Tue 28 November 2017 — 18:00 – 19:30 GMT
Several years ago, a trove of manuscripts was discovered in central Afghanistan, part of which explicitly dated to the early 5th/11th century and to the several decades before the Mongol invasion of Iran (early 7th/13th century).
This trove is quite diverse and contains texts of different genres (legal documents, letters, ledgers, poetry, prose, exegesis, etc.) written in six languages (Persian, Judeo-Persian, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic).
Despite the range in genre, date and language, it seems that most of these texts originate in the Bāmiyān valley, making them a unique source for the history of this area and its adjacent regions during the pre-Mongol period.
In the talk, Ofir Haim will offer an overview of the different kinds of documents. A special emphasis will be given to the documentary material written in Persian and in Judeo-Persian, which sheds light on the economic activity of the inhabitants of the Bāmiyān valley, as well as on the administrative norms and practices of its ruling powers. Speaker Ofir Haim is a doctoral candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in the history and culture of Jews in early Islamic Iran.
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Ismailimail 