Download or read book The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt written by Rebecca J. W. Jefferson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cairo Genizah is considered one of the world's greatest Hebrew manuscript treasures. Yet the story of how over a quarter of a million fragments hidden in Egypt were discovered and distributed around the world, before becoming collectively known as “The Cairo Genizah,” is far more convoluted and compelling than previously told. The full story involves an international cast of scholars, librarians, archaeologists, excavators, collectors, dealers and agents, operating from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and all acting with varying motivations and intentions in a race for the spoils. Basing her research on a wealth of archival materials, Jefferson reconstructs how these protagonists used their various networks to create key alliances, or to blaze lone trails, each one on a quest to recover ancient manuscripts. Following in their footsteps, she takes the reader on a journey down into ancient caves and tombs, under medieval rubbish mounds, into hidden attic rooms, vaults, basements and wells, along labyrinthine souks, and behind the doors of private clubs and cloistered colleges. Along the way, the reader will also learn about the importance of establishing manuscript provenance and authenticity, and the impact to our understanding of the past when either factor is in doubt.
Download or read book The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt written by Rebecca Jefferson and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The 'discovery' the Cairo Genizah has transformed Judaic Studies and our understanding of the Medieval Middle East more broadly. However, the complete story of how over a quarter of a million Hebrew manuscript fragments were discovered in 19th century Egypt and reassembled in collections around the world is far more convoluted and compelling than previously told. A little-known, forgotten or ignored cast of scholars, librarians, archaeologists, excavators, collectors, dealers and agents, all acting with varying motivations and intentions, utilized hidden networks and created alliances to find, disperse and redistribute these materials. Based on a wealth of archival materials, this book will take the reader on barge boats along the Nile, down into ancient caves and tombs, under medieval rubbish mounds, into hidden attic rooms and basements, along labyrinthine souks, and behind the doors of private club rooms, cloistered colleges and enemy alien internment camps. The journey will prove that provenance matters and that inaccurate, incomplete or simply untrue attributions have serious implications for scholarship. Readers will learn new information about the history of the Cairo Genizah; they will learn more about the Egyptian antiquities trade in the 19th and 20th century; they will gain further insights into late 19th and early 20th century manuscript collecting and archive building; and they will read about the importance of provenance research and the effect on scholarship when provenance is misleading or simply unknown."--
Download or read book The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt written by Rebecca J. W. Jefferson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-01-27 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cairo Genizah is considered one of the world's greatest Hebrew manuscript treasures. Yet the story of how over a quarter of a million fragments hidden in Egypt were discovered and distributed around the world, before becoming collectively known as “The Cairo Genizah,” is far more convoluted and compelling than previously told. The full story involves an international cast of scholars, librarians, archaeologists, excavators, collectors, dealers and agents, operating from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, and all acting with varying motivations and intentions in a race for the spoils. Basing her research on a wealth of archival materials, Jefferson reconstructs how these protagonists used their various networks to create key alliances, or to blaze lone trails, each one on a quest to recover ancient manuscripts. Following in their footsteps, she takes the reader on a journey down into ancient caves and tombs, under medieval rubbish mounds, into hidden attic rooms, vaults, basements and wells, along labyrinthine souks, and behind the doors of private clubs and cloistered colleges. Along the way, the reader will also learn about the importance of establishing manuscript provenance and authenticity, and the impact to our understanding of the past when either factor is in doubt.
