Abraham's Luggage: A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World (Asian Connections) 1107173884, 9781107173880

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Abraham’s Luggage

From a single merchant’s list of baggage begins a history that explores the dynamic world of medieval Indian Ocean exchanges. This fresh and innovative perspective on Jewish merchant activity shows how this list was a component of broader trade connections that developed between the Islamic Mediterranean and South Asia in the Middle Ages. Drawing on a close reading of this unique twelfth century document, found in the Cairo Genizah and written in India by north African merchant Abraham Ben Yiju, Lambourn focuses on the domestic material culture and foods that structured the daily life of such India traders, on land and at sea. This is an exploration of the motivations and difficulties of maintaining homes away from home, and the compromises that inevitably ensued. Abraham’s Luggage demonstrates the potential for writing challenging new histories from the accidental survival of apparently ordinary ephemera. Elizabeth A. Lambourn is a historian of South Asia and the Indian Ocean world, specializing in cultural exchanges with the Middle East before 1500. She is Reader (Associate Professor) in South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at De Montfort University in the UK.

ASIAN CONNECTIONS Series editors Sunil Amrith, Harvard University Tim Harper, University of Cambridge Engseng Ho, Duke University Asian Connections is a major series of ambitious works that look beyond the traditional templates of area, regional or national studies to consider the trans regional phenomena which have connected and influenced various parts of Asia through time. The series will focus on empirically grounded work exploring circulations, connections, convergences and comparisons within and beyond Asia. Themes of particular interest include transport and communication, mercantile networks and trade, migration, religious connections, urban history, environmental history, oceanic history, the spread of language and ideas, and political alliances. The series aims to build new ways of understanding fundamental concepts, such as modernity, pluralism or capitalism, from the experience of Asian societies. It is hoped that this conceptual framework will facilitate connections across fields of knowledge and bridge historical perspectives with contemporary concerns.

Abraham’s Luggage A Social Life of Things in the Medieval Indian Ocean World Elizabeth A. Lambourn De Montfort University, Leicester

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314 321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06 04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107173880 DOI: 10.1017/9781316795453 © Elizabeth A. Lambourn 2018 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2018 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Lambourn, Elizabeth, 1966 author. Title: Abraham’s luggage : a social life of things in the medieval Indian ocean world / Elizabeth A. Lambourn, De Montfort University, Leicester. Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom : New York, NY, USA University Press, 2018. | Printing House : Cambridge University Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017061571| ISBN 9781107173880 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: India Commerce History To 1500. | Ben Yijū, Abraham, active 12th century. | Jewish merchants Middle East. | Commerce History Medieval, 500 1500. Classification: LCC HF3785 .L36 2018 | DDC 382.09182/4 dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017061571 ISBN 978 1 107 17388 0 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Archibald Petty “Uncle Archie” to me first showed me the world of things.

who

And for my husband Dominic who, having already shared me with Abraham Ben Yiju these past six years, will hopefully not begrudge me this dual dedication.

Contents

List of Figures List of Tables Acknowledgments Notes on Style and Transliteration List of Abbreviations

page viii ix x xiv xvi

1 Introduction: A List of Luggage from the Indian Ocean World 2 From Ifriqiya to Malibarat: Introducing Abraham Ben Yiju Part I A Mediterranean Society in Malibarat

1 37 65

3 Making Homes and Friends: On Shopping and Suhba ˙ ˙ 4 Making a Meal of It: On Food Cultures

67 104

5 A Jewish Home: On Ritual Foods

129

Part II A Mediterranean Society at Sea

161

6 The “Simple” Bare Necessities: On Water and Rice

165

7 “Things for the Cabin”: Inhabiting the Ocean

189

8 The Balanced Body: On Vinegar and Other Sour Foods

219

9 From Malibarat to Misr and Beyond – Afterlives

240

Appendix Abraham’s List of Luggage (India Book III, 24) Select Bibliography Index

252 268 288

vii

Figures

1a Diagram summarizing the ductus of Abraham’s luggage list, T-S NS 324.114 (verso). Design by John Crawford. page 4 1b Photograph of T-S NS 324.114 (verso) in Cambridge University Library. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 5 2a Diagram summarizing the ductus of T-S NS 324.114 (recto). Design by John Crawford. 6 2b Photograph of T-S NS 324.114 (recto). Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 7 3 Map of maritime Eurasia. Design by Sebastian Ballard. 38 4 Map of northern Malibarat showing the principal port sites and rivers. Design by Sebastian Ballard. 51 5 Representation of a ship from the Maqamat (Assemblies) of alHariri, Iraq, 634 AH/1236–37. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Arabe 5847, fol. 248. 190 6 Double-page representation of the constellation al-Safına (Argo Navis), al-Sufi’s Kitab Suwar al-Kawakib al-Thabitah (The Book of the Fixed Stars, Illustrated), 400 AH/1009–10. The Bodleian Library, Oxford, Ms. Marsh 144, fols. 367–8. 200 7 Noah’s Ark, from the Jami c al-Tawarıkh (Universal History) of Rashid al-Din, Tabriz, Iran, 714 AH/1314–15. The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, MSS 727, fol. 45a (fol. 285a of the reconstructed manuscript). 209 8 Portable medicine chest. Dated to the later twelfth or first half of the thirteenth century and recovered in northern Afghanistan. The David Collection, Copenhagen, 89a–y/2003. Photograph courtesy of Pernille Klemp. 223

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Tables

1 Household items dispatched to Abraham in Malibarat at no charge. 2 Household items dispatched to Abraham in Malibarat and charged for.

page 71 82

ix

Acknowledgments

Beginnings are often difficult to pinpoint retrospectively, but the idea of writing about some aspect of what I now think of as the “Material Worlds of the India Book” goes back to a review I wrote in 2009 of India Traders of the Middle Ages for the British journal South Asian Studies. More than any other previous publication of India Book material it began to open up the material complexity and distinctiveness of the western Indian Ocean; I could not but be seduced. The idea for Abraham’s Luggage took more concrete form during the summer of 2011. The credit here goes to the Leverhulme Trust, whose award of a Major Research Fellowship spurred a fertile and exciting period of research even before the award formally began in October 2011. This book is one of many outputs generated during the two years of that fellowship but this is the first monograph to emerge from it and I cannot thank the Trustees of the Leverhulme Trust enough, nor the anonymous reviewers who supported my application, for giving me these years to think. They were blissful and busy. My Leverhulme award included funds for Research Assistants to revise translations of sources in languages other than Arabic and Persian. I am grateful to Sally Church for her verification and occasional revisions to the Chinese sources cited here, to Alastair Gornall for his work on the Sanskrit, to Daniel Davies and Philip Ackerman-Lieberman for initial work on Hebrew sources and to Ofer Livnat for coming on board as my research assistant in the final months of completing this manuscript. It has been a privilege to work with them all. Many people and institutions have played a part in this book since 2011. The Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University offered me a home for the duration of my Fellowship and in Green Library I found one of the best Humanities libraries I could have hoped for. Special thanks are due to the Abbasi Program’s Burçak Keskin-Kozat and to Mary Louise Munill of Stanford’s Interlibrary Services Information Center. Back in Leicester I am grateful to our own Interlibrary Loans staff and to DMU’s History Research Group for funding assistance for library visits beyond the city. x

Acknowledgments

xi

Working on the India Book material in depth has brought new challenges, particularly with regard to the Judaeo-Arabic in which the majority of documents are written. With no published coursebook for the study of medieval Judaeo-Arabic, its apprenticeship depends on the willingness of specialist scholars to share their knowledge. I have benefited during this time from long exchanges with Amir Ashur, whose intellectual generosity and huge patience in answering my many questions have made this book possible. The final edition of the Judaeo-Arabic and its Arabic transliteration presented in the Appendix are his work. Mordechai Akiva Friedman has been similarly encouraging and ever willing to answer questions and queries. It goes without saying that this book could not have been written without all his work organizing, and so often completing, the edition and translation of the India Book documents begun by S.D. Goitein. Working on T-S NS 324.114 has given me a small insight into the huge scale and complexity of that task and any expression of gratitude and admiration is bound to feel inadequate. These acknowledgments would not be complete without thanking the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library and its Director Dr. Ben Outhwaite for access to its collections. Nor should I forget Marigold Acland, then Commissioning Editor with Cambridge University Press, who first approached me about publishing with the press, and, of course, her successor Lucy Rhymer. I am grateful to both for the time they spent with me in discussions about what eventually became Abraham’s Luggage. During production my Content Manager Matt Sweeney and copy-editor Frances Brown were both a delight to work with and their attention to detail kept me on my toes. In India, Kesavan Veluthat has generously shared his deep knowledge of medieval south Indian history and facilitated introductions to other scholars. Chinnappa Gowda and Surendra Rao were exemplary guides during my visit to Mangalore in August 2013, and B.A. Viveka Rai untiringly answered my many questions about Tulu language and culture. I am grateful to Mangalore University for hosting me during this time and to its library staff and the staff of the History Department for their warm welcome and cooperation; and to Tukaram Poojary and his wife for opening their ethnographic collection, the Thulu Baduku Vasthu Sangrahalaya at Bantwal, to me and answering questions about many objects. During the course of researching and writing this book many scholars have answered questions, and read and fed back on draft chapters. There is no way to rank these contributions large and small, and I am equally grateful to everyone who has taken the time to interact with me. Thanks are due – in no order other than the alphabetical – to Philip Ackerman-

xii

Acknowledgments

Lieberman, Christina Anderson, Menashe Anzi, Amir Ashur, Sussan Babaie, Lucy Blue, Gerrit Bos, John Chaffee, Christine Chojnacki, John Cooper, Paul Craddock, Donald Davis Jr., Jean-Charles Ducène, Nahyan Fancy, Finbarr Barry Flood, Arnold E. Franklin, Mordechai Akiva Friedman, Dorian Fuller, Ophira Gamliel, Jessica Goldberg, Monica Green, Shireen Hamza, Anne Haour, J.D. Hill, Rub’a Kana’an, Derek Kennet, Sharon Kinoshita, Mahmood Kooriadathodi, Mike Laffan, Ephraim Lev, Paulina Lewicka, Sarah Longair, Roxani Margariti, Kathleen Morrison, Nawal Nasrallah, Annliese Nef, István Perczel, Craig Perry, Sebastian Prange, Jessie Ransley, Mariam RosserOwen, Axelle Rougeulle, St. John Simpson, Patricia Skinner, Sharada Srinivasan, Zvi Stampfer, Eric Staples, Carol Symes, Roberta Tomber, Éric Vallet, Marijke van der Veen, Philip Wagoner, Cheryl Ward, Stephanie Wynne-Jones and Zhao Bing. Colleagues on Monica Green’s MEDMED-L, the list for medieval medicine, generously advised and sent references. Sebastian Prange was kind enough to share final proofs of his forthcoming book Monsoon Islam. Lucy Greeves gave the manuscript a much-needed initial copyedit before submission. Among those already mentioned above I need to single out for particular thanks those who took the time to read whole chapters for me, and even the whole book. J.D. Hill read a very early iteration of what is now Abraham’s Luggage; I am similarly grateful to Cheryl Ward for reading what later became Chapters 6 and 7. Neither will probably recognize this book in its present form. Closer to the finish line I am indebted to Éric Vallet for detailed feedback on Chapters 1 and 2. Philip AckermanLieberman and Jessica Goldberg both responded to Chapter 3 while Mordechai A. Friedman was kind enough to read Chapter 5 and direct me to a fuller use of Abraham Maimuni’s responsa. Eric Staples made a thorough job of Chapters 6 and 7. Nahyan Fancy and Shireen Hamza wrested time to feed back on Chapter 8. I regret that there was in many cases no space to include the rich references they shared. Finally, I want to express a huge thank you to my long-time colleague Finbarr Barry Flood and to Mordechai Akiva Friedman for reading the whole manuscript before it went to press. As it is customary to say, any remaining omissions or errors are entirely my own. At De Montfort University my colleagues Ruth Jindal, Christine Jordan and Grahame Hudson have uncomplainingly helped to defend my research and writing time from the ever encroaching demands of teaching and administration. This book would not have been completed without their help. Lastly, Elizabeth Edwards, whom I first met at DMU, has been a constant support and friend during the writing of Abraham’s Luggage and her mentoring has been formative. Our conversations helped me

Acknowledgments

xiii

clarify different approaches but also spurred me not to give up on what sometimes felt like an unmanageably broad-ranging project. This book is dedicated to Archie Petty, the man singlehandedly responsible for introducing me to the study of material things when I was barely a teenager. Without the opportunities he gave me to handle Georgian silver or visit the Japanese galleries at the V&A there is no doubt in my mind that I would not have chosen the career path I did and so, in many ways, this book is all his “fault.” He is not alive to read Abraham’s Luggage but as a Cambridge man and an alumnus of St John’s, the British “home” of genizah studies, I like to think that he would have been more than enthusiastic about its subject matter. I cannot finish my acknowledgments without thanking my husband Dominic Fried-Booth for unstinting and unquestioning love and support (and not a little bafflement) before, during and after the writing of this book. No one will be happier to see it finally published than him, and only he knows how much he has contributed, and how.

Notes on Style and Transliteration

I have kept diacriticals to a minimum, reserving them for transliterated passages and specialist terms. This book broadly follows the International Journal of Middle East Studies guidelines on translation and transliteration, though with a British twist. As Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is not widely available in the UK I have substituted the Oxford English Dictionary Online. Non-English words that have now entered common British English (e.g. genizah, Torah, halaka, zakat) are spelled according to the OED and will not be singled out by either italics or diacriticals. As recommended by IJMES all placenames follow the modern English or most commonly used Romanized spelling. Although not geographical terms in current usage, for convenience I use Romanized Ifriqiya for the central North African area that includes Tunisia, and Malibarat, rather than malıbarat, to refer to the Malabar coast as this was the appellation used by the India traders. Personal names, titles, the names of organizations and titles of books and articles will not use diacritics but will otherwise follow IJMES transliteration and capitalization rules; they also preserve cayn and hamza. In a departure from IJMES guidelines, for convenience all specialist terms are made plural through the addition of “s.” All transliterated passages or titles are indicated in italics. Transliterated Arabic and Persian follow IJMES guidelines, Hebrew the guidelines of the Library of Congress (as recommended by IJMES), and Aramaic (extensively used in Jewish legal documents) likewise. A huge variety of transliteration systems exist for Indic languages and to simplify the matter in all cases here – principally for Sanskrit – I adopt the appropriate Library of Congress system while carrying across IJMES’s broader guidelines on what to transliterate and when. Chinese follows the Pinyin system. Regarding transliterations of the Judaeo-Arabic, there is no consensus on this and transliteration often involves correcting colloquial usage to more normative Arabic forms as well as a substantial amount of guesswork about the voweling of the Middle Arabic. Wherever possible I have followed the spellings used in S.D. Goitein and Mordechai xiv

Notes on Style and Transliteration

xv

A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden: Brill, 2008) or in other publications. I have relied for the main part on existing editions and translations but where I, or a research assistant, have translated a passage or revised an existing translation, this is indicated in the associated footnote. With the exception of T-S NS 324.114, the piece of paper at the heart of this book, the different genizah documents I rely on are cited not by their collection accession number but by the India Book number assigned by S.D. Goitein. The “New List” of India Book documents is published on pages 826–30 of India Traders of the Middle Ages. This system helps to differentiate different texts found on a single fragment, as is the case with T-S NS 324.114, and also simplifies the many instances in which documents have been reconstituted from multiple fragmentary copies, often held across different collections. Referencing follows Chicago Style as set out in The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). In accordance with Chicago Style recommendations, scriptural and classical references are cited in text or in footnotes, not in the final bibliography. As is current practice in Jewish Studies, I include among these classic texts the corpus of rabbinic literature (the Talmud, for example). Likewise, dictionary and encyclopedia entries are not listed individually in the bibliography but indicated in the footnotes with facts of publication omitted. Due to length restrictions, the final bibliography is a Select Bibliography only including those sources explicitly cited in the discussion. However, footnotes throughout the book gather wider background reading around different subjects. All dates are CE unless otherwise indicated.

Abbreviations

AH AM BCE BSOAS CE EALL ED EI2 EIr EJ EJIW IB JESHO NS OED Online

xvi

Anno Hegiræ, the Islamic calendrical system Anno Mundi, Jewish calendar era based on the year of creation Before Common Era Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies Common Era Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics Era of Documents, the Seleucid calendar used by medieval Jews Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn Encyclopaedia Iranica Encyclopaedia Judaica Encyclopaedia of Jews in the Islamic World India Book Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient New Series Oxford English Dictionary Online

1

Introduction: A List of Luggage from the Indian Ocean World

(Line 1)1 In the name of the Lord. Specification of the number of baskets and (2) gunnies and bottles and fa¯tiya chests, (3) and remaining luggage. These include: one large (4) gunny of rice and one small gunny ¯ [. . .]. (5) And also, for the travel provisions: four small (6) gunnies of RA and two baskets of rice and two baskets of hard wheat and one basket (7) of coconuts and one basket of flour and 3 fa¯tiya chests of L[. . .] (8) and one fa¯tiya chest of da¯dhı¯ and one fa¯tiya chest of copper and iron, (9) and one fa¯tiya chest of the fishermen’s gear. One cloth with iron (10) and other items, and one qartala basket of bread and 5 marı¯nas of vinegar ˙ fa¯tiya chest of locks and one basket of locks (11) and also one bamboo (12) and one meal carrier, separate in straw, and one table jug, (13) separate in straw, and one basket of worked brass (14) and another basket of worked brass and another basket (15) of worked brass, large, and 3 small baskets of (16) iron and stuff, and one salla basket of glassware and two fa¯tiya chests (17) of glassware and two stone ta¯jins in hay and two stone (18) pots and one salla basket of china and ˙4 ratliya jars filled with (19) oil and humuda and one bottle of wine and ̄ ˙ one˙ trap (20) for rats and six bottles of˙ oil and one fa¯tiya chest of firewood (21) and six empty bottles and one bottle of soap (22) and two barniyya jars of citrus and ginger, and 5 waterskins of mango (23) and two waterskins of hū t fish and two waterskins of citrus and 5 empty ˙ salla basket of bread and one large tabaq and 3 waterskins (24) and the ladles and one large (25) ladle. And of the qasca bowls: two˙ qascas and ˙ And also one large (26) qasca and one new qasca and˙ two old qascas. (27) ˙ ˙ ˙ of the fa¯tiya chests: 4 fa¯tiya chests of textiles. (28) And two barniyya jars of clarified butter and 4 legs for a bed and two old (29) qascas and 4 new ˙ door. (31) qascas and 3 bundles of pots (30) and one undecorated cabin ˙ c And with the na¯khuda¯ Abu l Sh[..] FYDM: one mihlab bowl (32) and ˙ the cabin and 3 one MWJH and 4 qasca bowls (33) [. . .] planks for ˙ C¯ ¯ N and one plank for a kursı¯ (35) [.] and planks for beds (34) and 4 IDA six [. . .]CYA with other stuff. (36) And of the copper: one table jug and 1

In this chapter the English translation is formatted as a sequential list along the lines of the original document. For this and other layout and translation decisions see the introduction to the Appendix.

1

2

Abraham’s Luggage one ta¯jin and one basin and ewer (37) and 3 ta¯lam platters. 20 carpets and ˙one iron lamp (38) and two strips of leather and its C[..]L, the ¯ SI¯ and fara¯sila2 [. . .] (39) and one coconut scraper and seven [..]A ¯ C, with the na¯khuda¯ Abu l Faraj. one mı¯za¯r wrap [. . .], [. . . . . .] six [. . .]A

So runs a list of luggage written in Judaeo-Arabic, that is Arabic written in Hebrew characters, penned on two sides of a small, narrow slip of paper. Like other informal, utilitarian lists of its kind it runs sequentially across the page, using every millimeter of paper to enumerate over 173 different items, from items listed singly such as a “trap for rats,” to containers of multiple uncounted things such as a “basket of worked brass.” The use at one point of the term zad, travel provisions, clarifies that the writer had packed at least some of these items for that purpose, while several references to furnishings for a balıj (billıj) or ship’s cabin and to certain nakhudas or ship owners involved in the transport of this luggage leave no doubt that at least part of this journey was to take place by sea. The terms themselves belong to a maritime patois distinctive of the western Indian Ocean and their use here anchors this luggage firmly within that area.3 The presence of large quantities of rice among the provisions and other items such as “one basket of coconuts” and “5 waterskins of mango” confirm this general location, rather than a Mediterranean context. But it is the abundant use of fatiya chests for packing – no less than thirteen in all – as well as the more discreet presence of “3 talam platters” that point more precisely to the assembly of this luggage in India, somewhere on the coasts of modern-day Kerala and Karnataka where these terms (and the objects they designate) have a long history of usage.4 Initially the list appears disorganized and inconsistent, quite against the order we assume lists to impose: objects or provisions are not grouped together in any clear way and while some items are simply recorded as part of larger bundles or chests, others are described individually in minute detail. Side by side we find items as varied as one qartala basket of bread, ˙ four fatiya chests of textiles, five empty waterskins, one undecorated cabin door, one bottle of wine and no fewer than sixteen qasca bowls – new ones, ˙ 2 3

4

A measure of weight; see the Appendix, English translation, n.60. Both terms are loanwords into Judaeo Arabic and commonly found before this in Arabic and Persian language sources from the Indian Ocean area. On the reading of balı¯j/billı¯j see English translation in the Appendix, n.49; for na¯khuda¯ see S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden and Boston: E.J. Brill, 2008), 121 56. Other terms can be traced to several of the Indic languages active on the northern coast of Malibarat in the medieval period, notably to Tulu, the language of the Tulunad region around Mangalore, and to Malayalam, the language of present day Kerala. For the vocalization of these terms see Appendix, English translation, nn.5 and 57.

Introduction

3

old ones, small ones, big ones. No doubt this list describes the very real mountain of luggage and provisions that faced its writer. A closer reading nevertheless reveals a determined logic and fitness for purpose. As its heading promises – “specification of the number of baskets and gunnies and bottles and fatiya chests, and remaining luggage” (macrifa cadad al-zanabil wa-l-jawanı wa-l-qananı wa-l-fawatı wa baqaya al-dabash) – this list is a specification and enumeration of its author’s luggage. The various containers are precisely described: they are “large,” “small,” of “bamboo,” or identified by a range of specific appellations such as zanbıl, salla or qartala for baskets, marına or barniyya for other containers, and they are ˙ always counted. Contents also matter: chests, gunnies, baskets, bottles and cloths either contain some “thing” or are specified to be empty. Foodstuffs are itemized in particular detail, whereas textiles and some metal items are bulk listed; there are no containers of generic “provisions” or “food.” Cabin furnishings are also given particular attention: an undecorated door and planks for the cabin, legs and planks for a bed. A few key utensils such as ladles and the qasca bowls appear to have traveled loose among the luggage. The luggage is˙ also subdivided into three parts, the last two consignments entrusted to a different ship owner or nakhuda for transportation along at least part of the route. The list is a checklist of sorts, allowing its writer to visually track and count this mountain of luggage during the course of a journey, and to verify that key provisions were present. But if there is method to this list and even a formal heading, this is a less than formal document. If we look beyond this neatly typeset English translation to the very material qualities of the document itself (Figs. 1a and b, 2a and b), we see that the list is written on the reverse and in the blank spaces of an earlier document.5 This small strip of paper is only some 28.3 cm long by 10.4 cm wide, and it still bears the creases from where the original memorandum was folded over and over into a small and easily transportable flat “packet,” barely 3 cm high by 9.7 cm wide. In both size and format it is typical of the common correspondence of the period, allowing the easy transportation of sometimes a hundred letters about one’s person.6 The list is written, in effect, on scrap paper; and although the 5

6

This memorandum is only summarized in the English edition but a full transcription of the Judaeo Arabic, with Hebrew translation, is available in S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, Abraham Ben Yiju India Trader and Manufacturer: India Book III, Cairo Geniza Documents (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010), 104 5 (IB III, 8). The best reference I know is cited in Nadia Zeldes and Miriam Frenkel, “The Sicilian Trade. Jewish Merchants in the Mediterranean in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Gli Ebrei in Sicilia dal tardoantico al medioevo: studi in onore di Mons. Benedetto Rocco, edited by Nicolò Bucaria (Palermo: Flaccovio Edittore, 1998), 250, mentioning 103 letters seized from a rabbi traveling in the Mediterranean.

