State document: T-S Misc.22.233

Description

Fiscal account recording the revenue of wheat, barley and broadbeans produced in five villages of the Gharbiyya province (Basūṭ Nahīsah, Maḥallat Bū l-Haytam, Nawāj, Damshīt, and Minyat Bū l-ʿAṭāf) in the kharajī year 562 and assigned to the military unit of the emir Abū Manṣūr ʿAlī b. ʿAlī al-ʿĀḍidī al-Nāṣirī. In its present state, the account consists of a single vertical bifolio (a format typically used in Fatimid accounting), which now contains only the details of the production of the village of Basūṭ Nahīsah. Originally, however, the account was also meant to contain details of the production of the other four villages, which implies either that a part of the account is missing or that the account was left unfinished. If, as in the case of the village of Basūṭ Nahīsah, the details of the production of the other villages covered one side of a folio, we can assume that at least one other vertical bifolio is missing. In lines 17–19, the scribe was supposed to sum up and account for the whole agricultural production of the five villages after each new entry (min al-ghallāt: qamḥ, šaʿīr, fūl). The sum of the whole production would then have been converted into counted gold money and the number obtained would have been added in front of the entry min al-ʿayn (l. 16). He did not do so, which might indicate that the document was only a draft of an account that was never submitted to the authorities. Description: Naïm Vanthieghem and Luke Yarbrough, whose edition-in-progress will be made available in PGP once it's published. Reused for a Hebrew literary text.