Download or read book Sacred Trash written by Adina Hoffman and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST WINNER OF THE 2012 AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION’S SOPHIE BRODY AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN JEWISH LITERATURE Sacred Trash tells the remarkable story of the Cairo Geniza—a synagogue repository for worn-out texts that turned out to contain the most vital cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. This tale of buried communal treasure weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other modern heroes responsible for the collection’s rescue with explorations of the medieval documents themselves—letters and poems, wills and marriage contracts, Bibles, money orders, fiery dissenting religious tracts, fashion-conscious trousseaux lists, prescriptions, petitions, and mysterious magical charms. Presenting a panoramic view of almost a thousand years of vibrant Mediterranean Judaism, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole bring contemporary readers into the heart of this little-known trove, whose contents have rightly been dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls.” Part biography, part meditation on the supreme value the Jewish people has long placed in the written word, Sacred Trash is above all a gripping tale of adventure and redemption. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
Download or read book Sacred Treasure The Cairo Genizah written by Rabbi Mark S. Glickman and published by Jewish Lights Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Indiana Jones meets The Da Vinci Code in an old Egyptian synagogue--the amazing story of one of the most important discoveries in modern religious scholarship. In 1896, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, and there found the largest treasure trove of medieval and early manuscripts ever discovered. He had entered the synagogue's genizah--its repository for damaged and destroyed Jewish texts--which held nearly 300,000 individual documents, many of which were over 1,000 years old. Considered among the most important discoveries in modern religious history, its contents contained early copies of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, early manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, and other sacred literature. The importance of the genizah's contents rivals that of the Rosetta Stone, and by virtue of its sheer mass alone, it will continue to command our attention indefinitely. This is the first accessible, comprehensive account of this astounding discovery. It will delight you with its fascinating adventure story--why this enormous collection was amassed, how it was discovered and the many lessons to be found in its contents. And it will show you how Schechter's find, though still being "unpacked" today, forever transformed our knowledge of the Jewish past, Muslim history and much more.
Download or read book The Jewish Calendar Controversy of 921 2 CE written by Sacha Stern and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-09-02 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 921/2, the Jews of Palestine and Babylonia disagreed about the calendar, and celebrated their festivals, through two years, on different dates. Sacha Stern re-edits the texts from the Cairo Genizah, contributes new discoveries, and revises entirely the history of the controversy.
Download or read book India Traders of the Middle Ages written by Shelomo Dov Goitein and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008 with total page 949 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The annotated and translated letters of 11th-12th century traders of the Jewish Indian Ocean, found in the Cairo Geniza, provide fascinating information on commerce between the Far East, Yemen and the Mediterranean, medieval material, social, and spiritual civilization among Jews and Arabs, and Judeo-Arabic.
Download or read book A Critical Edition of the Hebrew Manuscripts of Ben Sira written by Frédérique Michèle Rey and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-08-21 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Rey and Reymond offer a new critical edition of all the Hebrew manuscripts of Ben Sira from the Cairo Genizah and Dead Sea Scrolls (including the so-called "Rhyming" Paraphrase). Manuscripts are presented independently to preserve their unique qualities and to emphasize the text’s pluriformity. Readers will discover numerous new readings and restorations, explained in detailed notes, that illustrate Ben Sira’s complex textual composition. French and English translations together with a philological commentary help elucidate the sometimes obscure sense of the Hebrew. This edition will form the foundation for future work on the book of Ben Sira.
Download or read book The Ossetes written by Richard Foltz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Ossetes, a small nation inhabiting two adjacent states in the central Caucasus, are the last remaining linguistic and cultural descendants of the ancient nomadic Scythians who dominated the Eurasian steppe from the Balkans to Mongolia for well over one thousand years. A nominally Christian nation speaking a language distantly related to Persian, the Ossetes have inherited much of the culture of the medieval Alans who brought equestrian culture to Europe. They have preserved a rich oral literature through the epic of the Narts, a body of heroic legends that shares much in common with the Persian Book of Kings and other works of Indo-European mythology. This is the first book devoted to the little-known history and culture of the Ossetes to appear in any Western language. Charting Ossetian history from Antiquity to today, it will be a vital contribution to the fields of Iranian, Caucasian, Post-Soviet and Indo-European Studies.
Download or read book The Nile Delta written by Katherine Blouin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-02-29 with total page 675 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tells fascinating stories from across the c.7000-year history of the Nile Delta from the Predynastic period to the twentieth century.