Introduction

5

Fig. 1b Photograph of T S NS 324.114 (verso) seen through its Melinex mounting in Cambridge University Library.

Introduction

Fig. 2b Photograph of T S NS 324.114 (recto).

7

8

Abraham’s Luggage

handwriting is clear it is by no means formal. The purposeful hand and lineation of the heading quickly give way to smaller letters and tighter lines as the writer attempts to contain this growing list within the blank spaces available. Failing in this, the last third of the list from Line 26 onwards jumps and somersaults between lines of older text, negotiating a place between the address and post scriptum of the earlier memorandum before overflowing into the empty margins on the other side of the sheet and ending in a barely legible, spidery scrawl. It is no accident that this is the section of the list with the greatest number of lacunae, and consequently tentative readings in the English edition (Lines 36–9). Several misspellings in the later half of the list add to this sense of hurry: jazaj for zajaj, “glasswares,” in Line 16, barınatayn for barniyyatayn, “two barniyya jars,” in Line 28, and milhab for mihlab, ˙ ˙ a type of wooden bowl, in Line 31.7 The materiality of the handwriting captures larger bodily movements too. While the firm, regularly inked ductus of the first part of the list indicates that its writer began writing against a hard surface of some sort – the medieval Middle East continued the writing postures of Antiquity, writing sitting on the ground and resting the writing surface on a wooden board or lawha with a pot of ink on the floor nearby – by the end of the list ˙ the scrawled and barely inked writing suggests they had abandoned this support for the palm of their hand or some other soft surface.8 Very probably the writer moved around the pile of luggage they recorded; they were certainly too far from the pot of ink, or too busy, to re-ink their pen. This is the “personal writing” described by Colette Sirat as writing produced when people are in “a familiar environment . . . writing for themselves” – in brief, the writing seen in “drafts, personal notes or friendly letters.”9 The luggage list is a note rather than a formal inventory, or perhaps a draft for a more formal document; the truth is we know little about port administration and paperwork in this part of the Indian coast before the early modern period. Fortunately for us, our writer did not (or could not) continue this list on a second sheet of paper, a fact that has ensured that it has survived in its entirety. Today, this piece of paper is known by the shelf-number T-S NS 324.114 and it lies, ironed flat and shrouded in protective Melinex, altogether inconspicuous among its 7 8

9

See discussion of these misspellings in the Appendix, Judaeo Arabic Transcription and Arabic Transliteration, nn.6, 11, 14 and 16. Colette Sirat, Writing as Handwork: A History of Handwriting in Mediterranean and Western Culture (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 409. Sloping, even “crescent” shaped lines in several documents suggest the use of a thigh or palm as a writing support, see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 622 (IB III, 15) and 764 (III, 49). Sirat, Writing as Handwork, 430 and contrasted with more self conscious “controlled writing.”

Introduction

9

neighbors in a large black folder in the Special Collections of Cambridge University Library. This “specification” (macrifa) does not name the owner of the luggage. Indeed, why would its writer think to include their name in their own list? Fortunately, when this document finally came to be examined in Cambridge in the 1950s the writer’s identity was immediately apparent to its cataloguer on palaeographic grounds. The Israeli scholar S.D. Goitein recognized the handwriting of Abraham Ben Yiju, a North African Jew who had traded between Aden and India’s Malabar coast during the 1130s and 1140s.10 Abraham and his fellow traders referred to the southwestern coast of India in the plural, as malıbarat, literally “the Malabars,” and this is the designation I retain here, anglicized as Malibarat, as it accurately conveys both the political complexity of this coast in the twelfth century as well as its cultural diversity.11 Abraham made two extended sojourns in Malibarat totaling twelve years in all, making a home there, marrying locally and fathering three children before eventually returning with his household, and his paperwork, first to the Yemen and then to Fustat (Old Cairo). It was here, in Fustat, that the luggage list was eventually deposited along with other documents in the genizah or ritual depository of the Ben Ezra synagogue.12 And it is from this Cairene genizah that, in 1897, the list made its last journey to Cambridge in England, part of a far larger shipment of fragments that were to make Cambridge University one of the world’s largest repositories of what is now simply referred to as “the Cairo Genizah.” Goitein’s cards and notes suggest that he only examined T-S NS 324.114 briefly in the course of his cataloguing. Even if documentary materials – those fragments made up of secular writings such as letters, contracts and court records, business accounts, or lists – only constitute a fraction of the approximately 330,000 fragments eventually extracted 10 11

12

On Abraham’s handwriting and other documents attributed to him on palaeographic grounds see discussion in Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 632. Ibid., 55. A plural form of the singular malı¯ba¯r or mulayba¯r, a term widely used in the medieval Arabophone world to refer to the southwestern coast of India. The term was used by Abraham Ben Yiju in a document closely associated with his arrival in India (see Chapter 2, n.2) and is found elsewhere in the India Book (ibid., 477, Line 36, IB II, 55), as well as in a late thirteenth century Rasulid document from the customs house at Aden where it even seems to be applied to the Coromandel coast. The haram al malı¯ba¯ra¯t, Holy ˙ Sanctuary of Malibarat, listed here appears to designate Mylapore; see Nur al Maca¯rif Arabic edition with French introduction by Muhammad cAbd al Rahim Jazim as Nur al Maca¯rif. Lumière de la connaissance: règles, lois et coutumes du Yémen sous le règne de Sultan Rasoulide al Muzaffar (Sanaa: Centre Français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales de Sanaa, 2003 5), vol. 1, 518. On practices of ritual deposition see Malachi Beit Arié, “‘Genizot’: Depositories of Consumed Books as Disposing Procedure in Jewish Society,” Scriptorium 50, no. 2 (1996), 407 14.

10

Abraham’s Luggage

from Cairene genizahs around this time, there may be as many as 30,000 such documentary fragments worldwide and at Cambridge the cataloguing is ongoing.13 Goitein identified on one side the memorandum of another India trader, Joseph b. Abraham, and on the other Abraham’s luggage list. Goitein appears to have had time only to read and transcribe the first side of the luggage list but it was enough for him to be able to identify it as a “detailed list in Ben Yiju’s hand of receptacles containing food and other commodities, as well as of certain objects taken with him (on a trip from India to the West).”14 And so, the only surviving list of luggage and travel provisions known from the medieval Indian Ocean was first identified and formally catalogued. Yet it was to be another fifty years, almost a millennium after the list was first written, before it was read in its entirety and published. After Goitein’s death in 1985 the work of editing the fragments from the documentary genizah connected to the India trade – what Goitein referred to as his “India Book” – passed to Goitein’s student Mordechai Akiva Friedman. It is to Friedman, then, that we owe the identification of Lines 36–9 on the recto of T-S NS 324.114 as well as, most significantly, the first full English translation and commentary of the list.15 Abraham’s list of luggage was finally published in 2008 in S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman’s India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book.” Part One), the first part of Goitein’s long and eagerly awaited “India Book.”16 There it is India Book document III, 24 according to the “New List,” and one of eighty or so documents connected to Abraham Ben Yiju.

*************************** It is difficult to underline sufficiently the importance of the India Book documents for the study of the Indian Ocean at this period. They enliven a world where the resolution of most sources gives us names but few lives, trade commodities but no personal things. In brief, they allow us to study the Indian Ocean as a lived place rather than as an area of pure, disembodied commercial exchange. Besides Goitein himself, it was the Indian novelist and essayist Amitav Ghosh who was among the first to explore 13

14 15 16

Figure suggested by Marina Rustow and taken from “The New Geniza Lab,” Princeton Geniza Lab Newsletter 1 (2016), 1. Jessica L. Goldberg suggests between “8,000 and 18,000 fragments worldwide”; see “The Use and Abuse of the Geniza Mercantile Letter,” Journal of Medieval History 38, no. 2 (2012), 127 8, n.1. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 661. Friedman’s important contributions are self effacingly indicated by the curly brackets or braces {} enclosing them. Ibid., 661 4; for the Hebrew edition and the all important transcription of the Judaeo Arabic see Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 201 5.

Introduction

11

this potential. In an Antique Land, his ethnographic travelogue, and his one, formal scholarly article, “The Slave of Ms. H. 6.,” both published in 1992, explore the life of Abraham Ben Yiju in India and that of his Indian factor Bomma.17 Ghosh’s forays into the documentary genizah continue to inspire and provoke historians in equal measure. But whatever the rights and wrongs of his interpretations – and there is plenty to revise – Ghosh needs to be credited with first bringing India into the India Book in a significant way, an important counterbalance to the overwhelmingly Mediterranean focus of so much genizah research. Nevertheless, now that the full corpus of Abraham’s correspondence and other documents is available, the time is ripe to return to this life. The exceptional range of documents preserved – letters, memoranda, accounts, chits, lists of luggage or stored items, draft legal rulings, medical prescriptions, poems and even calligraphy exercises – invites further experimentation with the writing of radically new and different Indian Ocean histories. Abraham’s papers, as those of other Jewish merchants and families deposited in Middle Eastern genizahs, join a growing corpus of premodern documentary assemblages which constitute the personal paperwork of “private” individuals and offer a huge potential for the study of premodern personhood and individual material worlds. Nevertheless, within this, Abraham’s list of luggage is unique: the only known document of its type to have survived from the premodern Indian Ocean. It forces to the center questions about mobility and identity that are often only incidental to other discussions, the stuff of footnotes and brief asides. Like the motorways or airports and other “non-places” foregrounded by scholars of postmodernity, luggage in the premodern world offers a new place to think about dwellings and identities made in, and negotiated through, movement. Luggage also proves itself to be a particularly rewarding object of study. As ethnographer Orvar Löfgren observed in the context of contemporary luggage-making, “the suitcase looks ahead, but also backwards. People pack continuities.”18 Paradoxically, the luggage made for a departure from India, in anticipation of transoceanic travel, also tells stories of arrival and home making in India; objects and foodstuffs need to be present before they can be packed 17

18

Amitav Ghosh, “The Slave of Ms. H. 6.,” Subaltern Studies 7 (1992), 159 220 and In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale (Repr. New York: Vintage Books, 1994). Goitein and Friedman read B M A as Bama but here I follow Ghosh’s suggested reading based on discussions with Viveka Rai. Orvar Löfgren, “Containing the Past, the Present and the Future: Packing a Suitcase,” Narodna Umjetnost. Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore Research 54, no. 1 (2016), 72. See also the same author’s “Emotional Baggage. Unpacking the Suitcase,” in Sensitive Objects: Affect and Material Culture, edited by Jonas Frykman and Maja Povraznović Frykman (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), 125 51.

12

Abraham’s Luggage

and they are made present through a variety of commercial and social networks and in response to culturally learned expectations. Abraham’s Luggage embraces the micro-historical scale of this document to explore the everyday material worlds and materialities – literally the states or qualities of being material – of Jewish India traders on land and at sea; what Genizah scholars might think of as “the Mediterranean Society in the Indian Ocean.” In the things that Abraham and his household owned and ate as they dwelt and traveled in Malibarat, in the things that they packed and ate when they sailed west, are evidence for the ways that Mediterranean and Jewish cultures and identities were translated and negotiated through material things in twelfth-century southern India and the western Indian Ocean. Luggage’s multiple temporalities thus help to magnify bigger human issues: what you pack and how you travel certainly reflects your social status, but above all luggage magnifies the particularities of food cultures, domestic cultures and religious cultures. What you pack and how you travel takes us to the heart of what it is to be a particular sort of human being; to what you eat and how you eat it; to how you sleep and dress; to how you organize your personal space; and to what you believe in and how you express that. Abraham’s luggage list offers insights into processes of acculturation, conversion, cultural encounter and exchange otherwise undocumented in other textual or material sources. Where Finbarr Barry Flood’s Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu–Muslim” Encounter focuses at its core on circuits and practices of looting and gifting along the Ghurid frontier in the northwest of the subcontinent and more widely across India under the Delhi Sultanate, Abraham’s Luggage focuses in a narrower way on different but often contemporary circuits and practices of exchange and circulation on the southern, maritime interface between South Asia and the Middle East. The contrast is not just one of geographical and chronological scale but between types of circulation, things circulated and spheres of action.19 Micro and Macro, East and West While it focuses on one everyday domestic world, Abraham’s Luggage aims to write what Emma Rothschild has recently described as a new kind of micro-history, a “large” history that connects the “microhistories 19

Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu Muslim” Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). For a complementary study of much later non commercial exchanges in the Yemen see Nancy Um, Shipped but Not Sold: Material Culture and the Social Protocols of Trade during Yemen’s Age of Coffee (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017).

Introduction

13

of individuals and families to the larger scenes of which they were a part: to important or ‘macrohistorical’ inquiries.”20 Food culture offers an especially rich portal into macrohistorical issues, as anthropologists and ethnographers have long realized food is “a highly condensed social fact.”21 Foodstuffs and vessels or utensils for the storage, preparation and serving of food – what we might better think of as one “super category” of food culture – fill the luggage list. Less well recognized is the potential for luggage assemblages themselves to offer equally important and wide-ranging social and cultural insights. “Luggage” is itself a place to think about premodern mobilities and identities. Like all micro-histories, mine is shadowed by the problematical relationship of the micro to the macro; the ever-present question of the extent to which this single case study of a North African Jew in southern India can provide data or even models of wider application. As so many historians before me have found, there is no simple yes or no answer, only a careful weighing of each piece of evidence and a cautious estimation of its singularity. All I can say with any confidence is that it all depends. But what I do know is that this unique list of luggage is too important a document to be ignored simply through fear of its particularity. The study of Abraham’s material world certainly contributes to ongoing research into the position of Jewish communities in the medieval Middle East: the degree of their distinctiveness or embeddedness, and the ways in which this was negotiated. Institutions of trade and legal practices are two arenas where these questions have most recently been explored,22 but domestic materiality, and the luggage-making that supported it in mobility, are themselves profoundly identitarian and remain a much-neglected aspect of the larger field of inquiry. Domesticity was of course deeply entangled with marriage, or at least with women; it is telling that the terms manzil and bayt – “house” or “home” – also commonly referenced, politely and obliquely, a man’s wife, the Arabic equivalent perhaps of the colloquial British expression “her indoors,” and a conflation of wife and home that underlines how interdependent the two 20

21 22

See Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth Century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 7. For further discussion of how to bridge these scales and more ample bibliography see John Paul A. Ghobrial, “The Secret Life of Elias of Babylon and the Uses of Global Microhistory,” Past and Present 222 (2014), 51 93. Arjun Appadurai, “Gastro Politics in Hindu South Asia,” American Ethnologist 8, no. 3 (1981), 494. See notably Jessica L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Philip I. Ackerman Lieberman, The Business of Identity: Jews, Muslims, and Economic Life in Medieval Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).

14

Abraham’s Luggage

were.23 Abraham’s marriage to a local Indian woman necessarily raises the question of the extent to which, here too, his biography is typical of wider patterns among Jewish sojourners in India and Middle Easterners of other faiths. Chapter 2 addresses this problem to the extent that the surviving documents allow. It may be too early to assess whether Abraham’s life is in any way paradigmatic; as Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel suggest in their introduction to the use of case studies, these are best pursued not primarily for possible models and paradigms but because their study forces the historian to ask new questions and, in the process of answering them, stimulates new avenues of research.24 This, first and foremost, is what I hope to achieve here. The historical potential of the documentary genizah has always extended far beyond the history of the Jewish communities within which it originated. Cumulatively, the micro-historical study of Abraham’s luggage and provisions illuminates larger macrohistorical questions about the social and cultural consequences of inter-regional trade and long-term sojourning during a century when South Asia and the Indian Ocean were taking on a new centrality in the Islamic world and in Eurasia more broadly. The making of homes on India’s southern, coastal frontier belongs within a larger story of the gradual eastwards shift of the Islamic world that underpins the geopolitics of our contemporary world. The largest Muslim populations in the world today are not those in the Middle East but in South and Southeast Asia – Indonesia is famously the world’s largest Muslim nation – and the twelfth century represents a critical moment in their genesis. If we want to write a history of dates then 1192, the date of the Ghurid defeat of Prithviraja Chauhan at the battle of Tarain near Delhi, marks the beginning of a radical change in the quality and scale of Muslim presence in South Asia. Within little more than a century, the new Perso-Turkic Slave Sultans had conquered territories as far east as Bengal and, temporarily at least, as far south as Malibarat.25 Like all great dates, 1192 in fact marked the culmination of decades of gradual Ghurid gains in Punjab, themselves built on earlier Ghaznavid incursions. Nevertheless, in 1206 Delhi became 23

24

25

See Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 492, Line 2, where manzil is used to refer politely to the wife of na¯khuda¯ Mahruz. For the use of bayt to designate Abraham’s wife see ibid., 62 4, Lines 27 8 (IB III, 15). Jean Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, “Penser par cas: raisonner à partir de singularités,” in Penser par cas, edited by Jean Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2005), 9 45. Peter Jackson’s The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) is still a classic. On the longer history of encounters and exchanges between South Asia and the Middle East see André Wink, Al Hind: The Making of the Indo Islamic World, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1991 2003).

Introduction

15

the capital of a pan-Indian Sultanate and a new chapter in Islam’s Indian and global histories began. But this was by no means an inexorable, or even necessarily a military, advance. The impetus was primarily economic and, like a rising tide, this was a movement made up of surges and gentler comings and goings, a lapping human movement that gradually forged new social networks, new communities of converts or populations of mixed ethnicity, and new cultures. The Buddhist ruler of the Maldives had already converted to Islam in the mid-twelfth century, reportedly through contact with a scholar from the Horn of Africa;26 even before this, a series of Fatimid missions beginning in 460 AH/1067–68 had spread Ismacili Shiism to South Asia largely through maritime trade routes.27 In this context, the India Book documents offer important reminders that Islam was not the only faith in motion, and that these mobilities were not unidirectional, from west to east. Abraham’s repeated journeys across the western Indian Ocean, his marriage to an Indian woman, even his return west in 1149, also belong here. Although often overshadowed by the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century and the pan-Eurasian shifts they occasioned, these smaller events evidence a slower and more gradual eastwards drift, one operated through maritime as much as terrestrial mobilities, and later supported by the new interconnectivities of the Mongol Empire. This shift counterbalanced the ongoing erosion of Islamic territory across many parts of the Mediterranean and in the larger picture of things the general momentum was eastwards, first into the western Indian Ocean, South Asia and eastern Africa, and later into Southeast Asia.28 Thinking through Luggage Abraham’s Luggage approaches luggage-making as a skilled practice, and as one that is culturally, socially and temporally situated. Luggagemaking requires care, judgement and indeed dexterity, qualities 26

27 28

The date is recorded in the eighteenth century Maldivian Ta’rikh; see EI2, “Maldives.” Two surviving grants from later in the century attest to this royal patronage, see H.A. Maniku (ed.), Loamaafaanu: Transliteration, Translation and Notes on Paleography, vol. 1 (Male: National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research, 1982) and H.A. Maniku and G.D. Wijayawardhana (eds.), Isdhoo Loamaafaanu (Colombo: Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka, 1986). Farhad Daftary, The Isma¯’ı¯lı¯s: Their History and Doctrines, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 276 7. For good macro scale surveys of this period see relevant sections in Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. 2. The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); more recently Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

16

Abraham’s Luggage

commonly recognized as fundamental to skilled practice.29 Even more than now, successful luggage-making built on complex bodies of knowledge about what to pack for a given route and mode of transport, in what quantities and how to pack it. Travelers and sojourners of the twelfth century were engaged far more directly than now in the logistics of their own mobility: in the sourcing, containment and transportation of water, food, fuel, utensils, bedding and multiple other necessities, and consequently the management of the voluminous and heterogeneous luggage generated. Abraham’s luggage crystalizes questions about cultures of travel and provisioning in the twelfth-century Indian Ocean, the particular skills and technologies that developed within this environment, and the enskilment of travelers. The luggage list itself demonstrates a methodical filtering of detail according to the demands of the approaching journey; care and judgement permeate the list itself, and dexterity too. Even among studies of present-day migration and mobility luggagemaking has only very recently been recognized as a skilled practice and as a subject of study in itself.30 The varied skills underlying mobility have 29 30

Tim Ingold, “Eight Themes in the Anthropology of Technology,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 41, no. 1 (1997), 111. Academic studies of contemporary luggage practices have emerged principally since the late 2000s, often, though by no means exclusively, as part of the material turn in the fields of what has been called the “new mobility studies,” transport geography and migration history. Besides Löfgren’s “Emotional Baggage” see David Bissell, “Conceptualising Differently Mobile Passengers: Geographies of Everyday Encumbrance in the Railway Station,” Social and Cultural Geography 10, no. 2 (2009), 173 95 or Jason De León, “‘Better Be Hot than Caught’: Excavating the Conflicting Roles of Migrant Material Culture,” American Anthropologist 114, no. 3 (2012), 477 95. Volume 7, theme 2 (2015) of Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research is dedicated to the theme of objects and mobility and includes articles discussing luggage. For the turn itself see Paul Basu and Simon Coleman, “Introduction. Migrant Worlds. Material Cultures,” Mobilities 3, no. 3 (2008), 313 30 and Wang Cangbai, “Introduction: The ‘Material Turn’ in Migration Studies,” Modern Languages Open (2016), DOI: 10.3828/mlo.v0i0.88. Parallel to this are publications of various (mainly European) collections of bags, generally handbags, or their early relatives; listed here are those that include substantial historical essays rather than being primarily image focused: Olaf Goubitz, Purses in Pieces: Archaeological Finds of the Late Medieval and 16th Century Leather Purses, Pouches, Bags and Cases in the Netherlands (Zwolle: Stichting Promotie Archeologie, 2007); Judith Clark (ed.), Handbags: The Making of a Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), covering the Simone Handbag Museum in Seoul, South Korea; Renate Eickelmann and Johannes Pietch, Taschen: Eine europäische Kulturgeschichte 1500 1930, Catalogue of an exhibition at the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, München, 11 April 25 August 2013 (Munich: Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, 2013); and Olivier Saillard (ed.), Volez, voguez, voyagez Louis Vuitton, with contributions by Takashi Hiraide, Qiu Xialong, Marie Laure Gutton and Gael Mamine (New York: Rizzoli, 2016), important for its coverage of trunks and larger luggage pieces. For a rare survival from the medieval Islamic world see Venetia Porter, “An Ancient Iraqi Handbag: London,” Burlington Magazine 156 (2014), 404 5. One off studies also feature across archaeology and anthropology; see for example symbolic bundles in M.N. Zedeño, “Bundled Worlds: The Roles and

Introduction

17

also sat uneasily within Indian Ocean history, subtly sidelined as incidental “technicalities” or mere “useful knowledge,” in some cases more easily categorized as part of the history of technology. The anthropological notion of skilled practice31 instead helps to capture not only the sophistication of these bodies of knowledge but, by recognizing their cultural, social and temporal specificity, the potential of this material to contribute to a wider cultural history. Abraham’s list of luggage affords an exceptional opportunity to explore this subject in a space and at a time that has hitherto received little attention. There is nothing in Abraham Ben Yiju’s list of luggage as neatly labeled and physically circumscribed as the modern suitcase; luggage here – and in the period before mass airline travel – is the ensemble of possessions travelers carried with them, however these were contained and transported. From a contemporary perspective, or at least from the perspective of what we might think of as “suitcase cultures,” Abraham’s luggage seems voluminous and chaotic. But it is useful to remember just how recent the contemporary suitcase is, and how widespread and enduring the luggage-making practices recorded in Abraham’s list have been. The suitcase is in many ways the last survivor of a huge portfolio of containers and carriers – trunks, hat boxes, portmanteaus to name but a few – developed in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century for the transportation of personal effects.32 Deeply entangled with modern notions of functionality, it was originally designed specifically for the transportation of suits, hence “suit-case.” Without strictly defined weight limits and maximum dimensions, travelers had more freedom to “pack continuities,” to expect to live in mobility as they lived in dwelling. Medieval and modern European elites

31

32

Interactions of Complex Objects from the North American Plains,” Journal of Archaeological Method Theory 15 (2008), 362 78. See the very useful special edition of Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 41, no. 1 (1997) on the theme of Technology as Skilled Practice; and Tim Ingold, “Beyond Art and Technology: The Anthropology of Skill,” in Anthropological Perspectives on Technology, edited by Michael B. Schiffer (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 17 31. Also the special issue of Cultural Geographies on skill edited and introduced with clarity by Merle Patchett and Joanna Mann, with an afterword by Tim Ingold, “Five Questions of Skill.” Prepublished 21 April 2017, DOI: 10.1177/1474474017702514. Nineteenth century luggage assemblages have not been widely studied but see Daniel A. Gross, “The History of the Humble Suitcase,” Smithsonianmag.com (9 May 2014), www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history humble suitcase 180951376/?no ist; Paul Gérard Pasols, Louis Vuitton: The Birth of Modern Luxury (New York: Abrams, 2005); and Saillard (ed.), Volez, voguez, voyagez. Also relevant sections in Löfgren, “Emotional Baggage.”

