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Traces of Ibn Ṭawq

Today brought an exciting find. Boris Liebrenz had recently told me he found a reader note by Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq. That is already exciting when a person so elusive is concerned. But this is actually better, and I could/should have found this years ago. Yāsīn Muḥammad al-Sawwās’ (1987) catalogue of those manuscripts held in the Syrian National Library today but having once belonged to the holdings of the Abū ʿUmar or ʿUmariyya Madrasa in the suburb Ṣāliḥiyya is a wonderful catalogue, giving information about ownership notes or attendees records (samāʿāt). Continue reading “Traces of Ibn Ṭawq”

Recent Publications: Dyntran Blog and Ottoman Studies 2 (Bonn University Press)

In the course of the last month, two publications of mine came out. The first is my contribution to the blog of the research cluster “Dynamics of Transmission” (DYNTRAN), in which I trace the development of a family network in 15th-/16th-century Damascus and try to show the differences between ‘family’ and those ‘dynasties’ that emerge in the biographical dictionaries of the time.

Dyntran title page
Fig. 1: Dyntran logo

Continue reading “Recent Publications: Dyntran Blog and Ottoman Studies 2 (Bonn University Press)”

Biographical Dictionaries I: Ibn Ṭūlūn’s Ghuraf al-ʿaliyya

Biographical dictionaries are at once one of our central sources for prosopographical data – not only on the Mamluk era – and a genre that is often work-intensive to explore. The authors tried to arrange the masses of data they accumulated on several hundreds to even thousands of individuals from the past and their own times as good as they could. Most often, they are arranged either chronologically (by year of death) or alphabetically, or in a combination of the two (divided into generations – ṭabaqāt). Continue reading “Biographical Dictionaries I: Ibn Ṭūlūn’s Ghuraf al-ʿaliyya”