قائمة/جدول: ENA 2727. 4a

الوصف

"Notes on the birth of a son, dating: 1129 or 1130. Written in calligraphic script on a special piece of paper. A space of about eight lines is left blank between the two notes. . . The happy father was Abī ʿAlī Yeḥezqel b. Netanʾel Ibn al-Dimyāṭī, the brother of the scholarly India trader Ḥalfōn b. Nethanel. Ḥalfōn was a bachelor and took his nephew Abū l-Fakhr, the boy listed above, into his business. Since that happened in the 1140s, the date of the first note written above must have been 1129 or 1130, for only in those two years did the Muslim and Jewish months mentioned coincide. Abū l-Fakhr probably was named after his maternal grandfather; it is very likely that “Lady Overcoming” had stipulated this at her marriage. . .The erratic way in which these notes were written explains perhaps why so few of them have survived." (Information from Goitein, Med. Soc., III, 230–31, 475 fn. 47.) It is also quite likely that these two notes describe two different births. The top note describes the birth of Abū l-Fakhr to Abū ʿAlī Ibn al-Dimyāṭī on Thursday morning the 15th of Ḥeshvan/Dhū l-Qaʿda. The bottom note reports on the arrival of the "appearance" (labor? or just showing the pregnancy? istiqbāl al-ẓahr) of Sitt Ghalb in the middle of Shawwāl/Ṭevet and her oath that if she gives birth to a male child who survives to be circumcised, she will give a qinṭār of bread and a sheep for charity and will name the boy after her late father Abū Saʿd (thus it is unlikely that this describes the birth of Abū l-Fakhr).