18

Abraham’s Luggage

often traveled with their entire household – humans, animals, things natural and manufactured.33 The suitcase grew in popularity during the early twentieth century but it was only from the 1930s onwards, with the decline of long-distance rail and sea travel (where trunks or other carriers could be transported relatively easily by porters or servants) and the concomitant growth of airline travel, that the suitcase was repurposed and redesigned into a container for every and any item of luggage, and one which travelers now expected to carry themselves.34 The advent of the suitcase has also set the measure of what we now expect a “reasonable” amount of luggage to be and what constitutes “too much” luggage. The arrival of mass air travel with its new restrictions on the weight and dimensions of luggage thus marks a crucial juncture in the history of luggage-making, and we might think of luggage practices as divided into preand post-air travel. Against this background then, Abraham’s luggage challenges easy historical periodizations. It is perhaps far more modern than it might first appear, since the idea of luggage as a heterogeneous and voluminous thing to be carried by other people lasted well into the early twentieth century, and indeed continues to be the norm in many parts of the world. From another perspective, however, we might say that premodern luggage practices persisted and continue to persist in postmodernity. Although some premodern forms of container such as the pilgrim bottle – a type of flattened water bottle with lugs for a carrying strap – were shaped by travel, the large-scale advent of design for travel is a phenomenon of the later nineteenth century built on distinctly modern ideals of utility and functionality.35 We are now surrounded by a seeming infinity of containers, clothing and furniture designed not only for mobility but for specific types of mobility. However, in the twelfth century Abraham’s baskets, fatiya chests, jars and bottles were simply household containers on the move. As the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, the noun “baggage” designates “the collection of property in packages that one takes along with him on a journey; portable property.”36 The English “baggage,” although now more commonly designated as “luggage,” derives from the Old French 33

34 35

36

For Europe see the groundbreaking article by Grace Stretton, “The Travelling Household in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the British Archaeological Association 40 (1935), 75 103 and “Travelling Households,” in Margaret Wade Labarge, Medieval Travellers: The Rich and the Restless (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), 61 80. See discussion in Gross, “History of the Humble Suitcase” and Löfgren, “Emotional Baggage.” The subject has not been extensively researched in either material culture studies or design history but see Per Mollerup, Collapsibles: A Design Album of Space Saving Objects (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006) which includes numerous late nineteenth century inventions designed for travel. “Baggage, n. and adj.” OED Online.

Introduction

19

baguer “to tie up, bind, truss up” and its roots remind us that it is the packaging, binding, tying up that best defines what “luggage” was in the presuitcase age, not the material form of the container, or indeed the myriad things, the portable property or provisions, actually contained within. In Abraham’s luggage we see household storage containers on the move in ways that helpfully erode any assumption of a neat, binary separation between dwelling and mobility and that instead reflect the expectation of a continuity, of what James Clifford would term “dwelling-in-traveling.”37 Of course, the very noun “luggage” used here is a translation into British English of the original Judaeo-Arabic.38 Abraham and his circle used the term dabash, a term whose multiple inflections illustrate the complexity of portable things that circulated in the premodern western Indian Ocean. As Goitein and Friedman’s extensive footnote on the subject demonstrates, dabash (pl. adbash, dubū sh) was variously understood to designate “effects” (i.e. “personal effects”), “chattels” or “portable wealth,” “things of low value,” even on occasion “furniture,”39 an all-encompassing range not unlike the nineteenthcentury term “dunnage.”40 Context, then, is everything. The term occurs in a description of disembarkation procedures at Aden around 1220 and in an environment that helpfully defines dabash in relation to other transported things. The Iranian traveler Ibn al-Mujawir journeyed throughout Arabia and the Yemen in the 1220s. He left an extremely detailed narrative of his journeys, including the observation that travelers sailing into Aden disembarked on the first day after arrival with their dabash, while their “textiles” (thiyab) and “goods” (bada’ic) ˙ by stayed on the ship for up to three days until these could be processed 37 38

39 40

James Clifford, “Travelling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 108. For “luggage” the OED gives “luggage, n. Etymology: < LUG v. + age suffix. a. In early use: What has to be lugged about; inconveniently heavy baggage (obs.). Also, the baggage of an army. Now, in Great Britain, the ordinary word for the baggage belonging to a traveller or passenger, esp. by a public conveyance,” and “Draft additions 1997. spec. Bags, suitcases, etc., designed to hold the belongings of a traveller”; see “luggage, n.” OED Online. The OED notes that the term “baggage” is now “rarely used in Great Britain for ordinary ‘luggage’ carried in the hand or taken with one by public conveyance”; although the term remains in use in American English. For “baggage” the OED gives: “Etymology: < Old French bagage (15th cent. in Littré) ‘property packed up for carriage’ (= Provençal bagatge, Spanish bagage), < baguer ‘to tie up, bind, truss up,’ or < the cognate noun bagues, i.e. ‘bundles, packs’ (used, much earlier, in the same sense as the collective bagage), plural of bague = Provençal bagua, Italian baga, late Latin baga,” “baggage, n. and adj.” OED Online. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 228, n.9; see also discussion of the term in the Appendix, English translation, n.6. “Loosely used for miscellaneous baggage; slang, a sailor’s or tramp’s clothes”; see “dunnage, n.” OED Online.

20

Abraham’s Luggage

customs.41 Textiles and other traded goods were subject to import taxes, whereas dabash was not and could be carried off the ship immediately. It is clear that Ibn al-Mujawir describes how merchants disembarked with their belongings but had to wait for their goods to be processed and taxed. Here, and in Abraham’s list, the English translation “luggage” neatly captures both the portability of these things and the essentially personal nature of the things carried: they are belongings, possessions, chattels and provisions intended for personal consumption. Nevertheless, dabash remains a subtle term to translate, highly dependent on its context. Part of the fascination of luggage in the age before airline travel is its instability and permeability: constantly unpacked, repacked, consumed and added to during the course of even a single journey, luggage is a constantly changing assemblage. And yet, unpacked, luggage simply disappears again into the household. No empty suitcase or trunk remains to memorialize its former contents and previous journeys. It is helpful here to think of luggage as an example of what anthropologist Alfred Gell termed a distributed object – “an object having many spatially separated parts with different micro-histories.”42 Gell’s model offers a useful solution to the challenge the luggage list poses to modern readers. Lists of things are hard to read as continuous text – if readers do not simply skip lists entirely then they tend to only scan them for “useful” details.43 The notion of distributed object helpfully counters this tendency, encouraging us to read and study the list in its entirety as a single thing, while acknowledging it as an unstable and permeable assemblage. Fittingly perhaps, since Gell’s paradigmatic distributed object was the china tea set, Abraham’s luggage encompasses other, smaller and more homogeneous distributed objects such as his own basket of sını, “china,” as well as other more problematical and overlapping ˙ distributed objects such as his provisions or the chests of uncounted worked brass. The luggage list effectively records an object of many parts and multiple micro-histories. As its title suggest, Gell’s Art and Agency explored distributed objects in the realm of art – notably the oeuvre of Marcel Duchamp and the corpus of Marquesan art – however, it is his emphasis on the constitution of these objects through networks of social relations, what he calls their historical accretion or deletion via 41

42 43

Yusuf ibn Yacqub Ibn al Mujawir, Ta¯rı¯kh al Mustabsir, English translation by G. Rex Smith as A Traveller in Thirteenth century Arabia: Ibn al Mujawir’s Tarikh al Mustabsir (London: Hakluyt Society, 2008), 155. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 221. Lucie Doležalová, “Introduction. The Potential and Limitations of Studying Lists,” in The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing, edited by Lucie Doležalová (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 1.

Introduction

21

networks of social relations, that transfers particularly well to the luggage list and the social networks mapped in such detail in the rest of the India Book. Skilled practices have always resisted codification and the written medium and it should come as no surprise therefore that luggage-making is to all intents and purposes invisible in most of the textual record; in letters, travel narratives, even model contracts of carriage, it is simply part of the background habitus of premodern worlds. As Tim Ingold has emphasized, skills are grown through practice and training “in hands-on contexts of activity”44 and they remain embodied knowledge. Abraham and other India traders gained their knowledge through travel itself and did not write about this process. In this context, the list offers unique insights into luggage-making, even if it is the only record we have of the many luggages Abraham must have packed and unpacked during a lifetime of travel that took him from his native Ifriqiya to Malibarat via the Yemen and then back again as far as Egypt. Abraham’s list of luggage is also the only document of its kind currently known for the medieval Indian Ocean, and indeed for the contemporary Mediterranean. Other luggage assemblages, and the luggage-making knowledges that shaped them, are most often captured incidentally, usually because of some problem, a crisis of some sort that triggers correspondence or prompts discussion. Luggage’s very heterogeneity and instability mean that physical traces are similarly complex to identify. Nowhere in the Indian Ocean region is a medieval luggage assemblage preserved in the archaeological record. The places where we would be most likely to find one, such as in the closed context of a shipwreck (another crisis point), are few and largely unexcavated.45 Yet a good number of the imported artifacts and foodstuffs recovered at coastal sites around the Indian Ocean need to be thought of not only, nor even primarily, as commodities of interregional trade but as items that had arrived already as personal possessions – in luggage, as luggage. Anyone who ever traveled packed luggage and, as in medieval Europe, the volume of that luggage was sometimes surprisingly large. If the longer timespans of travel before the airline age made for particularly complex and changing luggages, travel cultures, notably 44 45

Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2000), 37. In the Indian Ocean no wreck has been well enough preserved to have yielded substantial information about the location where personal posessions were found, or the larger assemblage they belonged to. See, for example, Regina Krahl (ed.), Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; Singapore: National Heritage Board; Singapore Tourism Board, 2010), “Exhibition Checklist,” 229 35, nos. 2 17, 24 31, 34 41 (most with illustrations).

22

Abraham’s Luggage

practices of provisioning, have also impacted significantly on luggagemaking. We take it for granted in most First World travel that luggagemaking is largely decoupled from provisioning; we expect a multitude of places to feed and water us as we travel. But before these networks developed, and still in many places that exist beyond them, travelers were expected to carry their own provisions. Naturally much depended on the route taken and the mode of travel; major cities and to a lesser extent villages reliably offered potable water and food, but the crossing of any uninhabited area, land or sea, required travelers to plan accordingly. This was obviously especially critical when relying on informal stopping places, but just as important when voyaging using public infrastructure such as caravanserais, and indeed ships, since neither provided what we would now term catering.46 Paulina Lewicka has suggested that it was only from the fourteenth century onwards, and even then principally in Europe and China, that professional, paying establishments that might properly be termed “inns” developed.47 For those traveling in the Indian Ocean, luggage included provisions, cooking utensils and even fuel in ways radically different from modern understandings of the term and, as I will suggest, equally distinct from coeval Mediterranean assemblages. As with much of the habitus of medieval travel, these basic practices have resisted codification and are more often glimpsed through incidental details than explicitly stated. Working with the rich corpus of genizah documents and other sources within which this unique list is nested, the chapters of Abraham’s Luggage follow the histories of accretion and deletion of the luggage’s many parts via Abraham’s household and his network of social relations. Each chapter unpacks a different group of objects or foodstuffs to write new histories of the premodern Indian Ocean world: histories of settlement and acculturation, of Judaism and its practice, histories of travel and the inhabitation of the ocean. With an object as heterogeneous and permeable as “luggage,” these chapters and the sub-assemblages they identify and discuss do not claim to be authoritative in the sense that they are somehow final; other readers will find different ways to unpack this list and enliven its contents and one of this book’s aims is precisely to stimulate reflection on the possibilities (and problems) that lists present for historians. 46

47

For a challenging discussion of the caravanserai paradigm and a wide variety of related issues see Paulina Lewicka’s discussion of “The Place to Eat,” in her Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 366 77. Ibid., 371.

Introduction

23

Materialities and Material Worlds This book adopts an inclusive definition of matter, and the material world of Abraham’s Luggage includes not only objects – the solid, worked things most widely understood as constituting “material culture” – but also a wide range of other material “things” such as the raw and processed foodstuffs that are also such an important part of the luggage list. I propose that this material world is fundamental to the understanding of the India traders as a historical phenomenon. As one of the founding manifestos of material culture studies states, “it is a simple-minded humanism, which views persons outside the context and constraint of their material culture and thereby establishes a dichotomy between persons and objects.”48 This book takes as axiomatic the fact that study of the material world and materiality – the quality of being material – is “an integral dimension of culture,”49 as fundamental to its understanding as the study of language, social relations, time, space, representations “or a focus on relations of production, exchange and consumption.”50 Indeed, it sees materiality as fundamentally entangled with the study of all these domains, as well as constituting an independent field of study in its own right. As such this book builds on and contributes to what has recently been described as “a global reawakening to the interpretive and analytic purchase of ‘thinking through things’.”51 These principles and the scholars I cite will be all too familiar to specialists of material culture but perhaps less so to other historians – the material turn is by no means as widespread and embedded outside its own sphere as many assume. This is perhaps the best point at which to underline how substantially my take on agents and agency differs from that hitherto applied to genizah documentary sources. For economic historians, “agency” is a form of business relationship and “agent” is a technical term designating a person, usually a merchant, engaged to act on behalf of another.52 In material culture by contrast, “agents” are things that act on others; they can be animate or inanimate, as we commonly understand those terms – worked things, humans, (non-human) animals or indeed raw 48 49 50 51

52

Daniel Miller and Christopher Tilley, “Editorial,” Journal of Material Culture 1, no. 1 (1996), 11. Victor Buchli, “Introduction,” in The Material Culture Reader, edited by Victor Buchli (London: Berg, 2002), 1. Ibid. Haidy Geismar, “‘Material Culture Studies’ and Other Ways to Theorize Objects: A Primer to a Regional Debate,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 53, no. 1 (2011), 1. For an extensive discussion of business agents in Jewish trade see Jessica L. Goldberg, “Choosing and Enforcing Business Relationships in the Eleventh century Mediterranean: Reassessing the ‘Maghribi’ Traders,” Past and Present 216 (2012), 3 40.

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Abraham’s Luggage

materials and substances – and their reciprocal actions extend to every aspect of the lived world.53 Questions of materiality and agency weave their way through almost every chapter that follows: through observations and discussions of letters, of places (on land and at sea), of household objects, foodstuffs, medicinal substances, and the human agents with which they are all relationally attached. As archaeologist Lynn Meskell helpfully clarified, “materiality is not reductible to a set of given conditions or practices common to all cultures and all times . . . Imbued matter and embodied objects exist in relationship to the specificities of temporality, spatiality, and sociality.”54 If materiality is not universal, neither is agency, and my very approach of reading the list through a series of widely different methodological and ultimately ontological lenses, some emic, others etic, aims to contribute to a growing recognition of the usefulness of studying widely different material cultures.55 The documentary genizah is, of course, a profoundly material thing in itself and the writing, circulation and reception of these documents already evidence complex recursive relationships between persons and the material things that are letters, memoranda, poems, calligraphy exercises or legal rulings. But Abraham’s luggage list and his wider correspondence are also about material things in a more obvious way, and the discussion of material worlds in Abraham’s Luggage is largely focused beyond the materiality of the documents themselves to the study of the ways that materiality operated among India traders in Malibarat and at sea. Sailing West in 1149 Even within a broadened understanding of luggage-making before the “suitcase age,” Abraham Ben Yiju’s luggage is a particularly heterogeneous and complex assemblage, and before unpacking it any further it is important to pause and examine in more detail the precise circumstances that led to its creation. Like the vast majority of India Book documents, Abraham’s list of luggage does not state where and when it was written; it is the things of the list and the larger corpus of Abraham’s correspondence that furnish these contexts. When he first catalogued T-S NS 324.114 and linked it to Abraham Ben Yiju, Goitein realized that the presence of typically Indian 53

54 55

For a useful overview see Andrew M. Jones and Nicole Boivin, “The Malice of Inanimate Objects: Material Agency,” in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 333 51. Lynn Meskell (ed.), Archaeologies of Materiality (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 6. See Jones and Boivin, “The Malice of Inanimate Objects.”

Introduction

25

foodstuffs such as rice, coconuts and mangoes indicated that these provisions must have been assembled in Malibarat rather than in Aden. The volume and variety of foodstuffs carried – of rice alone there are a “large gunny,” “four small gunnies and two baskets” – also pointed to preparations for a substantial transoceanic journey, allowing Goitein to identify this as a list made “in preparation for a journey to the West.” Transoceanic voyages such as those between Malibarat and eastern Arabia made particularly large demands on food provisions and potable water, since they typically took five to six weeks even in the best conditions, and offered no opportunities for reprovisioning mid-route.56 There would have been no need to assemble such ample provisions if this luggage had been constituted for a coastal voyage, since the wellpopulated coasts of Malibarat offered numerous port towns and fishing villages where ships could resupply. We might add with hindsight that the presence of many other items corroborates Goitein’s assumption: Abraham’s transportation of a cabin door and planks for a cabin point to preparations for a substantial journey; similarly, the numerous and meticulously counted empty bottles and waterskins for potable water and the fishing gear would have been largely redundant along a coast peppered with villages. Mordechai Akiva Friedman was later able to establish that, within the larger narrative of Abraham’s life, the two most likely occasions for such a transoceanic journey are the two moves Abraham and his household made from Malibarat back to the Yemen in 1140 and again in 1149.57 As Friedman understood, Joseph b. Abraham’s memorandum, the other text on T-S NS 324.114, proves critical in deciding between these two dates. Amongst other matters, the memorandum requests the dispatch of distinctively Middle Eastern provisions to Mangalore, allowing Friedman to suggest that it must therefore have been addressed to Abraham when the latter was living back in the Yemen between 1140 and 1145.58 Since 56

57

58

It is worth noting that in the fourteenth century Ibn Battuta described a crossing from Calicut to Dhofar as having taken twenty eight days; see Abu cAbdallah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edition and French translation by Charles Defrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti as Voyages d’Ibn Battûta (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1969), vol. 2, 196. I am grateful to Eric Staples for pointing out that this time is probably noted because of its exceptional speed; from his own experiences on the becalmed and then storm damaged Jewel of Muscat dhow replica in 2010, crossings could easily take substantially longer (personal communication, 29 May 2017). Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 661. While we can pin down Abraham’s first arrival in Mangalore and his final departure from India very securely to the years 1132 and 1149, this stay was interrupted by a return to the Yemen sometime between 1140 and 1145. Friedman thus dates the document to “probably 1140 or 1149” (ibid., 661). Since none of Abraham’s correspondence from the years before he left for Malibarat in 1132 has survived, this request is highly unlikely to have been made before this date.

26

Abraham’s Luggage

Abraham later reused this scrap paper in India to list his own luggage and provisions, the list must have been penned after his return to Malibarat in 1145, and must therefore relate to his final return “West” in 1149.59 A letter addressed to Abraham’s siblings in the Mediterranean and dated very precisely to 7 Tishri 1461 ED, or 11 September 1149,60 bears testament to this final return; it announced Abraham’s arrival in Aden “safely with my belongings (mal), life, and children. May God be thanked for this!”61 This important letter is a reminder that this was a move rather than simply a journey. The list records not only provisions for the journey ahead, furnishings for the cabin, and what we might think of as essential belongings, but the sum of Abraham’s Indian life and that of his larger household. When Abraham wrote of his arrival he used the term mal to describe the complex assemblage of inanimate things that had just crossed the ocean: everything other than his own person, literally his rū h or soul, and his children (awlad). While Goitein and Friedman ˙ translate mal as “belongings,” perhaps “possessions and property” or even “chattels” more accurately convey the importance of the things Abraham had brought back from India.62 In Abraham’s luggage the apparently obvious distinctions between provisions, furnishings, personal possessions, chattels and even trade commodities are blurred in ways that force us to question these modern taxonomical assumptions. While merchants certainly carried cash with them – in this same letter Abraham makes reference to the dirhams or cash he had with him63 – his assets were as heavily invested in material things. The huge amount of worked and unworked metalwork in Abraham’s luggage likely represents remaining stock from the metalworking business he had run in India. The chests of textiles and twenty carpets also represented a substantial portion of his household’s portable property and wealth,64 available for sale or exchange in straitened circumstances at 59

60

61 62

63 64

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 586 (IB III, 8); English summary only; see the full transcription, Hebrew translation and commentary in Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 103 7. The letter was evidently timed to be carried back with returning Egyptian traders; my thanks to Éric Vallet for pointing this out. Departures for Egypt typically began in September or October, and Abraham would have arrived in Aden from India earlier that year. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 681, Line 4 (IB III, 29). EI2, “Mal.” Abraham uses the standard Arabic term here; Goitein and Friedman note that Yemeni Arabic uses the term ma¯l to designate “everything movable in a house,” and this usage is found in a letter written to Abraham about a rented house see India Traders, 708, Line 22 and n.11. Ibid., 683, Line 15; see also 772, n.8. S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 93), vol. 1, 101. Textiles and clothing also feature prominently as a source of ready cash in the biographies of various Islamic scholars; see various examples cited in

Introduction

27

the same time as they had dressed Abraham’s household and furnished his home in Malibarat. The fact that both categories of object – metalwares and textiles – are bulk listed, as opposed to itemized like the rest of the luggage, underlines that they were not of primary importance to the journey ahead but belonged to the category of mal. Abraham himself found it hard to distinguish between travel provisions (zad) and the main luggage (dabash). Thus, in spite of the fact that Line 5 confidently announces “and also for the travel provisions,” it is impossible to establish where this aside ends and the list of luggage resumes, since foodstuffs and essential utensils, notably empty bottles and waterskins, occur throughout the list. These blurred boundaries remind us, as Arjun Appadurai first underlined in The Social Life of Things, that commodities have complex social biographies far beyond their lives as economic goods and undergo correspondingly frequent shifts in value and meaning.65 Luggage is quite simply what you carry with you when you travel, whatever you need to carry with you when you travel, whoever it is for and however you contain it. The values and meanings of the items in Abraham’s luggage had the potential to shift over the course of even a single voyage, depending on the stage of that journey and whether its progress was smooth or not. However, Appadurai himself appears to have become disenchanted with the possibilities of the “social life of things,” noting that work on transformations between commodity, gift and other states had stayed “somewhat aloof from wider debates about new technologies, new global economies and new civilizing forms and techniques.”66 As its title makes clear, Abraham’s Luggage proposes that this idea is far from spent and does in fact contribute directly to the longue durée of these debates. Large assemblages such as Abraham’s luggage make for particularly rewarding study, but it is essentially luggage’s heterogeneity and instability that make it such a versatile subject within this framework. Ultimately, however, there is much that we can never know about the luggage list, no matter how ingeniously we examine the materiality of

65

66

Houari Touati, Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages, English translation by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 80 1. Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Arjun Appadurai, “Materiality in the Future of Anthropology,” in Commodification: Things, Agency and Identities (The Social Life of Things Revisited), edited by Wim van Binsbergen and Peter Geschiere (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2005), 55.

