Next week, the Caliphal Finances team will welcome Matthew Gordon and Eugénie Rébillard to discuss their respective research and share the Caliphal Finances team’s recent work, focusing in particular on the second half of the ninth century. To prepare for this, I (PostDoc Noëmie Lucas) have been focusing on this period in my reconstruction of the list of fiscal officials in Egypt. This blog mentions one of these officials, recorded only in documents (as far as I am aware), and addresses some issues relating to the reading of papyrus that collaboration with PostDoc Eline Scheerlinck helped resolve!
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“It is often assumed that the Abbasid fiscal system was centralized and that a large portion of regional revenues were sent to the capital.” This hypothesis is explored in our project, where I (Noëmie Lucas) trace how provincial revenue was moved, as evidenced in the literary corpus. In this blog post, I provide an example from the corpus and elaborate on the type of information we can gather.
Recently, our postdoctoral researcher, Noëmie Lucas, spent a few days in Paris for research, visiting the BULAC library and meeting with colleagues. Every researcher knows how isolating research can be—endless days in libraries sifting through sources, archives, and books, or hours spent staring at a computer screen reading and writing. Fortunately, funded projects, like those supported by the ERC, enable us to work as part of a team, sharing thoughts, doubts, and questions during daily or weekly group meetings. Moreover, these grants allow us to travel, meet fellow scholars, and access resources unavailable at our home institutions.
As part of my research on Abbasid fiscal history and historiography, I examine fiscal-related narratives to understand how they inform us about fiscal practices and its history. This blog post explores one of these narrative units, known as akhbār (singular: khabar), and investigates how a better understanding of its making can impact our knowledge of fiscal history.
We would like to shine a light on one financial director (ṣāḥib al-kharāj) of Egypt during the Abbasid period who is known to us from various sources. An overall aim of the Caliphal Finances project is to study all the actors involved in fiscal collection from the taxpayer to the caliph, including the participation of local administrators and elites in the shaping of fiscal policies. We are particularly interested in the fiscal administrative hierarchy. Noëmie Lucas (WP4 Making the Link: Fiscal Practice and the Literary Corpus) is working on gaining a clearer view of the upper-level administrators who are better documented in the literary corpus than the local ones.
The sixteenth Conference of the School of Abbasid Studies (SAS) took place in Venice from July 9th to 13th. I (Noëmie Lucas) was among the participants. I presented my research on fiscal-related narratives with a focus on the case study of ʿUmar b. Mihrān.
On Monday, July 1st, Noëmie Lucas participated in the 2024 International Medieval Congress (IMC) held in Leeds, presenting her research on fiscal revolts in a double panel organized by the SCORE team. She also chaired the second panel, contributing to a highly productive afternoon of presentations and discussions on revolts and rebellions in the Islamic world and their connection to crises.
The University of Edinburgh hosted the 8th International Conference of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean (SMM) from June 24 to 27, 2024. The conference theme was “Being Human: Rhythms, Actions, Interactions in the Medieval Mediterranean.”
From May 26 to 28, the Caliphal Finances team had the pleasure of hosting Cecilia Palombo, Assistant Professor of Early Islamic History at the University of Chicago.