Download or read book Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean According to the Cairo Genizah written by Efrayim Lev and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors provide a new insight to the practice of medical care in the medieval world. They examine the medicinal prescriptions and references to materia medica of the Cairo Genizah by combining the approaches of ethnobotany and history of medicine.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Judaism Volume 2 The Hellenistic Age written by William David Davies and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 766 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vol. 4 covers the late Roman period to the rise of Islam. Focuses especially on the growth and development of rabbinic Judaism and of the major classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, Jerusalem Talmud, Babylonian Talmud and various Midrashic collections.
Download or read book The Antiquities Trade in Egypt 1880 1930 written by Fredrik Hagen and published by Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. This book was released on 2016 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The vast collections of Egyptian objects on display in Western museums attract millions of visitors every year, and they reinforce a cultural fascination for this ancient civilisation that has been a feature of European intellectual history since Roman times. This book tells the story of how these objects came to be here. The book presents the first in-depth analysis of this market during its golden age in Egypt in the late 19th and early 20th Century. It is primarily based on the archival material of the Danish Egyptologist H. O. Lange (1863-1943) who, during two prolonged stays in Egypt (1899/1900 and 1929/1930), bought objects on behalf of Danish museums. The travel diaries, and the accompanying photographs, are complemented by a wide range of other sources, including contemporary travel guides and various travel memoirs, which together paint an extraordinarily detailed picture of the extensive antiquities trade. The book looks at the laws governing trade and export, both in theory and practice, and the changes over time. The practicalities of the trade are described: its seasons, the networks of supply, the various methods available for acquiring antiquities, and the subsequent routes of transmission of objects, as well as the different types of dealers operating in Egypt. The geographical distribution of dealers is mapped, and the role of the Egyptian state as a dealer is investigated, both through official sale rooms, and as a seller and exporter of more or less complete tomb-chapels. The final part of the book contains a list, with short biographies, of over 250 dealers active in Egypt from the 1880s until the abolishment of the trade in 1983. Most of them are described here in detail for the first time. The book will be of interest to archaeologists, Egyptologists, papyrologists, museum curators, and historians of science, and is a useful starting point for anyone wishing to understand how the great Western collections of Egyptian antiquities were formed.
Download or read book The Last Watchman of Old Cairo written by Michael David Lukas and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this “wonderfully rich” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel from the author of the internationally bestselling The Oracle of Stamboul, a young man journeys from California to Cairo to unravel centuries-old family secrets. “This book is a joy.”—Rabih Alameddine, author of the National Book Award finalist An Unnecessary Woman WINNER OF: THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION’S SOPHIE BRODY AWARD • THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD IN FICTION • THE SAMI ROHR PRIZE FOR JEWISH LITERATURE • Named One of the Ten Best Books of the Year by the BBC • Longlisted for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Fiction Prize • A Penguin Random House International One World, One Book Selection • Honorable Mention for the Middle East Book Award Joseph, a literature student at Berkeley, is the son of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father. One day, a mysterious package arrives on his doorstep, pulling him into a mesmerizing adventure to uncover the centuries-old history that binds the two sides of his family. From the storied Ibn Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, where generations of his family served as watchmen, to the lives of British twin sisters Agnes and Margaret, who in 1897 leave Cambridge on a mission to rescue sacred texts that have begun to disappear from the synagogue, this tightly woven multigenerational tale illuminates the tensions that have torn communities apart and the unlikely forces that attempt to bridge that divide. Moving and richly textured, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo is a poignant portrait of the intricate relationship between fathers and sons, and an unforgettable testament to the stories we inherit and the places we are from. Praise for The Last Watchman of Old Cairo “A beautiful, richly textured novel, ambitious and delicately crafted, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo is both a coming-of-age story and a family history, a wide-ranging book about fathers and sons, religion, magic, love, and the essence of storytelling. This book is a joy.”—Rabih Alameddine, author of the National Book Award finalist An Unnecessary Woman “Lyrical, compassionate and illuminating.”—BBC “Michael David Lukas has given us an elegiac novel of Cairo—Old Cairo and modern Cairo. Lukas’s greatest flair is in capturing the essence of that beautiful, haunted, shabby, beleaguered yet still utterly sublime Middle Eastern city.”—Lucette Lagnado, author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit and The Arrogant Years “Brilliant.”—The Jerusalem Post