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Abraham’s Luggage

T-S NS 324.114 or mine other genizah documents for context. It is unclear whether the list was drawn up purely for Abraham’s own convenience, to record and track what traveled with whom, or whether this Judaeo-Arabic document constituted the draft of a more formal shipping document. Where Byzantine law required all personal effects, excluding only victuals, to be recorded since they entered into the calculation of compensation in case of jettison,67 under Islamic law personal effects were exempt from this and therefore not required to be listed.68 However, we have no contemporary information about the way this issue was dealt with at South Asian ports, whether it depended on the jurisdiction of the owner of the ship, or whether other factors came into play. It seems impractical to draft a formal shipping document in JudaeoArabic when sailing from a South Asian port but the truth is we know little about maritime documentary practices in medieval India or about the lingua francas in use.69 Almost our only information about shipping paperwork in the ports of Malibarat at this period comes from another India Book document, a letter written in the 1120s which alludes to the procedures for ships entering and leaving the port of Kollam; however, it does not illuminate how personal luggage, or lists of it, would have been treated as part of these procedures.70 Much else is similarly speculative. The sailing season from south India ran from around mid-October to early April and Abraham may have packed at any time during that period, leaving India in the last months of 1148 or the early part of 1149.71 The list may capture the moment of loading itself (a listing of luggage as it was carried past Abraham to the nakhudas’ waiting boats) or earlier preparations (a record of luggage in 67

68 69

70

71

Hassan S. Khalilieh, Admiralty and Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean Sea (ca. 800 1050): The Kitab Akriyat al Sufun vis à vis the Nomos Rhodion Nautikos (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 74, 79 and 157 9. Ibid., 157 9, n.36. On administrative processes and paperwork in Aden, the Red Sea ports and the Middle East more generally see Andreas Kaplony, “The Interplay of Different Kinds of Commercial Documents at the Red Sea Port of Al Qusayr Al Qadim (13th C. CE),” in Verbal Festivity in Arabic and Other Semitic Languages, edited by Edward Lutz and Stephan Guth (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 94 115 and Roxani E. Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), chapter 4 “The Customshouse.” S.D. Goitein, “Portrait of a Medieval India Trader: Three Letters from the Cairo Geniza,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 50, no. 3 (1987), 455 and 460 1. Note, however, the remarkable consonance with Benjamin of Tudela’s account of the honesty with which commerce is conducted at Kollam; see the English translation by M.N. Adler as The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela (London: Henry Frowde, 1907), 64. Paul Lunde, “Sailing Times in Sulayman al Mahri,” in The Principles of Arab Navigation, edited by Anthony R. Constable and William Facey (London: Arabian Publishing, 2012), 79.

Introduction

29

three static piles waiting to be loaded). These preparations likely took place in Mangalore, Abraham’s main place of residence in Malibarat, but we cannot say whether this was in his house or warehouse, or perhaps on a beach or riverbank. Nor do we know how many were of his party, besides his two surviving children. As Abraham’s letter of arrival in Aden indicates, he traveled with his first-born son Surur and his daughter Sitt al-Dar; their mother does not feature and is assumed to have died some time before this. Yet his factor Bomma’s later appearance in ephemera written in Fustat in the 1150s suggests that he stayed with his master even after the latter left India, eventually joining him in Egypt. Perhaps he too was on this crossing. What we can say is that this luggage was dynamically in transit. The list is divided into three separate consignments: a first larger grouping assumed to be traveling with Abraham himself, and two smaller consignments entrusted to two different nakhudas. These three consignments may record the preparation of a transhipment – the practice of transporting goods or passengers and their luggages between vessels. Transhipment was common along the coast of Malibarat, where the transient topography of the coastline meant that ships often had to remain in deep water while smaller vessels ferried people, luggage and goods to and from the beach or landing place. This was certainly the case at Mangalore, where a shallow lagoon, protected from the ocean by sandbanks, obliged larger vessels to anchor offshore, or even better in the protective mouth of the Netravati river. If we cannot know exactly where on the coast of Malibarat this transhipment took place we can be certain that these three consignments were destined to be reunited for a longer journey: the “4 legs for a bed” Abraham carried with him would have been useless without the “3 planks for beds” loaded with nakhuda Abu-l-Sh[..]c. Similarly the undecorated cabin door required the cabin planks to complete the cabin space, and the coconuts the coconut scraper essential for their preparation. Some Ways to Unpack a List of Luggage Lists are often terse texts, seemingly resistant to contextualization. Their limited grammar seems to strip things of their contexts; things in lists have no immediate biography, no “life” if you will, other than that of the list in which they find themselves. Prose texts, by contrast, animate things and give them biography far more readily: prepositions connect, adjectives describe and verbs instantiate action, representing things in often complex configurations and interactions, and within specific social contexts. Lists easily beget further lists and it may seem particularly perverse to want to write a book about a list. Yet making lists was a fundamental

30

Abraham’s Luggage

activity and way of thinking among premodern cultures, a fact amply demonstrated in Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists and Lucie Doležalová’s edited volume The Charm of a List: From the Sumerians to Computerised Data Processing.72 This mindset has generated a ubiquitous and important category of historical source. The format is deeply entangled with ontological systems, with ways of thinking and organizing the world. Even a practical list such as the one studied here – a list aimed at recording a physical assemblage rather than ordering immaterial ideas or abstract things – embodies legal, economic, cultural, social and linguistic practices and systems of meaning, and its analysis here has begun to foreground some of these. Approached from this perspective, lists are voluble if asked the right questions. In his thought-provoking article “Trade Goods, Commodities and Collectables: Some Ways of Categorising Material Culture in Sung-Yuan Texts,” Craig Clunas makes the point that since Foucault’s seminal The Order of Things, awareness of the contingent nature of categories has become inescapable, forcing to the center the importance of understanding the ways in which categories have operated at different historical and social moments to configure meaning out of the “otherwise uncontrollable and promiscuous profusion of things, natural and unnatural.”73 In defense of lists it should also be said that in their lack of prescription they are more versatile by far than prose, open to multiple possible readings and re-orderings. Through the very sparseness of their grammar, lists encourage us to experiment with the reconfiguration of their parts; and none more so than a distributed object as complex as Abraham’s luggage where so many separated items – coconuts, coconut scraper, legs and planks for a bed, foodstuffs, kitchen utensils and tableware – beg to be reunited or placed in relationship to one another. The list begins with key provisions (zad) – rice, hard wheat (burr), coconuts, flour (daqıq) – that arguably privilege the preparation of this journey “from India to the West” and the moment of departure, but with over 173 separate containers or items listed there are many points at which we might begin to untangle the different micro-histories of this luggage’s many parts. It is important to remember in this context that Abraham’s list fixes only one moment, a very particular and peculiar convergence in the longer biographies of these things, their trajectories of exchange, their human 72 73

Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce (London: MacLehose, 2009) and Doležalová (ed.), The Charm of a List. Craig Clunas, “Trade Goods, Commodities and Collectables: Some Ways of Categorising Material Culture in Sung Yuan Texts,” in Arts of the Sung and Yüan, edited by Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 45.

Introduction

31

intersections and transformations. The list freezes in time items that would soon be stored or unpacked, assembled, cooked, filled, worn, slept on, consumed, and otherwise used in entirely new configurations or ways that essentially transformed them. And each of these things, as also the paper and ink of which the list is made, had its own prior history of travel, exchange and transformation before it was even packed. Indeed, one of the most surprising aspects about this assemblage is the number of things that were making a return journey across the Indian Ocean. Although the luggage list is not a formal household inventory as such, the household effects of Abraham’s Indian life represent a distinct and sizeable sub-assemblage within this (after all, this was a move as well as a journey), at the same time as they provided utensils and furnishings for life at sea during the approaching voyage. Counterintuitively then, instead of beginning with departures this book starts with arrivals. Part I, “A Mediterranean Society in Malibarat,” reads this list of luggage “against the grain,” as a document about arrivals and beginnings, about the making of new homes and the negotiation of food cultures in Malibarat. Part II, “A Mediterranean Society at Sea,” reads this same list in a more obvious direction, as a document about departures and the inhabitation of the ocean, and in particular the technologies of oceanic travel. This ordering sets a loosely chronological structure for the whole book, allowing the chapters to follow Abraham Ben Yiju from his native Ifriqiya to Malibarat and back again to the Yemen and Egypt. Nested Texts It would be impossible to unpack Abraham’s luggage in this way – to use it fully as a historical source – were it not for the larger corpus of India Book documents within which it is nested. The list, in itself anonymous and undated, stands apart from the mass of ephemera in the documentary genizah, its many anonymous and undated notes, shopping lists, chits, medical prescriptions and IOUs, because of the wide variety of documents directly connected with Abraham. As we have already seen, it is only thanks to this larger corpus that Goitein was able to associate the list with Abraham in the first place, recognizing his handwriting from other formally attributed documents; and it is also this documentary core that allowed Goitein and Friedman to sketch the outlines of Abraham’s biography and thus to anchor the list to Malibarat and his final departure in 1149. The surviving documentation begins only after 1132, when Abraham first settled in Malibarat, but continues through to his last years in Fustat. Although Abraham’s own letters and memoranda from India do not survive, the replies addressed to him by business friends do, and it is in

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Abraham’s Luggage

this sense that I refer to Abraham’s “correspondence.” No less significant are the wide variety of non-epistolatory documents written by Abraham himself which all substantially enrich the study of his material world. Through this core of some eighty documents, the luggage list connects to the larger corpus of over 500 documents associated with Abraham’s contemporaries in the India trade: what Goitein called his “India Book”. Although Abraham’s list of luggage is the only document of its kind currently known for the medieval Indian Ocean, it is far from lonely. Ultimately, it is this nesting of sources that enlivens what would otherwise have been a tantalizingly detailed piece of ephemera, allowing us to go beyond the immediate moment of the luggage list itself to unpack it as a Gellian distributed object and to reconstruct the micro-histories of its many parts. Whereas many of the Genizah’s anonymous and undated documents can only be used, if used at all, as secondary documents,74 this pattern of survival allows Part I to rely almost exclusively on India Book documents to explore the rich material worlds present in Abraham’s luggage and the values and meanings of these things in his social world. From these mercantile letters emerges a picture of foodstuffs and household things circulating between the Middle East and Malibarat in quite exceptional volumes and with surprising regularity, purchased by business friends for transportation in the luggages and commercial shipments of these same friends or other intermediaries. This thick description of things and people produces a mesh of entanglements and of relational ties, a social life of things, for the medieval Indian Ocean world that is unique in its quality and resolution. Sometimes the detail given in these documents is such that we can almost open the lids of closed chests and baskets and unpack the individual items contained therein, reconnecting them to the places of their manufacture, growth, processing or use, to their trajectories of exchange, and of course to the people who made, grew, processed, transported or used them. If there is such a thing as an archaeology through text, it is here at the heart of the India Book that it can be practiced. A Document in the Oceanic “Void” By comparison, the India Book documents are much less voluble about maritime travel. We can trace India traders up to the moment they 74

Examples are too numerous to cite comprehensively but see: Ephraim Lev and Zohar Amar, Practical Materia Medica of the Medieval Eastern Mediterranean According to the Cairo Genizah (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 50 2 who use seventy seven lists of pharma cological substances; Mark R. Cohen, Poverty and Charity in the Jewish Community of Medieval Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 83 4 for records of charitable distributions.

Introduction

33

embark at ports along their route but we only reconnect with them after they have disembarked with much repeated thanks to God for safe arrivals or consolatory words about those who had died en route. It is as if the simple act of embarkation put travelers and everything accompanying them into a state of suspended animation from which they only awoke upon arrival. Abraham certainly left no account of how he prepared for maritime travel, nor how he learned to do so, his enskilment. Contemporary sources – rihlas, for example, the early akhbar and caja’ib ˙ silence but are far from being substantial literature – whisper into this sources capable of standing alone. This situation is in marked contrast to the rich body of scholarship on ships and on ships as societies, lived places, in the age of early modern globalization.75 Part II wrestles with these problems and adopts strategies very different from the previous chapters where the nestedness of the luggage list within the documentary genizah can largely be relied upon to provide essential context and avenues of interpretation. Recognizing that at its core ocean voyaging was about survival in a hostile environment, I apply nutritionalbiological approaches to interrogate the list and posit why certain items were packed specifically with maritime travel in mind. Hydration, nourishment and rest form the focus of these chapters, and throughout I draw freely from studies of human physiology, ethno-pharmacology, the history of medicine and, of course, maritime archaeology to ask which seemingly innocuous items of luggage might evidence more complex and distinct travel knowledges. What cultural traditions or shipboard practices explain the need for a cabin door and planks, or for a chest of fishermen’s gear? One did not travel in the western Indian Ocean as one traveled in the Mediterranean; my aim is to investigate this ocean’s distinctive habitus of travel, its unique voyaging technologies and practices of luggage-making. The everydayness of travel and luggage-making may partly explain why travel knowledges remain largely invisible in the India Book documents, an essential background to successful travel that was not deemed worthy of writing and thus quite unlike the dramatic accounts of shipwreck that do survive.76 But it is all too easy to blame medieval writers “for not having kept their eyes wide open to the world,”77 as Houari Touati expresses it in 75 76

77

For a good discussion and further bibliography see John E. Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), chapter 4 “Ships as Societies.” For some of these see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 157 64; and Roxani E. Margariti, “Wrecks and Texts. A Judaeo Arabic Case Study,” in Maritime Studies in the Wake of the Byzantine Shipwreck at Yassiada, Turkey, edited by Deborah N. Carlson, Justin Leidwanger and Sarah M. Kampbell (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015), 189 201. Touati, Islam and Travel, 250.

34

Abraham’s Luggage

Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages, his study of the culture of travel among medieval Muslim scholars. As he demonstrates, this is to impose our own very modern expectations of travel narrative, and a primarily visual engagement with the world, onto entirely different genres and scholarly methods. Shipwrecks had financial and legal consequences, the lives lost also disrupted social networks of trade, and it may be this that explains why they were written about when, conversely, a smooth, uneventful crossing was not. Yet the fact remains that, even later, considerably more observational travel narratives only rarely engage with the time at sea. Often, as Touati himself admits, even in these later examples, the sea crossing becomes a tropic moment,78 a symbolic ordeal that still has much in common, I would venture, with earlier Buddhist and Jain maritime vignettes.79 It is only in the late seventeenth-century expression of the genre that the kinds of observational and largely non-symbolic detail that medievalists so crave – about water storage systems, standard provisions, cooking arrangements, the social life of ships – finally, occasionally appear.80 I cannot fully explain why this is the case, why in the medieval Indian Ocean and Red Sea ships were largely “non-places” in a very postmodern sense of the term.81 Whatever the answer, this comparative silence about travel in the premodern Indian Ocean adds to the importance and uniqueness of Abraham’s list of luggage, whilst complicating its interpretation. I cannot conjure sources that do not, or do not yet, exist but what I can do is look for new ways to interrogate and maximize those sources we do have, to tease open the knowledges and technologies of travel that underpinned the assembly of this luggage. Ultimately this agenda contributes to the understanding of ships as temporal and spatial mediators, as essential agents in connection, and as places where travelers dwelt.82

*************************** Expansive work exploring large areas and big ideas, as I am attempting here, is bound to sacrifice detail in some quarters. Consequently, scholars 78

79

80

81 82

Ibid., 248 and more recently Naglaa Saad M. Hassan, “The Sea,” and Said Mentak, “The Ship,” in Islamic Images and Ideas: Essays on Sacred Symbolism, edited by John Andrew Morrow, 132 8 and 139 45 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2014). See Sarah Shaw, “Crossing to the Farthest Shore: How Pali Jatakas Launch the Buddhist Image of the Boat onto the Open Seas,” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 3 (2013), 128 56. See Jan A. Qaisar, “From Port to Port: Life on Indian Ships in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in India and the Indian Ocean 1500 1800, edited by A. Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 331 49. Michel Foucault noted that “the ship is the heterotopia par excellence”; see “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986), 24, 27. I prefer not to use the term “transit” recently coined in an edition of the Journal of Global History 11 (2016) dedicated to nineteenth century ships as sites of global history and to “being in transit.”

Introduction

35

from different disciplines may be frustrated at different moments by the brevity of contextual discussion or detail on some topics. I have endeavored to supply core bibliographic references wherever possible but ultimately comprehensive detail is not my primary object here. What this book does is to see how ideas derived from a broad range of fields – from anthropology and material culture studies, via food history, the histories of religion and medicine, to maritime archaeology and, of course, Genizah Studies – can be brought to the study of the Indian Ocean as a collective model and in ways that will push forward ideas about our region. I am by training a historian of material culture and a cultural historian; beyond these fields I have endeavored to become what Michel Serres termed a “tiers-instruit”83 – literally “educated third-party” or even “educated outsider” – synthesizing and translating knowledge across domains. Strangely perhaps, given my training, there is one thing that Abraham’s Luggage does not attempt to do with this list and that is to match its contents to surviving things, to the extant material culture of the twelfth-century western Indian Ocean. This type of approach requires a rich complementarity of contemporary material that simply does not exist for the twelfth-century coast of Malibarat, or for Aden.84 In this sense Abraham’s Luggage is a pure archaeology of text.85 If this book encourages new archaeological excavations, no one will be happier than me, but in the meantime this study will be content to stimulate, among archaeologists and others, new interpretations of already excavated material or of existing museum collections. Ultimately there is no right or wrong way to reconfigure the luggage list, and no right or wrong set of sources to set alongside it. I can only attempt to be aware of the contingency of my own categories as I design each chapter to unpack a different sub-assemblage of “things.” As John 83 84

85

Michel Serres, Le tiers instruit (Paris: Éditions François Bourin, 1991). For a very recent survey of the state of the archaeology of this period around the Indian Ocean see Stephanie Wynne Jones, A Material Culture: Consumption and Materiality on the Coast of Precolonial East Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 178 90. On the problems this juxtaposition raises see Margariti, “Wrecks and Texts,” 189 201. For recent work based around an estate inventory see Miriam Frenkel and Ayala Lester, “Evidence of Material Culture from the Geniza An Attempt to Correlate Textual and Archaeological Findings,” in Material Evidence and Narrative Sources: Interdisciplinary Studies of the History of the Muslim Middle East, edited by Daniella Talmon Heller and Katia Cytryn Silverman (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 147 87. For a similar approach at the scale of an article see Mary C. Beaudry, “Words for Things: Linguistic Analysis of Probate Inventories,” in Documentary Archaeology in the New World, edited by Mary C. Beaudry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43 50.

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Abraham’s Luggage

Steinbeck bravely confessed, “the design of a book is the pattern of a reality controlled and shaped by the mind of the writer. This is completely understood about poetry or fiction, but it is too seldom realized about books of fact.”86 Abraham’s Luggage invites its readers to reflect on the reality they would shape from this terse, teasing list.

86

John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (New York: Viking Press, 1941), 1.

2

From Ifriqiya to Malibarat: Introducing Abraham Ben Yiju

When Abraham Ben Yiju appears in the documentary trail for the first time it is in a draft legal document, a deed of manumission for a maidservant to be precise, rather than a business letter. The deed was drawn up in “the city of Mangalore (Manjarū r) which is in the land of India in Tuḷuva of Malibarat, the royal city [D. . .S. . .]1 on the shores of the Great Sea”2 and is dated 29 Tishri 4893 AM equivalent to 17 October 1132. At this date Abraham son of Perahya son of Nathan known as (curifa) Ben Yiju, as he is referred to, was already in Mangalore, already an established merchant, and already firmly entangled in the social networks of the India trade. The deed records the emancipation and conversion to Judaism of Abraham’s domestic slave Ashu; duly renamed Berakha, after his sister, it is Ashu, “the slave girl, the proselyte of Tuḷuva,”3 who is widely held to have become Abraham’s Indian wife and the mother of his three children.4 This chapter introduces Abraham and follows him from his native Ifriqiya to his arrival on the coast of Malibarat sometime in 1132, in the process sketching the wider political, economic, social and cultural worlds through which he moved on this series of journeys east (Fig. 3). 1

2

3 4

Badly worn but a long word of approximately eight or ten letters; see S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, Abraham Ben Yiju India Trader and Manufacturer: India Book III, Cairo Geniza Documents (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010), 165, Line 4 (IB III, 17). Ibid., 165, Lines 3 5. Full transcription, Hebrew translation and commentary in ibid., 162 6 with English summary in S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 55 and 632 4 (IB III, 17). Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 55 and Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 165, Line 13. First proposed by S.D. Goitein in A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 93), vol. 2, 20 and repeated in his Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 202. See Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 56 and n.16 for a full discussion and further references. Assumption followed also by Amitav Ghosh and by Ophira Gamliel in “As´u the Convert: A Slave Girl or a Nayar Land Owner?” Entangled Religions 6 (2018), 201 46, DOI: 10.13154/er.v6.2018, 201 46.

37

From Ifriqiya to Malibarat

39

In going east Abraham was simply one of many enterprising Middle Easterners to have sought their fortunes in the Indian Ocean where the long-distance trade in high-value commodities promised equally high returns. He would also be one of the many Middle Easterners to father children by local women during these overseas sojourns. Travel narratives, inscriptions and more rarely documents have left us the names of a few of these sojourners; sometimes we have short biographies or anecdotes from their lives but more often their names are all that is left to tell us about their backgrounds and affiliations. What is almost entirely unparalleled, thanks to the India Book documents, is to be able to go substantially beyond what Jacqueline Sublet would term the “veil” of Abraham’s name5 – into his life and wider family relations, as Goitein and Friedman’s biography of him demonstrates, and even beyond, into the heart of his material worlds.6 His correspondence bears a frustratingly asymmetrical relationship to other historical sources and fields of historical research: where the history of twelfth-century North Africa and the contemporary Middle East is rich in sources and relatively well researched, no correspondence or documents from this period of Abraham’s life have survived, his surviving correspondence begins in 1132 and my discussion necessarily relies on parallel biographies and paradigmatic merchant lives to sketch out the routes and motivations that brought him to India. By contrast, in Malibarat, Abraham’s Indian correspondence and the rich corpus of ephemera and other documents he produced sit in a comparative historical void, with few contemporary sources for this period. Rather than fitting neatly into a secure historical context, Abraham’s Indian correspondence contributes new understandings of the political and economic history of northern Malibarat at this period.7 Leaving Mahdia and Entering Trade Like most India traders, Abraham himself never wrote explicitly about his background and route to India – at least, none of the surviving documents contain details of this – but passing references suggest a familiar tale of Indian “fortune hunting” by a Jew from a modest background. Abraham and his immediate family hailed from Ifriqiya, the area of North Africa 5 6 7

Jacqueline Sublet, Le voile du nom: essai sur le nom propre arabe (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991). For Abraham’s biography see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 52 89. My discussion of Malibarat’s political and economic geography is necessarily truncated here but see Elizabeth Lambourn, “India in the ‘India Book’: 12th Century Northern Malabar through Geniza Documents,” in Sur les chemins d’Onagre: histoire et archéologie orientales. Hommage à Monik Kervran, edited by C. Hardy Guilbert et al. (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2018).

