would cause them to complain of mistreatment. The petition served, then, as a disciplining device for midlevel officials. Thus did the state ensure that it could rely on the existing administrative infrastructure it found when it entered in Egypt while prying officials loose from their loyalties to the old regime in Baghdad.

Part 2 establishes, then, that the diplomatic vocabulary of the Fatimids had roots in the past and in the East, and that the Fatimids put their own dynastic stamp on it, introducing clusters of features that would persist in Arabic state documents far longer than the Fatimids would persist as a dynasty. Throughout this part of the book, I’ve derived my descriptions of Fatimid documents from the documents themselves. The narrative sources tend to be partial, vague, or inconsistent when they describe Fatimid diplomatic norms, or else contradict the material evidence. But the documents follow a conspicuously consistent and discernible set of patterns. Fatimid scribal practice was loosely consistent, but I suspect it may not have been fully standardized. There were institutionalized patterns, norms, and ideals, but not yet an explicit set of rules or a guide to document production (the way there would be, for instance, in the Mamluk period). This hints at the possibility that Fatimid bureaucrats trained in apprenticeships rather than in a school or a scriptorium. It also underscores the importance of pulling information about the documents from the documents themselves.

Part 3 leaves the broad narrative of Arabic diplomatic style and zooms in on a single genre: the decree. My goal here is to map the ecology of the Fatimid decree—both its life cycle (from writing, copying, dissemination, and registration to archiving and dismemberment) and the habitat in which its life cycle unfolded.

Chapter 9 argues that the long, lavish vertical scrolls (rotuli) that Fatimid subjects reused as scrap paper must once have been in strikingly abundant supply. Here, I tell the story of a conflict between two groups of Jews in the 1030s from the point of view of the documents it produced. This single case yielded fifteen state documents, both petitions and decrees, of which two are extant; the other thirteen are phantoms. This is a rate of preservation of less than 15 percent, and it may suggest the rate at which Fatimid state documents survived more generally—the proportion of some putative whole that our extant evidence represents.

This same case study also shows that the letters of the heads of the Jewish community in Syria-Palestine and Egypt discussed Fatimid bureaucratic procedure with conspicuous precision. One of the letters that document the case is in Hebrew, the language that Jewish communal leaders used when they were writing to each other and trying to sound impressive and official. But Hebrew had, by the eleventh century, been a written, not spoken, language for a millennium. Its limited lexicon presented those who used it with the dilemma of how to express new ideas in very old words. Where would a Jewish leader look in search of a Hebrew word for decree? The Hebrew Bible had two good sources of bureaucratic vocabulary: the books of Esther and Ezra. Both happened to have been set at the Achaemenid court. Eleventh-century CE letters thus drew on fifth-century BCE administrative vocabulary, talking about Fatimid governors as though they were Achaemenid satraps. To read them is to behold the persistence of Near Eastern administrative habits. This may point to the long shadow that the Achaemenids cast over Middle Eastern imperial politics, an even longer shadow than the Abbasids (who themselves drew on Sasanian symbols and political philosophy). The precision with which Jews deployed this administrative vocabulary suggests that the Fatimid procedures were knowable, even by those who didn’t work in the dīwāns (the offices of government). This case study also helps explain why the Fatimids bothered to write up decrees in response to petitions in the first place.

Chapters 10, 11, and 12 explain how they wrote them up, taking us into the belly of the beast (or, if you prefer, the holy of holies): the Fatimid chancery. Chapter 10 introduces the genre of administrative manuals, asking why the work of some Fatimid-trained officials remained useful and survived in multiple later copies, and others barely made it to us at all. I am particularly interested in a description of the Fatimid chancery written by a man who worked there for nearly half a century, and for the last two decades as its director, Ibn al-Ṣayrafī (d. 542/1147). The work survived in a single copy, in the same manuscript as an Ayyubid fiscal manual—that of Ibn Mammātī—which is much more technical and difficult to read but was copied repeatedly for centuries. The fact that they now occupy a single codex may have something to tell us about the circumstances under which both were copied—and thus of the transmission of Fatimid administrative practices during the Ayyubid period.

Chapter 11 considers Ibn al-Ṣayrafī’s account of the chancery, attempting to reconstruct how officials drew up different types of decree for public dissemination and for local archiving. Chancery fragments survived in the geniza that can be dated to Ibn al-Ṣayrafī’s tenure as director. Comparing the claims he makes with the material record of original chancery decrees convinced me that he described the tasks and specializations of his appointees without informing us that more than one specialist filled each post. The Fatimid chancery was, then, a larger organization than he let on—with implications for the production rate of Fatimid state documents.

From the scale of the operation, I then move to a particular problem of logistics. In chapter 12, I ask which the scribes of the Fatimid chancery wrote first, the grand rotuli that went out into the territory or the compact bifolios they stored in their archives. The question may seem painfully demotic—as when John Pryor asked how many horses could fit on a seafaring ship at the time of the Crusades, the kind of question that, left unanswered, made it difficult to understand how the Frankish conquests of the Levant could have happened in the first place.³² Students of the past sometimes find it easier to think in abstract, long-term processes than to render history in real time and at the scale of human lives. The answer was surprising, at least to me: the compact bifolio versions of decrees came first; they were the originals that stabilized the text of decrees, while the grand rotuli were instruments of performance. The rotuli may have looked impressive, but they were fungible. Given that, it seems less paradoxical that so many of them got discarded and survived as reused fragments, if at all. Only the compact bifolio versions of decrees were bound in the archives; they were the originals, serving to stabilize the text of a decree before the chancery calligrapher copied out grand rotuli from them.

Chapter 13 leaves the chancery and follows its products into the provinces. The first stop is the government bureaus where officials summarized decrees, copied them into registers, and festooned them with signatures and registration marks. S. M. Stern left us a thorough excursus on the caliph’s signature (ʿalāma), but lower officials had their own signatures and deployed them to authenticate documents and register their contents in their own archives.³³ The system of authentication was complex but rational. It had firm procedures. It required storage and retrieval. Having studied this system, one would be hard pressed to doubt the robustness, complexity, and concrete reality of the Fatimid state and its documentary culture. But beyond merely existing, that documentary culture also hints at the resources and precedents on which the Fatimids drew and at the density of nodal points in the system they constructed.

Part 3, then, traces the supply end of the arc, establishing that Fatimid decrees left their traces in offices throughout the empire—that documents were registered in numerous dīwāns. Part 4 establishes that not every document was intended for the archives. In chapter 14, I circle back to the decree in its grand form—the long, wasteful vertical scroll. While these scrolls were created to impress lower officials and subjects, once they had served their purpose, they were rarely preserved. For those of us (like me) who fetishize original documents—especially very fancy-looking ones—the fungibility of the grand decree may seem hard to fathom. But not all written objects required archiving. On the contrary: a humble, compact avatar of the same text was more easily stored and retrieved. It is perhaps intuitive for historians to regard physically impressive historical evidence as somehow possessing a greater value for posterity, almost as though we were reliving our medieval subjects’ awe before the authority of the ruler. To do so is to miss something important: documentary culture and archiving practices. Even though the public decrees were grand and might seem, to us, worthy of preservation by sheer dint of their grandeur, in their own time and place, they were fungible because they were instruments of performance.

And so they entered the supply chain once more, only this time as scrap paper.