Download or read book The Age of the Parthians written by Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-03-24 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Parthians are a fascinating but little-known ancient civilization. In the mid-third century BCE a bold and ambitious leader called Arshak challenged Hellenic rule and led his armies to victory. The dynasty which he founded ruled over what became a mighty empire and restored the glory of Iran following the region's conquest by Alexander the Great. This imperial eastern superpower, which lasted for 400 years and stretched from the Hindu Kush to Mesopotamia, withstand the might of Rome for centuries. The Parthians were nomadic horse-warriors who left few written records, concentrating rather on a rich oral and storytelling tradition. What knowledge we have of this remarkable people derives primarily from their coinage, which mixed Hellenism with Persian influences. In this book, distinguished scholars examine - from a variety of perspectives - the origins of the Parthians, their history, religion and culture, as well as perceptions of their empire through the lens of both imperial Rome and China.
Download or read book Babylon written by Michael Seymour and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-29 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Babylon: for eons its very name has been a byword for luxury and wickedness. 'By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept', wrote the psalmist, 'as we remembered Zion'. One of the greatest cities of the ancient world, Babylon has been eclipsed by its own sinful reputation. For two thousand years the real, physical metropolis lay buried while another, ghostly city lived on, engorged on accounts of its own destruction. More recently the site of Babylon has been the centre of major excavation: yet the spectacular results of this work have done little displace the many other fascinating ways in which the city has endured and reinvented itself in culture. Saddam Hussein, for one, notoriously exploited the Babylonian myth to associate himself and his regime with its glorious past. Why has Babylon so creatively fired the human imagination, with results both good and ill? Why has it been so enthralling to so many, and for so long? In exploring answers, Michael Seymour' s book ranges extensively over space and time and embraces art, archaeology, history and literature. From Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar, via Strabo and Diodorus, to the Book of Revelation, Brueghel, Rembrandt, Voltaire, William Blake and modern interpreters like Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino and Gore Vidal, the author brings to light a carnival of disparate sources dominated by the powerful and intoxicating idea of depravity. Yet captivating as this dark mythology was and has continued to be, at its root lies a remarkable and sophisticated imperial civilization whose complex state-building, law- making and religion dominated Mesopotamia and beyond for millennia, before its incorporation into the still wider empire of the Achaemenid kings.
Download or read book Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt written by Najat Abdulhaq and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the years following Nasser's rise to power, the demographic landscape and the economy of Egypt underwent a profound change. While these shifts have mostly been discussed in the light of postcolonial studies and the nationalization policies in the wider region, Najat Abdullhaq instead focuses on the role that these minorities had in the economy of pre-Nasser Egypt. With rigorous analysis of the types of companies that were set up by Jewish and Greek communities residing in Egypt, Abdullhaq draws out the changes which were occurring in the political and social sphere of the time. Jewish and Greek Communities in Egypt offers close analysis of those which can be described as 'innovative entrepreneurs, ' delineating the networks that existed between these businessmen and women. In doing so, the book also looks to the broader relationships and connections that were cultivated between Egyptian Greeks, Egyptian Jews and wider society. Additionally, Abdullhaq analyses how alterations in the political structures and law in the wake of World War II--including the rise of the Free Officers movements and the subsequent progressive nationalization of the Egyptian economy, and with it the curtailment of the private sector--affected the country's minorities"--