40

Abraham’s Luggage

roughly corresponding to modern-day Tunisia. Abraham’s siblings – his two brothers Joseph and Mevasser, and his sister Berakha – lived in the port city of Mahdia until 1148 when its conquest by the Normans in the June of that year finally encouraged them to leave for Sicily, and it seems likely that it was in Mahdia that Abraham and his siblings were born and raised. Abraham certainly maintained an attachment to Ifriqiya throughout his life, and in his first letter to his siblings after his return to Aden in 1149 he expressed the wish for them all to return to live in “al-Mahdiyya or to Ifriqiya, namely to Tunis or Qayrawan.”8 Ifriqiya was clearly home and Abraham even used the appellation Ha-Macaravi, the Maghrebi, in his Hebrew poetry.9 Abraham’s attachment to this region was to be visible even during his sojourns in Malibarat, through his efforts to import foodstuffs and products typical of the central Mediterranean. We do not know how long Abraham’s family had lived in Ifriqiya but, as Goitein and Friedman show, the family moniker or alias Yiju is distinctively North African, the name of a Berber tribe from whom Abraham’s grandfather Nathan appears to have enjoyed protection and patronage – a common system in Berber North Africa.10 As Yiju, Ishu and multiple other spellings, this trace of Berber patronage is present even in Malibarat in the many letters Abraham received, and it continued to be used by his wider family in Egypt into the later twelfth century. Mahdia had been founded on the coast of Ifriqiya in 921 as the capital city of the new Fatimid Caliphate,11 but as the empire expanded 8 9

10

11

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 683, Line 19 (IB III, 29). See ibid., 401 (IB II, 37). For an important reassessment of this term, its uses and abuses, see Jessica Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and their Business World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 41 5. On this and other aspects of Abraham’s name see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 52 4. A new assessment of geographic nisbas by Jessica Goldberg suggests that these Ifriqiyan Jewish families may in fact have immigrated from the western Mediterranean and this movement likely took place before the earliest surviving Geniza documents (c. 990); see Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 41 5. On the history of the city see EI2, “al Mahdiyya,” EJIW, “Mahdiyya, al ” and a large number of studies in French dating back to the 1950s listed in the critical bibliography to M. Ouerfelli, Gouverner en Islam entre le Xe siècle et le XVe siècle: Iraq jusqu’en 1258, Syrie, Hijaz, Yémen, Égypte, Maghreb et al Andalus (Paris: Ellipses, 2014), 253. I am grateful to Éric Vallet for this reference. The bibliography is huge but see articles in Annliese Nef and Patrice Cressier (eds.), “Les Fatimides et la Méditerranée centrale (Xe XIIe siècle),” Revue des Mondes Musulmans et de la Méditerranée 139 (2016), a thematic issue; also Alexander Metcalfe and Mariam Rosser Owen, “Forgotten Connections? Medieval Material Culture and Exchange in the Central and Western Mediterranean,” Al Masaq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 25, no. 1 (2013), 1 4. On the rise of the Fatimids in North Africa and the broader context see Michael Brett, The Rise of the Fatimids: The World of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the Fourth Century of the Hijra, Tenth Century CE (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Maribel Fierro (ed.), The New Cambridge History of Islam. 2. The Western Islamic World, Eleventh to Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Christophe Picard, La Mer des Califes: une histoire de

From Ifriqiya to Malibarat

41

eastwards it was very quickly superseded in 973 by the new Egyptian capital of al-Qahira, the modern-day Cairo. While this shift inaugurated what Jessica Goldberg describes as “a continuous stream of immigration of Jewish merchant families from Tunisia to Egypt,”12 Ifriqiya retained a significant Jewish community deeply involved in wider Mediterranean trade.13 By the eleventh century, the Fatimid-governed provinces of North Africa had seceded and fragmented into a familiarly complex jigsaw of shifting and ever-competing small polities, and Mahdia, earlier under the control of the Berber Zirids, had passed by the mid-century to the Banu Hilal.14 Increasingly too, the Mediterranean was the theatre of an aggressive naval geopolitics played out between the different Muslim powers, Norman Sicily, and the Italian city states of Pisa, Genoa and Venice. Mahdia had been sacked by a combined Pisan-Genoese fleet in 1087 and thereafter the Ifriqiyan coast was repeatedly raided by Norman forces.15 The fact that Abraham’s immediate family stayed in Mahdia until 1148, in spite of the worsening situation, is a useful reminder that many did not wish to, or could not, move; that mobility was also risky. With historical hindsight, of course, their immobility seems hopelessly optimistic. Mahdia was on the broken edge of an otherwise rich and vibrant Fatimid Caliphate, so why stay? Their biography reminds us that conflict, like natural disasters, was part of the everyday. In North Africa as much as in South Asia we might see staying, rebuilding, recovering, restarting as a reaction equally common and logical as flight. The immobility of Abraham’s family highlights the extent to which his own departure from Ifriqiya must have been a purposeful action. We know too little about Abraham’s wider family to gauge whether his entry into trade was expected or not. Goitein and Friedman’s biography points to a modest family background of teachers, scribes and low-

12 13

14

15

la Méditerranée musulmane VIIe XIIe siècle (Paris: Seuil, 2015); and Allen James Fromherz, The Near West: Medieval North Africa, Latin Europe and the Mediterranean in the Second Axial Age (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 43. On Jews in the trade with Sicily in particular see Nadia Zeldes and Miriam Frenkel, “The Sicilian Trade. Jewish Merchants in the Mediterranean in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Gli Ebrei in Sicilia dal tardoantico al medioevo: studi in onore di Mons. Benedetto Rocco, edited by Nicolò Bucaria (Palermo: Flaccovio Editore, 1998), 243 56. See H.R. Idris, La Berbérie orientale sous les Zirides (Xe XIIe siècles), 2 vols. (Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve, 1962) and more extensive critical bibliography including the Banu Hilal in Ouerfelli, Gouverner en Islam. On the Normans in Ifriqiya see A. Nef, Conquérir et gouverner la Sicile islamique aux XIe et XIIe siècles (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2011) and “La Sicile dans la documenta tion de la Geniza Cairote (fin Xe XIIIe): les réseaux attestés et leur nature,” in Espaces et réseaux en Méditerrannée (VIe XVIe siècle). 1. La configuration des réseaux, edited by D. Coulon, C. Picard and D. Valérian (Paris: Bouchène, 2007), 273 92.

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ranking religious employees16 and a number of clues suggest that Abraham was originally destined to follow this family path. Abraham’s scribal training is evident in the “clear, strong, and graceful” hand in which he wrote his more formal documents.17 Elsewhere Goitein and Friedman speculate that he may have studied Torah with the rabbi of Mahdia, Labrat b. Moses.18 Surviving legal rulings in Hebrew written across Abraham’s lifetime indicate that he had received a religious education and even corresponded about such matters with higher religious authorities.19 Nevertheless, as Jessica Goldberg has shown, business was central to this “middling sort” of Jewish family as a way to invest capital; it was “the necessary cost of maintaining a family’s capital base, and a worthy activity for a member of a respectable family, [although] not as a source or motor for gaining social prestige.”20 Once he was established in trade, Abraham certainly sent commodities and remittances in cash from India to his family in the central Mediterranean.21 This was not a uniquely Jewish pattern. Trade had long cohabited with scholarship, administration and many other occupations, and many of the first Islamic scholars had been traders or merchants too. Nor was Abraham the only member of his wider family to trade in India: a maternal cousin, Abul-Khayr Ibn al-Minqar, appears in a number of documents and it is clear that the two cousins traded side by side in the early years in India, although it is unclear who arrived first.22 Abu-l-Khayr’s existence raises the more general question of the social networks, the ties of kinship or community, through which Abraham first left Ifriqiya and reached India. If kinship undoubtedly played its part, of far wider import were the personal ties and sense of faith community that ensured novice traders found experienced mentors for their first business dealings and travels. Abraham himself later took on just such a role in India, mentoring another maternal cousin and the sons of several business colleagues.23 We will never know what motivated Abraham to leave Ifriqiya and the scholarly, religious milieu of his immediate family, or precisely the order in which these two transformations happened. Notwithstanding its diminished status, Mahdia remained an important port and interface between the central Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa; it was an easy place to leave. Abraham may have been apprenticed into trade in the 16 19 20 21 22

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 54, also 72. 17 Ibid., 632. 18 Ibid., 74, n.70. Ibid., 73 4, n.69 (where IB III, 20b & c should read IB III, 29b & c); for the documents or drafts see 690 2 (IB III, 29b & c), 709 12 (IB III, 34 5) and 723 (IB III, 40b). Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 48. On 20 dinars sent back to family in Mahdia, see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 366 (IB II, 30). Ibid., 69. 23 For example, ibid., 577, Lines 14 16 and n.26 (IB III, 4 6).

From Ifriqiya to Malibarat

43

Mediterranean before moving east, but Jewish scholars and religious administrators were also mobile and he may have left Ifriqiya as a working scribe, only later transitioning into trade somewhere along his route east.

The India Trade and Its Routes The expansion of Jewish trade into India during the long twelfth century has not yet been subject to the kind of rigorous study now available for the eleventh-century Mediterranean, and consequently there are many aspects of the broader context of Abraham’s journey eastwards that remain unclear. The career of another native of Mahdia, cAllan b. Hassun, offers an example of similar processes in the 1110s, perhaps a decade before Abraham made his own way east. As traced by Goitein in “Portrait of a Medieval India Trader,”24 cAllan was first apprenticed into Mediterranean trade via his maternal uncle cArus who had earlier joined the stream of North African Jewish migration to Egypt. cAllan moved east to do business for his uncle in the Red Sea ports and it was from Aden, and apparently without his uncle’s permission, that cAllan first journeyed to Malibarat. Profit and success in business certainly drove mobility and in his letter to his uncle cAllan justifies the journey as necessary to maximize their profits.25 Another document sketches a different, this time failed, recruitment into the India trade only a year before Abraham traveled to Malibarat, as a father in Alexandria desperately tried to find gainful employment for his dissolute son by sending him to the Yemen with a departing India trader.26 If the stages of the route east were clear, the motivations for embarking on them were many. As far as we can tell, the move into the Red Sea and western Indian Ocean was a relatively new area of activity for Mediterranean Jews; as Jessica Goldberg has shown, it was only in the long twelfth century, from the 1080s onwards, that “the geographic range of individual [Jewish] merchants’ activities took a breathtaking leap in extent,” bringing them into the western Indian Ocean in a significant way.27 The comparative unknown of these routes was certainly seductive; “young merchants like young warriors,” Goitein noted, “seek adventures.”28 What is certain is 24 25 26

27

S.D. Goitein, “Portrait of a Medieval India Trader: Three Letters from the Cairo Geniza,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 50, no. 3 (1987), 449 64. Ibid., 461. S.D. Goitein, “The Tribulations of an Overseer of the Sultan’s Ships: A Letter from the Cairo Geniza (Written in Alexandria in 1131),” in Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of Hamilton A.R. Gibb, edited by George Makdisi (Leiden: Brill, 1965), 283. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 305. 28 Goitein, “Portrait,” 451 2.

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that by the 1130s Abraham, like other Jewish merchants, relied on ready established, even well-worn, trade routes through the Red Sea to Aden and the Indian Ocean beyond. Even if India was not Abraham’s final destination from the outset, its presence would have grown stronger the further east he traveled, and there were many opportunities along the way for social transformation. The high mortality rate among India traders – evident from the numerous shipwrecks and drownings discussed in genizah documents – ensured there was always room for fresh entrants. Even if India itself was still in many ways new to Jewish traders in the early twelfth century, India and the Indian Ocean world were nevertheless a well-established part of the daily life and imagination of the Islamic Mediterranean. In its move from Mahdia to Cairo the Fatimid Empire inevitably entered the Indian Ocean system very directly. Products, people, travel accounts and the letters of absent traders such as cAllan mediated this Indian Ocean world to those who had never traveled there and perhaps never would – what anthropologist James Clifford has called “traveling-in-dwelling.”29 Al-Idrisi’s Entertainment for He Who Longs to Travel the World (Kitab Nuzhat al-Mushtaq fı Ikhtiraq al-Afak), begun in 548 AH/1154 and dedicated at that time to the new Norman conqueror of Sicily, Roger, is an important reminder of the critical role of live informants, here returning traders, in bringing new information back into the Mediterranean world.30 Written by an author who apparently never left the Mediterranean basin, it is nevertheless rich in up-to-date information about Europe and India, and particularly the ports of northern Malibarat.31 Even before this, two Fatimid texts offer evidence for a new interest in earlier accounts and descriptions of the Indian Ocean world. The voices of nakhudas and merchants are vividly alive in the Indian Ocean stories compiled in Egypt in the early 970s by Musa ibn Rabah al-Awsi al-Sirafi under the title The Truth of the Stories and Wonders of the Seas (al-Sahıh min Akhbar al-Bihar wa cAja’ibiha). This compilation is now recognized to be an alternative collection of the stories more commonly known as The Book of the Wonders of India or Kitab cAja’ib 29 30

31

James Clifford, “Travelling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 108. On this revised dating see Annliese Nef, “Al Idrîsî: un complement d’enquête biogra phique,” in Géographes et voyageurs au moyen âge, edited by Henri Bresc and Emmanuelle Tixier du Mesnil (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2010), 53 66. Al Idrisi is believed to have died in 571 AH/1175 76 (ibid., 65). For a rapid survey of the variety of new sources, including human informants, al Idrisi turned to (though India traders are not mentioned) see Henri Bresc, “Archives du voyage,” in the same volume, 38 9. On the importance of Idrisi’s work for the geography of northern Malibarat see Lambourn, “12th Century Northern Malabar.”

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al-Hind32 and this Fatimid context of compilation brings new dimensions to the reception history of these accounts. In the later Book of Curiosities of the Sciences and Marvels for the Eyes (Kitab Ghara’ib al-Funū n wa Mulah al-c Uyū n), written in the eleventh century, information taken from other early sources again allows the Indian Ocean and its islands to join the Mediterranean in the Fatimid’s newly expanded world view.33 Sparse though these references may seem, and however intermittent the letters sent back, if we are to accept Rolf Engelsing’s idea that texts or letters are read intensively when written media are scarce, letters and other sources such as these may have had a considerable impact, read, re-read and shared multiple times.34 In whichever capacity he left Ifriqiya, Abraham’s move effectively took him from the broken western edge of the Fatimid Empire and an increasingly bellicose Mediterranean, to its prosperous and expanding eastern periphery and the new centers of the western Indian Ocean world beyond. A journey of this distance would have been undertaken in stages, with stops of varying lengths at the major hubs along his way. Alexandria and Fustat, with their large Jewish communities, must have been such stopping places.35 Abraham would have found there employment or new opportunities and, eventually, transport for the next leg of his journey east. In the twelfth century a traveler setting out from Fustat for the Yemen or India typically sailed down the Nile to one of its riverine ports such as Qus or Akhmim, a three-week journey on average;36 from there 32

33

34 35

36

See discussion in Jean Charles Ducène, “Compte rendu d’Abu Imran Musa ibn Rabah al Awsi al Sirafi, Al Sahih min Ahbar al Bihar wa ‘Aga’ibiha, edité par Yusuf Al Hadi, Damas: Dar Iqra’ li l Tiba‘a wa l Nasr wa l Tawzi, 1326 (h)/2006, 304 pages,” Journal Asiatique 298, no. 2 (2010), 579 84 and Imran Musa ibn Rabah al Awsi al Sirafi, Al Sahı¯h min Akhba¯r al Biha¯r wa cAga¯’ibiha¯, Arabic edition by Yusuf al Hadi (Damascus: Dar Iqra’ li l Tibaca wa l Nasr wa l Tawzi, 1326 AH/2006), in fact a composite edition of the two compilations. The two versions share fifty five stories, although with notable differences, while another twenty eight are unique to this Egyptian compilation. Arabic edition and English translation by Yossef Rapoport and Emily Savage Smith as An Eleventh Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities (Leiden: Brill, 2014). Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland 1500 bis 1800 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche, 1974). See Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of the Fatimid Caliphate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), which is held to have largely overtaken Jacob Mann’s classic The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine under the Fatimid Caliphs, rev. edn (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1970). Also (in Hebrew) Miriam Frenkel, “The Compassionate and the Benevolent”: The Leading Elite in the Jewish Community of Alexandria in the Middle Ages (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute for the Study of Jewish Communities in the East, 2006). For data on average travel times see J.P. Cooper, “No Easy Option: The Nile versus the Red Sea in Ancient and Mediaeval North South Navigation,” in Maritime Technology in the Ancient Economy, edited by V.W. Harris and K. Iara (Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2011), 202.

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they crossed the Eastern Desert by caravan to one of Egypt’s more southerly Red Sea ports such as Qusayr or Aydhab, a journey that could vary widely from a fortnight to over three weeks (Fig. 3).37 At Aydhab the Bahr al-kabır or Great Sea, what we now term the Indian Ocean, began.38 From the Red Sea ports travelers made their way down to Aden or other departure ports for India, usually via the Dahlak archipelago or other Red Sea ports which were busy trade nodes in and of themselves.39 Itineraries were extraordinarily varied, and Abraham’s route to Aden is unlikely to have been either as straight or as fast as the lines of modern maps imply. Easily lost too in the pure lines of such maps is the variety of accommodation, the very problem of lodging and provisioning, along any route east. The caravanserai has loomed so large in thinking about mobility and hospitality in the Islamic world that it has distracted attention from more intangible, less monumental hospitality practices. An increasing body of evidence suggests that across Afro-Eurasia and certainly up until the fourteenth century, personal and communal networks occupied a primary place in hospitality for travelers, with residences or religious institutions not simply complementing but overriding public travel infrastructure where it existed.40 Those intending to stop somewhere for a longer time, and with the means to do so, might rent an apartment or a house, or they might stay with family or friends. The documentary genizah is especially rich in references to these informal networks across the Middle East and Goitein cites the letter of a Jewish merchant in India introducing “two distinguished Tunisian merchants whom he had met in the East” to his brother in Fustat.41 Genizah documents capture for the Jewish community a wider practice of hospitality only faintly seen in other sources – except perhaps the rihla or scholarly ˙ travel genre where personal acquaintances and religious institutions 37 38 39 40

41

Ibid., 202. Described thus in a legal document drawn up in 1144 at Aydhab “which is situated on the shores of the Great Sea”; see Goitein, Letters, 338, Letter 79 (IB VII, 23). Goitein, “Portrait,” 458, and for references to other merchants meeting in Dahlak on the way to India see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 293 (IB II, 2). See the challenging discussion in Paulina Lewicka, Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 351 85. A key study of the Kazaruniya’s role along maritime routes is Ralph Kauz, “A Kazarunı Network?” in Aspects of the Maritime Silk Road: From the Persian Gulf to the East China Sea, edited by Ralph Kauz (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 61 9. For an all too brief discussion of mosques as essential stopping places in Malibarat see Sebastian Prange, Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). S.D. Goitein, “The Documents of the Cairo Geniza as a Source for Mediterranean Social History,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 80 (1960), 98; also Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, 350.

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feature prominently. With Jewish communities established across Eurasia similar recommendations would have facilitated travel well beyond the routes discussed here and they no doubt played an important part in Abraham’s own travels east. It is also important to underline that there were many places with no public infrastructure of travel, where informal networks of domestic hospitality or religious institutions were the only options, and many times not even these. By the medieval period the manned and wellprovisioned stopping places in Egypt’s Eastern Desert established under the Romans were entirely derelict, and travelers relied on traditional watering places known to caravan leaders. Even a busy Red Sea port such as Qusayr only received a dedicated caravanserai in the Ayyubid period, and it is likely that, even then, residences continued to play a central hospitable role.42 Aden likewise appears to have had little or no formal travel infrastructure; Roxani Margariti concluded that the silence in contemporary sources about caravanserais or khans at the port likely “has real significance,” leaving merchant residences to fulfill an extraordinarily wide range of business and hospitality functions.43 The centrality of domestic spaces to mobility and hospitality is also well documented, both textually and archaeologically, for the premodern east coast of Africa, and for later periods in the Red Sea area.44 Across these intersecting and complementary systems, travelers were expected to be substantially autonomous, assembling and transporting such provisions of food and water as were appropriate to the journey ahead, in addition to any other utensils, clothing or bedding they might require. Paulina Lewicka has shown that caravanserais in the medieval Middle East did not offer food or furnishings45 and the same was true of

42

43

44

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David Peacock and Lucy Blue (eds.), Myos Hormos Quseir al Qadim: Roman and Islamic Ports on the Red Sea (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2006 11), vol. 2, 103 4; on the Sheikh’s house see Katherine Strange Burke, “The Sheikh’s House at Quseir al Qadim,” Bulletin of the American Research Center in Egypt 190 (2006), 24 8 and “Archaeological Texts and Contexts on the Red Sea: The Sheikh’s House at Quseir al Qadim,” unpublished PhD, University of Chicago, 2007. Roxani E. Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 103; view also repeated in Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les Sultans Rasulides du Yémen (626 858/1229 1454) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), 142. See Stephanie Wynne Jones, A Material Culture: Consumption and Materiality on the Coast of Precolonial East Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 190 3; Nancy Um, The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009). Lewicka, Food and Foodways, 351 85; also her earlier article “Restaurants, Inns and Taverns That Never Were: Some Reflections on Public Consumption in Medieval Cairo,” JESHO 48, no. 1 (2005), 40 91.

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ships. This principle of self-sufficiency is rarely explicitly articulated, but constantly hinted at in references to provisions assembled, forgotten or lost.

Making Business Friends in Aden We do not know when Abraham first reached Aden, nor whether this was as a working scribe or as a trader, but by the time he arrived in India in 1132, somewhere between Ifriqiya and Aden he had acquired experience in trade and travel, money, and some very powerful friends in Adenese business and administration. Aden had been an important node of Indian Ocean trade for well over a century by the time Abraham arrived. The recentering of the Fatimid Empire at the end of the tenth century had reinvigorated the Red Sea as a major axis between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean; along this route, Aden’s natural harbor and distinctive volcanic hinterland – the perfect wayfinding marker – contributed to make it the primary node in the southern Red Sea. Although the Fatimid Empire did not technically extend as far as the Yemen, the allegiance of the local Ismacili Sulayhid dynasty and their appointed governors in Aden, the Zurayids, brought this region firmly within their ambit.46 As al-Muqaddasi underlined, the port was “the vestibule (dihlız) of China” and offered “good fortune to those who visit it, a source of prosperity to those who settle in it.”47 Given the commercial acuity of Mediterranean Jews, the most perplexing question must be why it apparently took a century for this community to exploit these newly revived connections. The problem may lie in part with the sources themselves, since the earliest genizah documents relating to the Yemen date only from the late 1090s. However, the later eleventh century may mark a real turning point in the development of Mediterranean Jewish networks. The timing of their “breathtaking leap” coincides with what David Bramoullé has identified as the first coherent and articulated Fatimid policy in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean after 107348 and which included the development of the so-called 46

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On the history of Aden see Margariti, Aden. The Red Sea area was still active before this although not a major axis; see Timothy Power, The Red Sea from Byzantium to the Caliphate: AD 500 1000 (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2012). Muhammad ibn Ahmad al Muqaddasi, Kita¯b Ahsa¯n al Taqası¯m fı¯ Macrifat al Aqalı¯m, English translation by Basil Anthony Collins as The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions: A Translation of Ahsan al Taqasim fi Maʻrifat al Aqalim (Reading: Garnet, 1994), 27. David Bramoullé, “The Fatimids and the Red Sea (969 1171),” in Navigated Spaces, Connected Places: Proceedings of Red Sea Project V, edited by Dionisius A. Agius et al. (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2012), 127 36; also Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 170 2 and 176 7.

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southern route via Aydhab.49 What Bramoullé’s largely political and diplomatic study skips over, however, is the coincidence of this with worsening economic and social conditions in the Fatimid domains. In a provocative and thought-provoking venture into Big History, Ronnie Ellenblum has linked these phenomena to the extended droughts and famines documented in the eastern Mediterranean at this period. Although famine and pandemic disease were to some degree common events, textual and documentary evidence indicates a tenfold rise in the number of droughts in Egypt between 950 and 1072 compared to the preceding 650 years, culminating in a seven-year famine between 1065 and 1072 and a period of social collapse known as “the great calamity.”50 Ellenblum understands this crisis as a direct counterpart to the Medieval Warm Period (or Medieval Climate Optimum) then favoring western Europe with longer growing seasons and thus population increase.51 Although Ellenblum’s thesis requires greater archaeological support, it is difficult not to be persuaded by the synchronicity of Fatimid economic crisis, new oceanic policy and the arrival of the India traders in South Asia. With famine and agricultural collapse came a decline in Fatimid state revenues. Where better to turn to compensate for this than to the longdistance trans-regional trade between the Indian Ocean and a booming Europe? I want to emphasize, nevertheless, that the “breathtaking leap” of the long twelfth century is in fact only so from a Mediterranean perspective; Jewish merchants otherwise had a very long prior history in Indian Ocean trade. There is no genizah for the western Indian Ocean but Jewish merchants are a persistent, if faint and irregular, presence in the sources.52 Four Persian Jews were among a larger group of West Asians who witnessed the grant of privileges to an East Christian church at the 49

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On the evolution of the Red Sea ports see the indispensable John P. Cooper, The Medieval Nile: Route, Navigation, and Landscape in Islamic Egypt (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2014). Ronnie Ellenblum, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950 1072 AD (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 29, 31 (table 2.1 and fig. 2.3), and 151 5 with further references. Ellenblum’s thesis is by no means universally accepted and the events of the period have been covered and explained in a wide variety of ways, see relevant sections of publications given in this chapter n.11, p. 40. Phenomenon first posited by H.H. Lamb, “The Early Medieval Warm Epoch and Its Sequel,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimate, Palaeoecology 1 (1965), 13 37; for a recent over view of the field and its methods with discussion of the MWP see Rudolf Brazfil, Christian Pfister, Heinz Wanner, Hans von Storch and Jurg Luerbacher, “Historical Climatology in Europe The State of the Art,” Climatic Change 70, no. 3 (2005), 363 430; for the MWP 388 96. For an overview of Jewish trade in India before 1300 see Ranabir Chakravarti, “Reaching Out to Distant Shores: Indo Judaic Trade Contacts (up to CE 1300),” in Indo Judaic Studies in the Twenty First Century: A View from the Margin, edited by Nathan Katz (Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 19 43.

