Legal document: T-S Ar.42.174
Legal document T-S Ar.42.174Tags
Description
Bill of sale of a slave. In Arabic script. Location: Fustat. Dated: first decade of Ramaḍān 483 AH, which is October/November 1090 CE. Seller: Ḥanūn b. ʿAllūn, the Christian clerk (kātib) in the Dār al-Dībāj (‘residence of the viziers’). Buyer: ʿArūs b. Yosef, a wealthy cloth merchant, many of whose accounts and letters are preserved in the Geniza. The sale is for a Christian woman named Qiwām, who has smallpox scars on her back (though Khan read this as "she has a son," ابن جاري rather than اثر جدري ). Price: 21 dinars. There is a Judaeo-Arabic filing note on verso. (Information from CUDL, Khan, Aodeh, and Craig Perry.)
Translation: Khan, Geoffrey (in English)
T-S Ar.42.174 1r
Transcription
Translation
Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Recto
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In the name of God, the merciful and compassionate.
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Ḥanūn ibn ʿAlūn, the Christian clerk in the Dār al-Dībāj, states that: I have sold to the elder ʿArūs ibn Yūsuf, the Jew
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from Fusṭāṭ, a Christian slave girl and her son Qiwām and I have guaranteed to him that whenever any claim is made against him on account of the price, and nothing else,
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it will be incumbent on me to free him from this or to pay it for him from my money, she being a carob coloured slave girl with a dependent son, who is a slave boy;
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and (also states) that he has no complaint about her to me on account of a defect or anything else except his dispute with regard to the price. I have received
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from him the price, this being twenty-one dīnārs, except for the commission included in this sum. He has granted me a quittance from that and from any oath upon it or upon any part of it,
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from any other person, whether a relative or a stranger. He wrote with his own hand in the first ten days of the month of Ramaḍān in the year
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four-hundred and eighty-three. I called God, exalted is he, to be my witness concerning this. Judgement always belongs to God.
T-S Ar.42.174 1v
Verso
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The note for (the boy) Qiwām of the maid-servant from Ibn Zurʿa.