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port of Kollam in southern Malibarat in 849.53 Through Indian grant documents and the later account of Benjamin of Tudela (d. 1173) we know Kodungallur (Muyirikkodu), a major city of the Cera polity in Malibarat, to have been home to a well-established and influential Jewish community since at least 1000.54 It is surely no accident, then, that in the earliest documentary genizah sources for Aden, it is a Jew of Iranian origin who emerges as the key figure at the port. Japheth b. Bundar was an India trader in his own right but also Aden’s Wakil al-Tujjar or Representative of Merchants.55 Tenth-century observers had noted a strong Iranian presence in Aden and up the Red Sea to Jedda, which must surely have included Iranian Jews,56 but the route and timeline of Japheth b. Bundar’s arrival in Aden remains obscure.57 Be that as it may, this powerfully networked family was to play a critical role in Abraham’s future. Japheth’s greatest achievement was to consolidate the easterly and westerly arms of Aden’s trade. Through him, a trio of strategic marriages united the families of the Egyptian and Adenese Representatives of Merchants. Japheth’s son Madmun was married to a sister of Judah Abu Zikri Kohen, the powerful Representative of Merchants in Egypt, while Japheth’s niece, his sister’s daughter, married Judah Abu Zikri Kohen himself and moved to Egypt. Finally, her brother Mahruz b. Jacob was married to another of Judah’s sisters who in turn came to live in Aden. Both Madmun and Mahruz became close business associates of Abraham’s, and while we can be relatively certain that Abraham had no kinship or marriage ties to either family in this alliance, it is all the more frustrating that we do not know when, where or how he first became associated with them. What we do know is that by the time Abraham left for Malibarat in 1132, he was already intimately connected to this circle in business and in friendship and we are left to deduce that he had already sojourned in Aden and traded in India for some time before he made this more permanent move east. His business account for the year 526 AH (23 November 1131 – 11 November 1132), his last year of trading out of Aden, evidences his well-established position in trade with the proceeds 53 54

55

56 57

Discussed with further references in Pius Malekandathil, Maritime India: Trade, Religion and Polity in the Indian Ocean (Delhi: Primus Books, 2010), 38 61. M.G.S. Narayanan, “The Jewish Copper plates of Cochin,” Cultural Symbiosis in Kerala (Trivandrum: [n.s.], 1972), 23 30 and 79 82 and “Further Studies in the Jewish Copper Plates of Cochin,” Journal of Indo Judaic Studies 6 (2003), 19 28; also Benjamin of Tudela, The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, English translation by M.N. Adler (London: Henry Frowde, 1907), 67. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 37 with references in n.1 to the documents in which Japheth b. Bundar is mentioned. On the problems of understanding the nature of merchant leadership see Margariti, Aden, 178 81 and 183 4. al Muqaddasi, Ahsa¯n al Taqası¯m, trans. as Best Divisions, 89. By contrast, Michael G. Wechsler in EJIW, “Ibn Bundar, Hasan, Abu ‘Alı (Japheth)” ˙ suggests that Japheth was a very recent arrival.

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that this account was drawn up for him by Japheth b. Bundar’s own son Madmun.60 1132 – Disembarking in Malibarat In a documentary corpus where dates are rare, Abraham’s arrival in India and the start of his first extended sojourn in Malibarat can be calibrated relatively clearly: 526 hijri – ending on the equivalent of 11 November 1132 CE – was his last year trading out of Aden and already on 29 Tishri 4893 AM or 17 October 1132, the date preserved on the aforementioned draft deed of manumission, Abraham was in Mangalore. Aden had considerably shorter sailing seasons than the Gulf or other Arabian ports on the Indian Ocean and Paul Lunde has shown that the critical departure period from Aden for India was during the tırmah or the “great season” (al-mawsim al-kabır) that in Aden began in the last week of August and lasted barely three weeks.61 If Abraham did indeed cross at this time, then with sailing times of at least five to six weeks this document suggests that he had barely landed when he manumitted his slave. The Malibarat Abraham disembarked into was in many ways as fragmented as the Ifriqiyan coast he had left behind. Mangalore itself belonged to the territory of the Alupa dynasty under Kavi Alupendra (r. c. 1110–60), although in practice the Alupa polity was a patchwork of feudatory chiefs whose histories are barely recorded.62 As the deed of manumission makes clear, the port was understood above all as part of Tuluva, a culturally and linguistically distinct region of the coastal belt which now corresponds to coastal south Karnataka and northern Kerala.

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Western Sea board of India (c. 500 BCE 1500 CE),” in Trading World of the Indian Ocean, 1500 1800, edited by Om Prakash (Delhi: Pearson Education and Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2012), 53 116; for a closer look at trade through the Genizah sources by the same author see his “Indian Trade through Jewish Geniza Letters (1000 1300),” Studies in People’s History 2, no. 1 (2015), 27 40 and “Reaching Out to Distant Shores.” Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 328 36, probably dated 1133 (IB II, 20). Paul Lunde, “Sailing Times in Sulayman al Mahrı,” in The Principles of Arab Navigation, edited by Anthony R. Constable and William Facey (London: Arabian Publishing, 2012), 79 citing Sulayman al Mahri, who gives more detailed information for Aden than Ibn Majid and slightly different seasons. Other sources such as a Yemeni Rasulid agricultural almanac for the year 1271 similarly emphasize the critical nature of this window (ibid., 78, 79). For the history of the Alupas see Bhasker Anand Saletore, Ancient Karnataka. 1. History of Tuluva, Poona Oriental Series 53 (Poona: Oriental Book Agency, 1936); K.V. Ramesh, A History of South Kanara: From the Earliest Times to the Fall of Vijayanagara (Dharwar: Karnatak University, 1970) and P. Gururaja Bhatt, Studies in Tuluva History and Culture (From the Pre historic Times up to the Modern) (Kallianpur: Self published, 1975).

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Abraham’s use of the term Tuluva in this document is unique among Middle Eastern sources and a testament to the strength of this regional identity even in the twelfth century. Notwithstanding the huge range of trade commodities mentioned in the correspondence, the core exchanges were in fact comparatively simple and the India traders took their place in a classic pattern of import and export between south India, the Middle East and the Mediterranean world that was already a millennium old.63 The Southwest monsoon leaves Malibarat’s coastal plain and western Ghats lushly forested and cut by short but powerful rivers running westwards to the ocean. From this area the India traders exported botanical products such as pepper, cardamom and red and white areca (also called betel) nuts, less often cubeb and ginger. Alongside this traveled a multiplicity of qualities of iron and steel, including a high-carbon iron prized for its durability and resistance to rust, smelted and refined from the ore-rich laterite soils of the Ghats.64 In spite of the far greater range of commodities available for export from the entrepôt of Aden, Jewish traders appear to have focused on a very specialized section of the market, importing into Malibarat metals rare or unavailable in the area such as gold, silver, tin, copper ingots and cullet, as well as brass cullet, all sourced from Egypt and the Mediterranean area.65 Less frequently they ventured into commodities such as raisins, Egyptian sugar and drky, a stillunidentified commodity.66 Within this broad pattern of trade, Abraham found a niche as a resident intermediary between local suppliers and his colleagues in Aden.67 63

64 65

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By far the best longue durée survey of the ecology and economy of Malabar is Kathleen D. Morrison, “Environmental History, the Spice Trade, and the State in South India,” in Ecological Nationalisms: Nature, Livelihoods and Identities in South Asia, edited by Gunnel Cederlöf and K. Sivaramakrishnan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 43 64. Longue durée patterns of trade discussed in Éric Vallet, “Le Périple au miroir des sources arabes médiévales. Le cas des produits du commerce,” Topoi Orient Occident 11 (2012), 367 8 and 370. See listing and commentary in Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 315, n.17. For the broad context see Paul T. Craddock, “Two Millennia of the Sea borne Metals Trade with India,” Indian Journal of History of Science 48, no. 1 (2013), 1 37; on early Jewish involvement Dan Levene and Beno Rothenberg, “Early Evidence for Steelmaking in the Judaic Sources,” Jewish Quarterly Review 92, no. 1/2 (2001), 105 27. Identifications reviewed (p. 160) in Roxani E. Margariti, “Thieves or Sultans? Dahlak and the Rulers and Merchants of Indian Ocean Port Cities, 11th to 13th Centuries AD,” in Connected Hinterlands: Proceedings of the Red Sea Project IV, edited by Lucy Blue, John Cooper, Ross Thomas and Julian Whiteright (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2009), 155 63. For a discussion of the further ends of these networks see Lambourn, “12th Century Northern Malabar.”

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The India traders spread their trade across multiple ports in northern Malibarat. Besides Mangalore, an important proportion of business focused on a cluster of ports some 150 to 170 kilometers to its south, in the north of what is now modern Kerala: Pantalayini-Kollam (Fandarayna in the Judaeo-Arabic) near modern Koyilandy, Kannur (Jurfattan), and Dharmadom (Dahfattan), near modern Thalassery.68 This pattern is far from accidental. In the first instance it simply exploited Malibarat’s natural geography and the tendency of its rivers and mountain passes to partition the region into contiguous and almost selfcontained spaces running west–east between the ocean and the Deccan plateau’s large, agriculturally based polities. By operating at multiple ports merchants effectively guaranteed themselves access to distinct trade networks with distinct markets and supply chains – in effect a classic upstream/downstream network. However, this flexibility would have been doubly necessary at this period, since the entire coast was in full dynamic reconfiguration following the collapse of the Cera kingdom that had previously unified most of the western coastal tract south of Mangalore since the ninth century. The events surrounding this collapse are still hazily understood and hotly debated, but it is generally agreed that in the early 1120s the Cera kingdom splintered into a mosaic of eighteen or more smaller polities.69 By spreading their activities across different ports Abraham and his business colleagues effectively guaranteed themselves access to three different polities, two of them newly independent and born of the Cera collapse. Mangalore in the north gave access to the Alupa kingdom, to its south Pantalayini-Kollam belonged to the polity of Purakilanadu, while Kannur and Dharmadom came under Musika governance.70 Genizah documents give little sense of the political or administrative structures at any of these ports, a pattern which in fact corroborates the findings of historians of south India who now concur that across the area centralized sovereignty and administration was rare, with considerable authority devolved to a variety of autonomous assemblies and trade associations.71 In trade as in hospitality, in Malibarat 68 69

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Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 598, n.15 and 639, n.20, discuss this port. M.G.S. Narayanan, Peruma¯ls of Kerala: Brahmin Oligarchy and Ritual Monarchy. Political and Social Conditions of Kerala under the Cera Peruma¯ls of Makotai ¯ (c. AD 800 AD 1124), 2nd rev. edn (Thrissur, Kerala: CosmoBooks, 2013), 129 30 and 132. For a full discussion see Lambourn, “12th Century Northern Malabar.” On the mone tary implications of this fractured political landscape see Roxani E. Margariti, “Coins and Commerce. Monetization and Cross Cultural Collaboration in the Western Indian Ocean (Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries),” in Religion and Trade: Cross Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000 1900, edited by Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi and Catia Antunes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), especially 206 13. See extensive bibliography and survey of the discussion in Kesavan Veluthat, The Political Structure of Early Medieval South India (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993). On the

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personal networks were no doubt paramount and the genizah correspondence bears ample testimony to the wide networks of relations with local merchants, administrators and local chiefs that underpinned Jewish trade in the region. Such a multi-port approach may have helped to cushion the impact of the Cera collapse, as indeed other disruptions, on trade, and Sebastian Prange has suggested that Muslim merchants and networks also exploited the void left by the Cera collapse in a largely similar manner.72 Against this background, Abraham’s repeated association with Mangalore is worthy of mention. In the 1130s the port was sufficiently important as a hub for Jewish trade with the Yemen for Madmun to keep a storeroom (makhzan) there,73 and Abraham’s early Indian correspondence gives us the names of many merchants and ship owners, Indian and West Asian, who regularly made the Aden–Mangalore crossing. And it is Mangalore that emerges from the correspondence as Abraham’s principal base in northern Malibarat: it was in Mangalore in 1132 that Abraham manumitted his maidservant, Mangalore was the principal destination for his commercial and household orders, and even much later, in 1147, when Abraham’s wife and children were reported to be in the port of Kannur in the summer of that year, it was still to Mangalore that Khalaf b. Isaac shipped the household items Abraham had requested.74 The choice of Mangalore may have been more strategic than previously realized: the port is curiously absent from the itineraries of Abraham’s best-documented Ifriqiyan predecessor cAllan b. Hassun, but above all it is starkly absent from Middle Eastern geographical and travel literature until the early fourteenth century, when it emerges as a major center of the pepper trade with a significant Muslim, but not Jewish, population.75 Since Jewish merchants from the Mediterranean followed rather than led in the India trade, it is possible that they deliberately targeted, or perhaps

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contribution of genizah sources to this discussion see Lambourn, “12th Century Northern Malabar” with further bibliography. The long history of West Asian relation ships with these bodies is surveyed in Elizabeth Lambourn, “Describing a Lost Camel Clues for West Asian Mercantile Networks in South Asian Maritime Trade (10th 12th Centuries CE),” in Ports of the Ancient Indian Ocean, edited by M. F. Boussac, J. F. Salles and J. B. Yon (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2016), 351 407. Prange suggests that the legend of the conversion to Islam of the Cera king Cheraman Perumal, with its account of the foundation of mosques all along the coast of Kerala and parallel installation of Muslim port administrators, be assigned to the twelfth century. I am grateful to Sebastian Prange for sharing a draft of Monsoon Islam in which this idea is discussed. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 351, Line 20 (IB II, 21 4). Ibid., 624 and 625 (IB III, 15). The same was true of next year’s consignment which was also sent to Mangalore, 629 (IB III, 16). See for example Ibn Battuta, Rihla, vol. 4, 88 and further discussion in Lambourn, “12th Century Northern Malabar.”

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were forced to operate in, some of the newer markets in Malibarat; in the 1130s Mangalore may have been one of these places. It may be significant in this regard that only the twelfth-century Armenian Description of Cities, Indian and Persian, a short merchant guide covering routes between Afghanistan and China, appears to bear some trace of Mangalore; listed as Panklur, the port is accurately situated by its anonymous author between Pank‘ur (Faknur) and P‘andrianeˉ (Fandarayna).76 Perhaps Armenian merchants operated under similar conditions, exploiting lessconnected places; whatever the reasons, the fact remains that when Abraham disembarked northern Malibarat had barely settled after the Cera implosion and it was in Mangalore that he started a new life. Landscapes of Hospitality In Malibarat, Abraham also disembarked into a substantially changed landscape of hospitality and one that was to condition his activities, and the subject matter of his letters, throughout his stay.77 In South Asia, residences and religious institutions played an even more fundamental role in hospitality than they already did in the Middle East. While medieval Indian sources point to the existence of a wide range of systems of hospitality, from simple camping grounds via rest-houses and religious institutions to the domestic hospitality of acquaintances and business friends,78 it is important to remember that caravanserais proper were a later innovation introduced from the Middle East by the first Indian Islamic polities, and even then to a very limited degree until the later sixteenth century.79 In Mangalore and other ports Middle Eastern travelers would have been dependent on their social networks for accommodation. Brahminical purity systems also added to this complexity, since Middle Easterners and others were potentially polluting presences. 76 77

78

79

I am grateful to Peter Cowe for indicating this reference and sharing his revised transla tion of the Armenian text (personal communication, 19 July 2013). Elizabeth Lambourn, “Eating Together, Eating Apart: Sojourning ‘Others’ and Commensal Practices in 12th Century Malabar,” Session 1714, In Other Words: Redrawing Frameworks Using the “Global Middle Ages” as Method, III, sponsored by the AHRC Network Defining the Global Middle Ages, International Medieval Congress, Leeds, 3 6 July 2017 (working paper). The most comprehensive overview is still that in Jean Deloche’s Transport and Communications in India prior to Steam Locomotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 94). I might cite a host of scattered references and local studies but it is abundantly clear that for South Asia this rich topic is in urgent need of fresh research. Chaul offers a paradigmatic example; see the Nizam Shahi period caravanserai in Pushkar Sohoni, “Medieval Chaul under the Nizam Shahs: A Historic and Archaeological Investigation,” in The Visual World of Muslim India: The Art, Culture and Society of the Deccan in the Early Modern Era, edited by Laura Parodi (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 53 75.

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By the medieval period Brahminical Hinduism in southern India appears to have developed a particularly stringent praxis of purity and, while there is no space here to discuss exactly when and why this developed, our sources suggest that the accommodation of Middle Easterners and other non-Hindus required particular measures.80 Ibn Battuta’s later journey along the Malabar coast in the 1340s offers the most detailed description of this Indic landscape of hospitality.81 From Sindabur (Goa) to Kollam in the very south, he notes that Muslims could only access water and food at public way stations if they drank from their hands or ate off banana leaves; physical contact with non-ephemeral surfaces or other human bodies was far more problematic. As he reflected later, while Muslims were the most highly respected people in Malabar, “they [the unbelievers] do not dine with them and do not admit them to their houses.”82 Where possible, Ibn Battuta stayed in the homes of prominent local Muslims or in Muslim religious institutions. When this was not possible he relied on the more formal services provided by Indian Muslim communities established along the main roads, who sold Muslim travelers basic necessities and cooked their food. “Were it not for them,” he says, “no Muslim could travel.”83 Ibn Battuta considered these practices particular to coastal Malibarat, but an earlier, midthirteenth-century, Chinese trade manual offers evidence that this was not the case. The Zhufanzhi or Treatise on the Various Foreign Phenomena was written by Zhao Rugua, an Inspector of Foreign or Maritime Trade at the Chinese port of Quanzhou, and it includes a description of Indo–Arab interactions in Bengal (P’ong-k’ie-lo), no doubt as reported to him by visiting West Asian merchants. Zhao Rugua noted that “when Ta-shi [Arab] foreigners come to this country, they give them seats outside the doors and lodge them in separate houses supplied with bedding and household utensils.”84 This allocation of separate space was not an 80

81 82

83 84

Mainly discussed in relation to the ban on Brahmins traveling by sea, for a recent discussion with extensive bibliography see S.C. Bindra, “Notes on Religious Ban on Sea Travel in Ancient India,” Indian Historical Review 29, nos.1 2 (2002), 29 47. On the rehabilitation of Ibn Battuta as a historical source for Muslim South Asia see extended discussion in Chapter 4. Abu cAbdallah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edition and French translation by Charles Defrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti as Voyages d’Ibn Battûta (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1969), vol. 4, 75. Way stations are also mentioned briefly in the tenth century portion of the Akhba¯r al Sı¯n wa l Hind, Arabic edition and English translation as Accounts of China and India in Two Arabic Travel Books, edited by Philip F. Kennedy and Shawkat M. Toorawa (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 119. Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edn and French trans. as Voyages, vol. 4, 72. Zhao Rugua, Zhufanzhi, English translation by Friedrich Hirth and W.W. Rockhill as Chau Ju Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu fan chï (New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1966), 97.

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indication of generosity towards the Ta-shi. If Arabs were seated outside rather than inside people’s houses and given separate lodgings, furnishings and utensils it was because of the pollution their contact imparted to these surfaces and objects. It is clear that what Zhao Rugua and Ibn Battuta describe is not a problem with Muslims or Arabs per se but a more general issue of how and where to accommodate anyone, Jews included, from outside the Brahminical system. Zhao Rugua furnishes an important indication that these practices were not exclusive to Malibarat and that they predated the fourteenth century. Such was the sensitivity of sociality and commensality between West Asians and Hindus in Malibarat that the topic eventually entered local Muslim legal texts. The late sixteenth-century Fath al-Mu’ın composed by the Shafici legist Zayn al-Din Macbari includes recommendations for Muslims visiting Hindu houses or accepting wedding invitations.85 As this last point suggests, not all Malibarat’s Hindu communities necessarily enforced purity rules as strictly as Ibn Battuta suggests86 and there are enough reports of extra-caste commensality and hospitality from across early historic, medieval and early modern South Asia – from Megasthenes via al-Biruni to Zayn al-Din Macbari – to suggest that in practice there were many ways to circumvent these issues. However, the fact remains that these accounts suggest that in India sojourn and travel were both fundamentally impacted by questions of purity and pollution, and this well before modern Hindu reformists hardened stances on interand extra-caste interaction. There is no firm evidence for the existence of a large established Jewish community at Mangalore at the time Abraham arrived, and certainly not afterwards. While some ports to its south, notably Pantalayini-Kollam, were likely home to established or nascent Indo-Jewish communities – later sources, at least, mention significant Jewish populations there87 – we are left to guess that in Mangalore Abraham and other India traders 85

86

87

I am grateful to Mahmood Kooriadathodi for mentioning this source and sharing his PhD dissertation, “Cosmopolis of Law. Islamic Legal Ideas and Texts across the Indian Ocean and Eastern Mediterranean Worlds,” unpublished PhD (Leiden University, 2016). Although the evocation of bonds of friendship is to some extent a trope of the genizah merchant letters, relations of friendship and assistance between Middle Eastern Jews and non Brahmin Indians in western India are mentioned; see India Traders, 477, Lines 37 40 (IB II, 55) also fuller discussion in Roxani Margariti, “Ashabuna l Tujjar Our Associates, the Merchants: Non Jewish Business Partners of the Cairo Geniza’s India Traders,” in Jews, Christians and Muslims in Medieval and Early Modern Times, edited by A.E. Frankin et al., 40 58 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).. An early fourteenth century Mamluk Syrian geography describes Fandarayna as having a mainly Jewish, Indian and Muslim population (Shams al Din Abu cAbd Allah Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al Dimashqi, Nukhbat al Dahr fi cAja¯’ib al Birr wa l Bahr, French translation by M.A.F. Mehren as Manuel de la cosmographie du moyen âge [Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1874], 234).

From Ifriqiya to Malibarat

59

initially relied on their active social networks at the port. Perhaps Madmun’s resident agent al-Fawfali, other Muslim sojourners or indeed Indian merchant colleagues offered accommodation. And yet, wherever Abraham first lodged, such hospitality must have been in high demand, spurring the need to establish a residence of his own. As the draft deed of manumission already mentioned indicates, Ashu was purchased “for the best of my [Abraham’s] silver from your mistress’s home,” and manumitted very shortly after Abraham’s arrival in Malibarat.88 Although there is nothing to disprove the idea that he might have encountered her and bought her in Aden, by far the most logical assumption is that this Tulu slave had been purchased locally in Mangalore. Perhaps, on the Bengali model, Abraham occupied a ready-furnished home that required a domestic servant.89 Why else would a male merchant need an Indian maidservant in India than if he had a house to run? No home could function without female domestic labor and Ashu’s local knowledge and domestic skills, in drawing water, shopping for food and cooking, cleaning and washing, would have been essential to its smooth running.90 The surviving documents tell us nothing about the personal emotions or impulses by which this Tulu domestic slave became a Jewish wife but Amitav Ghosh’s casting of this as a love story is likely some way from the truth.91 While Abraham’s marriage does appear to have been atypical of his immediate circle of Jewish business friends, whose homes and wives in Aden, Fustat or Alexandria anchored them to the Middle East throughout their Indian sojourns, a large body of work on contemporary Jewish marriage patterns and sexual mores suggests that such local marriages were by no means unusual. As Mordechai A. Friedman first recognized, relationships like Abraham’s were part of a host of adaptations of the family unit, and in turn Jewish family law, to increased mobility and longterm sojourn.92 Even without this, however, Jewish communities in the

88 89 90

91 92

Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 165, Line 14 (IB III, 17). For a fresh and provocative re reading of the deed and the possibility that this was a more economically strategic association see Gamliel, “As´u.” For three model deeds of purchase from thirteenth century western India, listing duties for female slaves, see Lekhapaddhati, English translation by Pushpa Prasad as Lekhapaddhati: Documents of State and Everyday Life from Ancient and Early Medieval Gujarat, 9th to 15th Centuries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 158 60, nos. 58 9. Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale (Repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 230. See Mordechai A. Friedman’s extremely important article “Women and the India Trade,” in From Sages to Savants: Studies Presented to Avraham Grossman, edited by Yosef Kaplan, B.Z. Kedar and Yosef Haker (Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar Le Toldot Yisrael, 2010), 157 86 (in Hebrew); for the effect on engagements see

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Middle East retained many practices commonly thought of as typical of, even exclusive to, Muslims and which facilitated such relationships: polygyny – the taking of more than one wife – was practiced, as was temporary marriage.93 Furthermore, notwithstanding the fact that it was frowned upon under Jewish law, a variety of sources make clear that it was common for Jewish men to have sexual relations with non-Jewish female slaves or take them as concubines; others converted and married them and even abandoned wives to do so.94 Abraham likely joined a body of longer-term West Asian sojourners, Jews included, whose local marriages or relationships with slaves, concubines and local free women engaged them far more deeply in the making of Indian homes and Indian lives. Relationships with non-Jewish women, and slaves in particular, posed grave problems for the children born, since, technically, a child born to a non-Jewish slave mother was also a slave, with all the abrogation of rights that this implied.95 Genizah scholars’ treatment of Ashu has naturally followed the legalistic trail laid by Abraham himself and which centers on the legitimacy of marriage to an emancipated female slave and the question of whether the children of that union were legitimate Jews and thus free persons able to inherit from their father. This must certainly have been of genuine concern to Abraham as a father, and as an observant Jew, and genizah scholars read the deed, alongside four important autograph responsa or legal opinions about such a union, as evidence for Abraham’s efforts to legitimate his surviving children within the wider Jewish community, and so guarantee their future.96 Yet this should not eclipse the practical advantages of such relationships, whether formal marriages or more casual liaisons, to those operating far beyond the main centers of Jewish settlement.

93

94

95 96

Amir Ashur, “The India Trade and the Emergence of the Engagement Contract: A Cairo Geniza Study,” The Medieval Globe 3, no. 1 (2018), 27 49. The classic text remains Mordechai A. Friedman, Jewish Polygyny in the Middle Ages: New Documents from the Cairo Geniza (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Mosad Biyalik, 1986) (in Hebrew); see also his article “Jewish Law as Witness to Sexual Mores among Jews in Islamic Countries during the Middle Ages: Veils and Temporary Marriage,” Pe‘amim 45 (1990), 91 9 (in Hebrew). Friedman, “Women and the India Trade,” 172 5. See the exceptionally thorough review of this problem with full bibliography in Craig Perry, “The Daily Life of Slavery and the Global Reach of Slavery in Medieval Egypt, 969 1250 CE,” unpublished PhD, Emory University, Atlanta, 2014, 106 52. Perry, “Daily Life of Slavery,” 106 52. Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 236 48, for a full edition of the responsa, with English discussion and summary in India Traders, 55 7 and 690 2 (IB, III 29 b & c)

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South Asianists have preferred to focus on the advantages Abraham’s union with an Indian woman conferred and the wider precedents of this strategy. A passing reference in Abraham’s accounts to nayar sihrı, ˙ “my brother-in-law Nair,”97 together with mentions of a brother-in-law c 98 Abu Ali and another nayar individual, “the brother of the kardal[r] or Director,”99 have led to suggestions that Abraham’s marriage forged significant kinship networks and business associations in Malibarat, in ways that relationships with slaves in the Middle East are not usually understood to have done. The term nayar is a Judaeo-Arabic rendering of Malayalam nayar, the famous high-caste matrilineal group of Kerala, now commonly Anglicized as Nair. Abraham’s use of the moniker nayar sihrı has been seized on as a brief but significant clue that his ˙ wife came from that community and that her wider family supported Abraham’s business.100 These references are unfortunately so passing and ambiguous as to defy more substantive analysis: sihr designates ˙ a male affine and can mean brother-, father- or son-in-law; furthermore it is unclear whether these three references describe one and the same individual, or two, or even three different persons. Finally, critically, in the deed of manumission Ashu is not described as a nayar, a fact that might even potentially invalidate Goitein’s first suggestion that Ashu was the woman Abraham married. This haziness is further compounded by gaps in research on both the history of the nayar communities – for the term does not designate a single homogenous group – and histories of coerced labor in precolonial southern India. In later periods nayars were key operators in the pepper trade101 while marriages to nayar wives are documented as playing a central role in inter-caste relations and ethno-genesis in Malibarat, this much is true;102 the fact that Indian maidservants were regularly sold to the Middle East, including to Jewish families, is also evidence for the existence of such a trade even if southern Indian sources are quiet on 97 99 100

101 102

98 Ibid., 639, n.17. Ibid., 774. Ibid., 660, n.17 and on the ka¯rda¯r 62 3 with further references in notes. Identified by Friedman; see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 639, n.17 citing earlier discussion in S.B. Isenberg, India’s Bene Israel: A Comprehensive Inquiry and Sourcebook (Berkeley: J.L. Magnes Museum, 1988), 22, n.19. Amitav Ghosh also made the connection, see In an Antique Land, 229; and now extensively discussed in Gamliel, “As´u.” See J. Kieniewicz, “Pepper Gardens and Markets in Precolonial Malabar,” Moyen Orient et Océan Indien 3 (1986), 1 36. Most research focuses on the Colonial period but see G. Arunima, There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar, c. 1850 1940 (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 2003) and the earlier K. Saradamoni, Matriliny Transformed: Family, Law and Ideology in Twentieth Century Travancore (Walnut Creek, CA and New Delhi: Alta Mira Press and Sage, 1999).

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the subject,103 but there is so much that we do not yet understand. The only thing we can currently say with confidence is that, whoever Abraham’s Indian wife was – whether she was the Ashu of the deed of manumission as Goitein suggested or perhaps another Indian woman altogether – she brought him notable local advantages, if only at the level of a well-run home and access to lawful sexual relations. In this, India traders also followed millennium-old patterns. The Periplus Maris Erythraei (The Circumnavigation of the Red Sea), a firstcentury account of trade in the western Indian Ocean, noted that Arab skippers and agents were familiar with the area and language of Raphta on the East African coast, “through continual intercourse and intermarriage.”104 Later, in 916, the Arab polymath al-Mascudi remarked on a new generation of Indian Muslims at ports such as Saymur (Chaul) in western India; known as bayasira they were fathered by resident Arab merchants to local women.105 Al-Mascudi’s figure of a resident Muslim population of 10,000 is largely symbolic but there can be no doubt about how quickly a few male sojourners, of any faith, might father a new community, and human genetics are now substantiating this aspect of male mobility.106 It is perhaps permissible for once, useful even, to look ahead to early Portuguese documents for a model of the human and cultural consequences of long-term male sojourn. A census of the Christian population of Cochin fort taken in 1514 records that it was home to fifty-eight households in which Portuguese men had taken wives from across the Indian Ocean region – from Socotra to Java, via Gujarat, Kanara and Malabar, and including also women described as Nairs and Brahmins. Within less than two decades of the Portuguese arrival, these couples had produced forty-two children; but even more, forty-five children, had been born out of wedlock to other non-European women.107 103 104 105

106

107

Data from sale documents suggests around 13% Indian origin; see Perry, “Daily Life of Slavery,” 39, figure 1. Periplus Maris Erythraei, Greek edition and English translation by Lionel Casson as The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 61. c Ali ibn Husayn al Mascudi, Muruj al Dhahab wa Maca¯din al Jawhar, French translation by B. de Meynard and B. and P. de Courteille, revised by C. Pellat as Les prairies d’or (Paris: Société Asiatique, 1962 79), vol. 1, 187. For the Comoros see S. Msaidie, A. Ducourneau, G. Boetsch, G. Longepied, K. Papa, C. Allibert, A.A. Yahaya, J. Chiaroni and M.J. Mitchell, “Genetic Diversity on the Comoros Islands Shows Early Seafaring as Major Determinant of Human Biocultural Evolution in the Western Indian Ocean,” European Journal of Human Genetics 19, no. 1 (2011), 89 94. Discussed in Joy L.K. Pachuau, “Women in Portuguese India,” in Coastal Histories: Society and Ecology in Pre modern India, edited by Yogesh Sharma (Delhi: Primus Books, 2010), 95, citing A. da Silva Rego, Documentaçao para a história das missões do padroado portugês do Oriente (Lisbon: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1947 58), vol. 1, 249 59 (doc. 110).

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Abraham’s choice of wife followed well-established precedents and we should not discount the possibility that, for Jewish traders too, such marriages and alliances represented a tested strategy for local integration, as deliberate as Abraham’s choice of Mangalore as residence. We do not know whether Abraham sailed for Malibarat in 1132 intending another straightforward round trip, or whether he left Aden with the intention of settling there. Goitein suggested that the length of Abraham’s first Indian stay, eight years from 1132 to 1140, might have been determined by his desire to recoup the financial losses he suffered shortly after his arrival.108 However, the speed with which he emancipated his maidservant Ashu and settled there seems to speak of quite other motivations. Madmun’s first letter to Abraham in India hints at a forced departure,109 and with trade routes a recognized means of escape from persecution or more personal crises, it seems likely that Abraham left to avoid some form of dispute. A frontier port in Tuluva was, in this context, a good place to begin afresh, separated from Aden by a long sea crossing and limited sailing seasons, and yet not completely unknown. In a society of sojourners, more permanent residents could create for themselves an important niche as intermediaries and this is exactly what Abraham did. And the simple truth is that once one has a home, a new family and a new life, it becomes more difficult to leave.

Lost Luggages Missing from the narrative of Abraham’s move from Ifriqiya to Malibarat is any record of the other luggages he packed and repacked in the course of these journeys, and of course of the luggage he carried when he disembarked there in 1132. This is not an idle question: these lost luggages might have helped us chart not only the route and chronology of Abraham’s journey, but perhaps also the intended length of his stays. More importantly still, they would have shown his remarkable social rise made through this mobility and perhaps the refinement of his luggage-making skills. Luggage-making and provisioning are learned skills and culturally and socially distinct practices; provisioning in particular is conditioned by local resources, food cultures and food technologies. Travel from Ifriqiya to Malibarat was not simply a matter of geographical translocation but entailed a series of profound cultural translocations. Travel east meant movement through a wide variety of 108

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 70.

109

Ibid., 330, Lines 1 4 (IB II, 20).

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foodscapes and cultures of travel which each demanded particular knowledges and skills. Madmun’s consolatory reference in an early letter to Abraham’s “troubles and discomfort on the sea and otherwise” during his outwards journey110 hints perhaps at the depth of those changes beyond Aden.

110

Ibid., 330, Lines 5 6 (IB II, 20).

Part I

A Mediterranean Society in Malibarat

Luggage always intertwines the past, the present and the future, as ethnographer Orvar Löfgren observed, and Part I begins looking backwards, reading Abraham’s list of luggage for the continuities he had packed and as evidence of the life he was leaving.1 Löfgren’s observation is perhaps even more true of packing before the age of the suitcase and design for travel than it is of contemporary mobility. Without strictly defined weight limits and maximum dimensions, travelers had more freedom to “pack continuities,”2 to expect to live in mobility as they lived in dwelling. Thus, in blurring the line between mobility and stasis, luggage becomes an important source for the study of premodern domestic material cultures and food cultures. The luggage list is far from being a perfect source – it is not a formal household inventory – but in recording luggage prepared for an extensive, perhaps six-week, sojourn on-board a ship it inevitably includes a significant number of household items. Furthermore, it is one of the only India Book documents relating to Abraham Ben Yiju’s household that does not privilege imported things, things that needed to be ordered from Aden and so left a written trace. Instead it captures things both “global” and local, things and foods – like rice and hū t fish, or qasca bowls ˙ locally in Malibarat. ˙ and talam platters – that were grown, fished or made As such it is the single richest document for the study of the domestic culture of Mediterranean Jews in Malibarat. The data the luggage list provides, however fragile, however specific to one man in one place at one time, is very welcome. In spite of the large numbers of Middle Eastern traders who frequented South Asian ports we probably know more about the commodities they traded than how they 1

2

Orvar Löfgren, “Containing the Past, the Present and the Future: Packing a Suitcase,” Narodna Umjetnost. Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore Research 54, no. 1 (2016), 59 74. Ibid., 72.

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sojourned and lived there. Thus, Abraham’s luggage list presents us with a unique opportunity to explore these questions. In the assembly of luggage are also stories of home making, and in this dabash, this luggage, is the story of Abraham’s life in Malibarat. The luggage list offers us a place to explore new beginnings, and it is here that I start.

3

Making Homes and Friends: On Shopping and Suhba ˙ ˙

If the date of 29 Tishri 4893 AM, equivalent to 17 October 1132, given in Abraham Ben Yiju’s draft deed of manumission for his Tulu maidservant Ashu can be trusted, perhaps within weeks of disembarking in Mangalore Abraham had determined to take her as his wife.1 There is nothing in Abraham’s surviving documents to indicate whether or not he left a wife behind in the Middle East but later correspondence certainly points to a growing family in Malibarat: a letter from Madmun, the son of Japheth b. Bundar, written in 1134 greets Abraham’s son Surur and so informs us indirectly that he already had one male child by this date;2 subsequent references to items sent “for the children” and direct greetings to them indicate further births, although no names. No documentation survives to clarify exactly when and where Abraham had purchased his Indian slavefactor Bomma, but he too quickly became an essential participant in Abraham’s business and an acknowledged member of this new household.3 Madmun’s letter of 1134 in fact greets son and slave together; “your son Surur and Bama [Bomma]4 are especially greeted,” he writes.5 Paradoxically this correspondence tells us more about Bomma and about Abraham’s children than about their mother but it was this 1 2

3 4 5

See discussion of this document and its interpretation in Chapter 2, pp. 37, 59 63 with further references to Goitein and Friedman’s extensive discussion and work by Gamliel. S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 356, Margin Line 8 (IB II, 25 6). For other references to this growing family and the later deaths of Abraham’s two sons see ibid., 70 and references therein. Amitav Ghosh, “The Slave of Ms. H. 6.,” Subaltern Studies 7 (1992), 159 220. I follow Ghosh’s suggested restitution of the root B M A as discussed in “The Slave of Ms. H. 6.” Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 356, Margin Lines 8 9 (IB II, 25 6); they are greeted again together in ibid., 315, Lines 36 7 (IB II, 13 15) and similarly 630, Lines 22 3 (IB III, 16). On slaves regarded as part of the Jewish household see discussion in ibid., 604, n.59. On the broader context of slavery from genizah sources see Craig Perry, “The Daily Life of Slaves and the Global Reach of Slavery in Medieval Egypt, 969 1250 CE,” unpublished PhD, Emory University, Atlanta, 2014.

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barely mentioned wife and these half-glimpsed children who anchored Abraham to Malibarat in ways qualitatively different from his closest Jewish business friends who lived “on the road” in constant rotation between India and their wives and children, their homes, in Egypt or the Yemen. Explicit references to a physical home, to a manzil or bayt, also pepper the correspondence from Abraham’s Adenese business associates – Madmun, and his cousins Joseph b. Abraham and Khalaf b. Isaac. A memorandum from Joseph b. Abraham, probably written sometime between 1134 and 1137, appends a note about foodstuffs and other household necessities that he was dispatching to Mangalore from Aden bi-rasm manzilihi al-sharıf. The Arabic term manzil can be translated as either “household” or “home,” giving “for your [Abraham’s] esteemed household” or “for your esteemed home,”6 and the expression reoccurs in another letter dated to between 1135 and 1138.7 Later, around 1140, Khalaf b. Isaac used the variant phrase bi-rasm al-bayt – “for the home” or “for the house” – to describe the ultimate destination of a similar consignment.8 These few explicit references to Abraham’s manzil or bayt provide important and unequivocal evidence for the existence of this residence; many more notes do not bother to specify where such consignments of foodstuffs and household necessities were destined. Abraham emerges from the correspondence as a man as deeply involved in domestic management and home making as he was in the business of trade, and supported in this by the efforts of his three main business partners together with an almost uncountable number of intermediaries.9 The regularity and consistency with which Middle Eastern and Mediterranean household items were dispatched from 6

7 8 9

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 567, Lines 1 2 (IB III, 2) and for the Judaeo Arabic S.D. Goitein and M.A. Friedman, Abraham Ben Yiju India Trader and Manufacturer: India Book III, Cairo Geniza Documents (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010), 80. The term was used by Jewish traders to refer to a wide range of places, from a lodging, a house or even apartment, to their own household. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 571, Lines 14 15 (IB III, 3) and Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 85. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 610, Lines 22 3 (IB III, 11) and for the Judaeo Arabic Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 133. I use the terms “courier” and “intermediary” loosely and interchangeably. This was not yet the formalized system of professional couriers and intermediaries identified by Gagan D.S. Sood in the eighteenth century (see his India and the Islamic Heartlands: An Eighteenth century World of Circulation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), particularly chapter 5 on “Language, Writing and Couriers”). The processes seen here are closer to those explored by Sebouh Aslanian in From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

Making Homes and Friends

69

Aden to Malibarat emerges as an important and distinctive aspect of this body of mercantile correspondence. In all, the documents record the dispatch of twenty-seven10 different types of object, foodstuff or substance to this Indo-Ifriqiyan Jewish home in Malibarat. Of course, these documents privilege mobility – the things and foodstuffs imported into Malibarat via Aden – since these exchanges were underpinned by written correspondence. Local things did not leave the same written traces, not because they were necessarily less present but because they could be obtained directly; they did not need to be written for. Chapter 4 engages more holistically with the balance between local and “global” in the dining culture of West Asian merchant elites in Malibarat. In this chapter, I begin by exploring the larger social and business context within which this home making took place and suggest that in Malibarat, well beyond the limits of the commercial circulation of many Mediterranean foodstuffs and commodities, merchant letters were essential vehicles not only for business but for the business of home making and ultimately the business of identity. In the process this chapter addresses important questions about the relationship between the domestic and the mercantile and the agency of material things within business relationships. The India Book documents allow us to unpack parts of Abraham’s luggage in sometimes startling detail, to map the social and geographical networks through which he accrued his domestic assemblage and to understand the “continuities” he packed when he finally returned west. At present these meticulously documented household contents must necessarily remain detached from any discussion of Abraham’s actual house or indeed from the wider built environment within which it sat. Abraham’s manzil was probably located somewhere near the old port area or Bandar, but we cannot be certain. The urban history of Mangalore, as indeed the other ports of northern Malibarat, is known only in the broadest outlines11 and it is frustrating to be able to reconstruct the contents of Abraham’s manzil in sometimes startling detail while lacking a clear understanding of its broader context. For the moment these aspects of Abraham’s life and the larger history of Malibarat must remain out of focus as we turn to those areas where new written sources provide data of a uniquely high resolution and quality.

10

11

I count “glass” as one category rather than enumerating the different types of container dispatched, similarly for textiles, kohl and gums. Other botanical substances and chemi cals are counted individually. But for an important start see B.M. Ravindra and D. Venkat Reddy, “Neotectonic Evolution of Coastal Rivers of Mangalore, Karavali Karnataka, India,” International Journal of Earth Sciences and Engineering 4, no. 4 (2011), 561 74.

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Part I A Mediterranean Society in Malibarat

Things of “No Importance” and Other Household Orders The most obvious and plentiful references to Abraham’s busy involvement in making his home feature in the asides, addenda and postscripts of business letters recording the dispatch of consignments of home essentials to Malibarat. Joseph b. Abraham’s mention of Abraham’s manzil cited earlier occurs in one such addendum and it is worth quoting it in its entirety: There was dispatched to your excellency for your esteemed household what has no importance and no value (ma¯ la¯ khatar lahu wa la¯ qı¯ma), namely a bottle of raisins; a ruba¯ciyya [roughly 10 kilograms]12 of almonds and a ruba¯ciyya of soap (sabū n); an embroidered kerchief (mandı¯l) woven in Aden; five dasts [dozen ˙ 13 sheets] of Egyptian paper; half an ounce of civet; half a pound of kohl; and half a pound of mastic gum. The kerchief, civet, paper, kohl and gum are all in one piece of cloth, on which is written your excellency’s name. All of this is sent together with the aforementioned Sheikh Maymū n. And peace.14

Similar passages appear in the correspondence of Madmun and Khalaf b. Isaac, and in total sixteen of the twenty-three surviving letters or memoranda sent to Abraham in India include discussions about consignments of household goods. Each correspondent displays his own particularities in terms of the information recorded and the place in his letter he noted this but together these passages reveal a world of personal provisioning and couriering indispensable to mobile lives and yet all but invisible in other contemporary Indian Ocean sources. Table 1 sets out this data. Madmun sometimes refers to the items he was sending Abraham as hadiya, Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic for “gift” or “present,”15 but more commonly correspondents choose to politely underline the (fictitious) low value of the items sent. As in Joseph b. Abraham’s addendum, these consignments are repeatedly introduced as “what has no importance and no value” or variations around this phraseology. In effect, as Goitein and Friedman realized, the items mentioned in these passages were sent free of charge. In one instance Khalaf b. Isaac makes this bluntly clear, clarifying to Abraham that the kohl, samgh gum ˙ 12 13 14 15

For a discussion of this measure see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 314, n.14. On a dast and more specifically dasts of paper see ibid., 304, discussion in n.9. Ibid., 567, Lines 1 4 (IB III, 2) and for the Judaeo Arabic, Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 80. Surviving correspondence records his use of the term hadiya on only three occasions, two of them in his dealings with Abraham, see lB II, 25 6, letter of c. 1134 (Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 356, Line 10 and for the Judaeo Arabic S.D. Goitein and Mordechai Akiva Friedman, Madmun Nagid of Yemen and the India Trade: India Book II, Cairo Geniza Documents [Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010], 200); IB II, 21 4, 1135 (India Traders, 346, Line 8 and for the Judaeo Arabic Madmun, 182).

1133

II, 20

II, 25–6

c 1134

II, 16–19 1133–40

Datea

IB doc

2

rosewater

sugar and raisins

(misrı¯ h Talhı¯)i ˙

paper (waraq)

/ / /

6 ruba¯ ciyyas

1 “piece”

brazilwood boxes

brazilwood boxes (bakka¯miya)

/

3 dastsj

raisins (zabı¯b)g 2

sugar (sukkar)

1 ruba¯ ciyya

soap (sa¯bū n)e

f

2 ruba¯ ciyyasd

sugar and raisinsc /

1 “piece” (qit ca) /

rosewater

basket (qawsara)b

Packing

½ basket

Quantity

dates

Item

Items dispatched

Madmun b Hasan

Madmun b Hasan

Madmun b Hasan

Sent by

/

/

Mangalore

Destination

Table 1 Household items dispatched to Abraham in Malibarat at no charge.

/

Abu Ghalib, the ship’s captain

Abu Said b Mahfuz

Courier/s

/

/

al-Mubarak

Ship

Other

postscript

postscript

”

“a gift (hadiya) for your son ”

“Please accept wishes for the most consummate wellbeing of yourself; your son Surū r and Bama are especially greeted ”

“If you have any need or service ”

“Your servant has sent to you ”

“I sent you

end, with “I sent you ” autograph “Please honor me to do postscriptum about any errand for you ” the soap (Line 13)

Position in document

1

Quantity

1 ruba¯ ciyya

/ /

fū ta (goat-wool) 1

paper (Talh¯ı, ˙ ˙ large)

15 sheets

/

/

/

1

c 1135–38 maqtac (Alexandrian)

¼ mikya¯l s

III, 3

1

bizr baql r

/

coral

c 1135

II, 21–4

1 dast

mastic gumo (mastaka’)

paper (waraq baya¯d)q

½ ratl n

½ ratl

kohlm

“all in one piece of cloth”

/

10 (?) ruba¯ ciyyas /

½ ū qiya l

civet (zaba¯d)k

Sent by

Joseph b Abraham

Madmun b Hasan

bottle (qinnı¯na) Joseph b Abraham

/

Packing

sugar and raisins

5 dasts

paper (misrı¯)

kerchief 1 (mandı¯l) (Aden)

soap

g

Items dispatched

almonds (lawz) 1 ruba¯ ciyya

c 1134–37 raisins

III, 2

Item

Datea

IB doc

Table 1 (cont.)

/

Mangalore p

Mangalore

Destination

Na¯khuda¯ Mahruz

Position in document

/

postscript (margin)

mid-letter

ship of na¯khuda¯ postscript Mahruz

Ship

Shaykh Abu-l- / Khayr and Bomma

Shaykh Maymun, the Muslim

Courier/s

“ for your esteemed household what has no value or importance ”

Coral for son Surur

“A gift (hadiya) from me to you ”

“ for your esteemed household what has no importance and no value ”

Other

c 1136–39 white sugar 1 (sukkar abyad)

maqtac (Alexandrian)

/

leather mat (nat c) (Abyssinian)v

t

Madmun b Hasan

“in a piece of cloth”

brazilwood box Joseph b (large) Abraham

bottles

1

sugar

bottles

/

/

raisins

/ /

/

basket (qawsara)

paper (baghda¯dı¯)

g in a mazza

brazilwood box (large)

brazilwood box (large)

brazilwood box (large)

fū tas (Egyptian) 2

III, 4–6

½ ratl

1

samgh gum

dates

½ ratl

vitriol (za¯j)

c 1136

1 ū qiya

ladanum (la¯dan)

II, 30u

5 ratls

½ ratl

1

soap

kohl

1

raisins

costus (qust)

1

sugar

/

/

Shaykh Abu c Ali b Tayyib al-Misri

/

ship of Fidyar

/

towards beginning “I sent what has no of letter importance and is not worth mentioning ”

mid-letter

III, 1

III, 4-6 (cont )

IB doc

paper (misrı¯, small size) c ilk gum

1 ratl

½ ratl

3 ū qiyyas

5 dasts

7 molds

ilk gum

c

paper (misrı¯)

cheese (hala¯l)

1 ratl

costus

litharge (martak)

1 ratl

kohl (Maghrebi)

vitriol

1

raisins

g

2 ruba¯ ciyyas

½ ratl

4 dasts

g

Quantity

Items dispatched

kohl (Isfahani) ½ ratl

Item

c 1137–40 white sugar

Datea

Table 1 (cont.)

Sent by

in a little basket

“in a mazza”

glass bottle “firmly set in a basket”

unknown but Joseph b packaged Abraham separately as 2 itemsw

in a mazza (with brass cullet)

Packing

/

Destination

Ship

Shaykh Ahmad, / the captain, b Abu-l-Faraj

Courier/s

postscript

Position in document

“I am sending you what has no importance or value ”

“Please accept this in return for some of your services.”

Other

After 29 July 1139

III, 11

III, 12–14 1146

After 1138

III, 10

II, 13–15 c 1130s

½ ratl

½ ratl

½ ratl

kohl

samgh gum

vitriol

1

1

sugar

raisins

/

/

/

bottle

bottle

Khalaf b Isaac

/

/

Muwaffaq al-cAsha’iri

/

/

1 ratl

kohl (Maghrebi)

/

Abu-l-Surur(?) ship of Ibn al-Muqaddam

“both in one case”

2

/

Abu-l-Surur(?)z ship of Ibn al-Muqaddam

stone pan (miqla)

/

Shaykh Abu-l- ship of Hasan al-Fidyar al-Mahalli

c Abd al-Masih / al-Shammas (the Deacon)

Muwaffaq al-cAsha’iri

Khalaf b Isaac

Dahfattan (?)y

Mangalorex

/

bottles

Khalaf b Isaac

Madmun b Hasan

sieve (munkhal) 1

2

/

1

leather mat (nat c) (Abyssinian)

raisins

bottle

1

sugar

/

2 ruba¯ ciyyas

sugar and raisins

/ /

1

2 dasts

paper (fine, large, waraq sulta¯nı¯)

wrapped in canvas

dabı¯qı¯ scarf

6

leather mat (hası¯r) (Berbera)

”

end of letter

mid-letter

“I sent you what has no importance for the children ” “This is from me It cost nothing (no charge) ”

“God, the Exalted, made it possible for me to forward to you for your household ”

postscript (margin) “I sent what has no importance or value ”

towards beginning “I have sent you of letter

III, 9

III, 16

g

bottles

Khalaf b Isaac

Khalaf b Isaac

Sent by

bottle / /

1

1 ruba¯ ciyya

1 ruba¯ ciyya

almonds

“wrapped in a Joseph b piece of cloth” Abraham

soap

1

1 dast 12 sheets

/

2

2 dasts

paper (Talh¯ı) ˙ ˙ wine (nabı¯dh)

c 1148–49 maqtac

paper (misrı¯)

bottles bottle

/

/

1

1 ratl

paper (baya¯d)

costus

/

/

bottle

bottles

bottles

Packing

2

10 sheets

samgh gum

19 July – 17 sugar August almonds 1148 raisins

½ ratl

½ ratl

vitriol

30 July – 27 sugar 2 August raisins 2 1147 almonds 1 (topped up with sugar)

Quantity

III, 15

Item

Datea

Items dispatched

IB doc

Table 1 (cont.)

/

Mangalore

Mangalore

Destination

na¯khuda¯ Mahruz

the na¯khuda¯

Shaykh Abu Ali Ibn al-Halla c

Courier/s end of letter

Position in document

ship of Shaykh mid-letter Madmun

ship of Shaykh end of letter and Madmun postscript

/

Ship

sent

”

“ what has no importance ”

“If you have any order or require any service, please honor me with it ”

“I sent what has no importance or value, for the children ”

“I could not get hold of arsenic in the market”

“I

Other

b

Table organized by approximate date of letter not by IB number. As noted elsewhere in Goitein and Friedman’s India Traders the term is still used in Aden for a particular type of basket for dates; recently observed examples are recorded at 1.2 m in diameter by 50 to 60 cm deep (325, n.22). c It is unclear whether each item was packaged separately or whether the two were carried together. IB III, 15 mentions a bottle of almonds that had been topped up with sugar ibid., 625–6, Lines 45–7. d One ruba¯ ciyya is roughly equivalent to 10 kg. Friedman observes its wide use in India Book documents, see discussion in Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 314, n.14. e Likely an Egyptian import which may have come, in turn, from Ifriqiya (see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, 344 and n.17 on Tunisian soap in Egypt). f An Egyptian import, see sources on the Egyptian sugar industry in Chapter 8, p. 225, n.20. g Probably a Yemeni product, see Chapter 5, p. 137. h For a fascinating discussion of whether geographical appellations – misrı¯, baghdadı¯, hama¯wı¯, sha¯mı¯ etc. – designate the origin of the paper, or perhaps a size of sheet, ˙ ˙ or both, see A. D’Ottone, “La carta in Yemen: osservazioni sulle provenineze e i materiali,” Gazette du Livre Médiéval 45 (2004), 56–8. i Dozy defines talh¯ıyah as a sheet of paper “telle qu’elle sort de la fabrique,” one assumes therefore uncut and unsized, see Reinhardt P.A. Dozy, Supplément aux ˙ ˙ dictionnaires arabes, 3rd edn (Leiden and Paris: Brill and G.P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1967), vol. 2, 52. j References to dasts in the letters sometimes explain that a dast consisted of twelve items, thus “a dozen.” See Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 590, Line 24 “a dast of 12 sheets of Talh¯ı paper” and further discussion in ibid., 30, n.9. ˙ ˙ k Goitein considered civet – the secretion of one of many species of civet cat – a Far Eastern substance and was perplexed by its circuitous route to south India. However, civets are found widely across eastern Africa and South and East Asia (Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 567, n.25). Abyssinian civet is later documented as an import to Aden (Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les Sultans Rasulides du Yémen (626–858/1229–1454) [Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010], 406, n.131). l 1/12th of a ratl, and thus a weight that varied regionally and over time; also transliterated wiqiyya by some. ˙ m Origin unspecified but other consignments are specified to be Maghrebi or Isfahani. Spanish kohl was also available in Aden, see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 511, Line 16. n A ratl is roughly equivalent to one pound (1 lb) although like all weights it varied regionally and over time. ˙ o Mastic gum (mastaka’) and the other tree resins Abraham received such as cilk and samgh gum were Mediterranean products, see Goitein and Friedman, India ˙˙ ˙ Traders, 561, n.54 for a discussion of these and Vallet, Arabie marchande, 405. p This document discusses the delivery of letters “for the people in Mangalore” which are to be delivered personally, thus suggesting that the goods and household items were destined for this port (India Traders, 349, Lines 7–8). q Simply translated as “white” in ibid., 346, Line 9; the term sometimes designated “paper.”

a

Translated by Goitein and Friedman as generic “seeds for nibbling” (ibid., 346 and n.65), the term bizr al-baqla al-hamqa¯’ designated purslane seeds, commonly ˙ used in medicine notably for reducing thirst and this identification is more likely (further discussed in Chapter 8, p. 230). s Described as “a small measure for dry goods or liquids,” see India Traders, 346, n.65. t See discussion of this container in ibid., 561, n.49 where it is identified as a Yemeni term, “probably an earthen vessel.” u The letter is fragmentary and it is not exactly clear in which context these items passed to Abraham, and whether they were charged for or not; however, as the assemblage includes items most often sent at no charge such as raisins and sugar I include them in this category. v Further discussed in Chapter 4, pp. 124–5. w The letter specifies that these items make five “packages” (shukhū s) in total, see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 562, Line 13 and n.59. x The letter discusses business between Aden and Mangalore. y Goitein and Friedman’s edition suggests that this letter and items were dispatched to Abraham at Dahfattan (modern Dharmadom) but this is not explicitly stated in the letter (India Traders, 596). z The name of the courier is missing but Goitein and Friedman suggest Abu-l-Surur who is mentioned alongside Muwaffaq al-cAsha‘iri earlier in the letter (India Traders, 613, n.42).

r

Making Homes and Friends

79

and vitriol he was sending were “from me . . . no charge.”16 In the English and Hebrew editions of these documents the sixteen assemblages of this type are consistently identified by separate subheadings as “gifts” or “presents.” S.D. Goitein believed that, since similar packages are only mentioned in around one in fifty Mediterranean letters, this must reflect “a custom taken over from the Indian merchants.”17 The India traders inhabited a world thick with gift-exchange – from the recognizable “presents” exchanged between family members, via the makarim or “gifts of honor” made to state officials or communal leaders, through to more formal systems of merchant tribute – yet Joseph b. Abraham’s “present” and others like it fit none of these categories. In fact, the use of the terms “present” and “gift” in the edited texts needs to be treated with caution. Only one of Abraham’s business colleagues, and then only occasionally, used the term hadiya, “gift,” “present”: the term occurs only in letters from Madmun and is used only twice (see Table 1). Goitein’s expansion of the term hadiya to all consignments that were not charged for offered an apparently clear and immediate context within which to understand these items but one which fundamentally misrepresents their nature and function. There is, in addition, no evidence to suggest a particular Indian mercantile practice at work here. Since Goitein wrote, our knowledge of systems of exchange and circulation across premodern Eurasia has expanded considerably18 and yet no evidence for a distinctively Indian mercantile practice of dispatching gifts alongside commercial consignments has emerged thus far.19 In the following sections I wish to propose that the consignments sent at no charge belong alongside “paid-for” household orders and that both form an integral part of the extended services (sing. khidma, pl. khidam) that 16 17

18

19

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 620, Line 44 (IB III, 12 14). Ibid., 10, largely repeating an earlier observation in S.D. Goitein, “Letters and Documents on the India Trade in Medieval Times,” in Studies in Islamic Trade and Institutions (Leiden: Brill, 1966), 334. For a major project and the resulting edited volume see Filippo Carlà and Maja Gori (eds.), Gift Giving and the “Embedded” Economy in the Ancient World (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014). The long historiography of gift studies is treated in Harry Liebersohn, The Return of the Gift: European History of a Global Idea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). South Asia has lagged in the study of both premodern epistolary cultures and gift exchange but note the important study of offerings, danadharma, by Jonathan Parry, “The Gift, the Indian Gift and the ‘Indian Gift’,” Man 21, no. 3 (1986), 453 73. Some textual evidence on more conventional gift exchange can be found in the letters exchanged between Buddhist scholars in India and China; see Prabodh Chandra Bagchi, “Some Letters of Huian Tsang [sic] and his Indian Friends,” in India and China: Interactions through Buddhism and Diplomacy. A Collection of Essays by Professor Prabodh Chandra Bagchi, edited by Tansen Sen and Bangwei Wang (London: Anthem Press, 2009), 65 9.

80

Part I A Mediterranean Society in Malibarat

were fundamental to business relationships and in particular to the system of suhba or reciprocal agency that constituted the backbone of trade at this ˙ ˙ period. Shopping and Shopping Lists in the India Book Khalaf b. Isaac’s letter in which he clarifies that the consignment of kohl, samgh gum and vitriol was not charged for helpfully includes other details ˙ that begin to set this practice in the broader context it requires. Thus, while these items were not to be charged, Khalaf specifies that the thirty sheets of paper would be charged and should be added to his account. Khalaf b. Isaac’s careful disentangling of what was and what was not to be charged, and what should therefore feature in his account, alerts us to the presence of other household items in this correspondence that were charged for, and thus belong to a wider world of transoceanic shopping. The account summary of business between Madmun and Abraham for the year 1134 simply includes, alongside other business transactions, charges for the purchase of a number of household items: jawziya aljabal “nougat [a product of] the highlands”;20 sorghum (dhurra); Lakhabı glass from the Adenese suburb of the same name; a dast of Egyptian tumblers and four glass bottles in baskets; as well as clothes – two Egyptian fū tas, a sharabiyya and a maqtac robe to a total cost of over 17 ˙ ˙ Yemeni or malikı dinars (equivalent to roughly 7½ Egyptian dinars).21 His account for the following year records a similarly eclectic array of items.22 Abraham and his peers were too influential and wealthy to need to conduct a small-scale, peddler trade in Middle Eastern household essentials and I propose that, whereas they are currently described simply as “consumer goods” exported to India,23 these items be read instead as further household orders, ones that were this time charged for. To get a sense of the scale of Abraham’s expenses it is helpful to cite Goitein’s estimate that two Egyptian dinars was sufficient to cover the total monthly expenditure – rent, food and ancillary expenses – of a whole family of middling artisans, meaning that the household order just mentioned

20 21

22 23

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 19 where these are described as “Yemeni sweet meats made of walnuts.” Ibid., 354, Lines 1 10 of II, 26 (IB II, 25 6), and for the Judaeo Arabic, Goitein and Friedman, Madmun, 199. The exchange rate to the Egyptian dinar varied but at the time of this account is reckoned at 1 Egyptian dinar to 2.35 malikı¯ dinars (Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 18). Other rates discussed in ibid., 172, n.27. Ibid., 344 6, Lines 38 49 of II, 23 and 1 7 of II, 24 (IB II, 21 4); for the Judaeo Arabic, Goitein and Friedman, Madmun, 182 3. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 19.

Making Homes and Friends

81

represented, very roughly, the equivalent of four months’ total expenditure for a more modest household.24 These orders are less obvious than the “presents” and things of “no importance” just discussed since they are not prefaced by any distinctive introductory phraseology but integrated into lists of commercial items for which payment is due, “you owe . . .” Nevertheless, as we have seen, the mainstay of Abraham’s imports from Aden, and those of his closest business friends, focused around raw metals and cullet, an entirely distinct assemblage from the household orders under discussion. Only two commodities, sugar and raisins, span the two assemblages but these are mentioned in only one letter as bulk-traded commodities, and otherwise feature as items sent free of charge.25 These paid-for household items are also clearly distinguishable from the bulk of commercial transactions because of the small quantities involved: these are single items or small sets. Allusions to other charged household orders are scattered throughout the main text of the correspondence between Abraham in Malibarat and his Adenese business friends. A total of six such orders can be identified on the basis of the above-mentioned criteria, and Table 2 sets out their contents. Frustratingly, without copies of Abraham’s own correspondence from India we have no direct record of his requests, in effect his shopping lists, although several letters directly refer to these lost orders. In a letter dated after 1138 Khalaf b. Isaac switches from discussing recent deliveries to giving an update “about the necessities” (wa amma al-hawa’ij) Abraham had requested.26 ˙ of years later discusses another Another letter from Khalaf a couple request (the Arabic verb used is talaba) from Abraham for glassware.27 ˙ These fragmentary conversations, and others besides, point to lost shopping orders and a far more extensive circulation of paid household items than is preserved in the surviving documents. These passages are not new discoveries. Mordechai Akiva Friedman observed in 2008 that the documents contain evidence for the regular shipment of goods destined for “the personal use of the Jewish merchant 24

25 26

27

S.D. Goitein in A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 93), vol. 1, 359. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 317, Line 15 (IB II, 13 15). Ibid., 600, Lines 38 9 (IB III, 10) and Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 119. For the full order, Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 600 2, Lines 38 47 (IB III, 10). Although Goitein and Friedman translate hawa¯’ij, plural of ha¯ja, as “things,” in this context, given ˙ ˙ items and offers to fulfill any “need” the clear terminological relationship between these (ha¯ja), I suggest that the English “necessities” perhaps better reflects the nature of the ˙ items sent. Specifically cups (ka’s) and lamps (qindı¯l); see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 610, Line 25 (IB III, 11) and Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 133.

Date

II, 25–6

c 1134

II, 16–19 1133–40

IB doc

3 dinars

/

/

wheat (burr)b

sorghum (dhurra)

11/6th dinar /

/

/

3 dinars minus ¼

nougat (jawziya) / (Yemeni highlands)

/ /

1

/

“in a package”

/

basket (qawsara)

Packing

kerchief (mandı¯l, 2 Manari)

maqta

6 dinars

5 dinars

1

burū jı¯ carpet

c

1 dinar

leather mats 10 (hası¯r) (Berbera)

2¾ malikı¯ dinars

Costa

2 dinars

1 basket/ 115 ratls

Quantity

leather mat (nat c) 1 (Abyssinian)

dates

Item

Items dispatched

Madmun b Hasan

Madmun b Hasan

Sent by

/

/

Destination

Table 2 Household items dispatched to Abraham in Malibarat and charged for.

Ship

/

Abu Sacid b Mahfuz (via Mangalore)

/

/

Abu Ghalib, the / ship’s captain

Courier/s

mid-letter

mid-letter

Position in document

” Dispatched with “a gift (hadiya) for your son” (see Table 1)

“You owe

Dispatched with goods not charged for (see Table 1)

“ charged to you ”

Other

II, 21–4g c 1135

/

1 dast

4

glass (Lakhabi)

bowls (aqda¯h)d (Egyptian)

bottles (glass)

4 dinars

/ /

⅔ dinar ⅓ dinar

iron pan (miqla) 1

1

12 ratls

sieve

soap

3½ dinars

fū ta (wool, fulled)

1

4 dinars

fū tas (Egyptian, 2 patterned)

1 nisa¯fı¯

/

1 dinar

leather mat (nat c) 1

/

/

/

/

1 nisa¯fı¯

leather mat 4 (hası¯r) (Berbera)

jugs (rata¯lı¯) (glass)

1 dinar

“firmly set in baskets”

/

“firmly set in baskets”

1 nisa¯fı¯ f 5 nisa¯fı¯s

/

/

/

/

/

6 qira¯tse

¾ dinar

2½ dinars

2½ dinars

5

i

/

1

maqtac

glass (zaja¯j)h

1

shara¯biyya (dress item)c

fū tas (Egyptian) 2

Madmun b Hasan

/

g

g likely Abul-Khayr and Bomma

Ibn Qattus

/

Saydan b Abu-l-Fath

mid-letter

“You owe ” dispatched with “a gift (hadiya)” (see Table 1)

After 29 July 1139

III, 12–14 1146

III, 11

2

30 sheets

lamps (qandı¯l) (glass)n

paper (qirta¯s)o

/

wheat (burr)

13

5

green bottles

g

drinking bowl (ka¯s) (glass)

5

10

68

1

1 dinar

/

/

/

11 qı¯ra¯ts

1 nisa¯fı¯

1 nisa¯fı¯

Costa

Items dispatched

Quantity

jugs (arta¯l)l (glass)

drinking cups (kı¯sa¯n)k (glass)

bowls (aqda¯h) (glass)

After 1138 iron frying pan (ta¯jin)j

III, 10

Item

Date

IB doc

Table 2 (cont.)

/

/

/

“in baskets”

(purchased with a basket costing 1 qı¯ra¯t)

/

Packing

Khalaf b Isaac

Khalaf b Isaac

Madmun b Hasan

Khalaf b Isaac

Sent by

/

/

/

/

Destination

/

/

ship of Fidyar

/

Ship

Shaykh Abu cAli ship b Tayyib of Fidyar al-Misri

/

/

na¯khuda¯ Muhammad

/

Courier/s

end of letter

mid-letter

mid-letter

Position in document

”m

”

to

“As to the dinar for the paper, add it to my, your servant’s, account ”

“You asked buy I bought you

“You ordered

Dispatched with items not charged for (see Table 1)

“As to the goods ordered by you ”

Other

a Amounts recorded in local Yemeni malikı¯ dinars, see p. 51, n.58 and p. 80, n.21 for equivalences in Egyptian dinars, and for further references. b Goitein and Friedman interpret this as wheat Abraham had forwarded from Mangalore to na¯khuda¯ Abu Said b. Mahfuz (India Traders, 354, n.8). Given the context, I suggest that this may be read instead as money owed by Abraham to the na¯khuda¯ for the wheat the former had couriered to him out of Mangalore, presumably when Abraham was doing business elsewhere on the coast. c Dress item, see discussion in India Traders, 354, n.9. d Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 354, Line 8 translate aqda¯h (sing. qadah) as “tumblers.” I prefer “bowls” and the term is applied to a wide variety of vessel ˙ ˙ forms used for drinking. e 1/24th of a dinar. f As its name suggests, half a malikı¯ dinar. g The same account includes ¼ dinar given to Bomma for purchasing an unspecified number of “glass tumblers” (aqda¯h zaja¯j) (India Traders, 345, Line 45). ˙ h Quantities unspecified, but IB III, 10 (ibid., 601, Lines 41–4) suggests that if one nisa¯fı¯ was enough to purchase sixty-eight glass tumblers, ten bowls and five ˙ cups, then 5 nisa¯fı¯s would have represented a substantial purchase of glasswares. ˙ i Sing. arta¯l. Goitein translated “cups,” Friedman proposes “jars.” Given the root of the term and its association with the measure the ratl, roughly equivalent to ˙ ˙ a pint, I suggest that “jugs” is more appropriate (India Traders, 345, n.51). j A later letter records that Khalaf had in fact forgotten the pan: “I had forgotten it in my house (bayt) that day and did not send it” (India Traders, 610, Lines 21–22). k Goitein and Friedman prefer “tumblers,” see discussion by Friedman of the vessel terminology in India Taders, 601, n.40 (IB II, 10). l Ibid. and see n.i above. m The letter makes clear that Khalaf was unable to fulfill Abraham’s original order for twenty bowls and four lamps as the local glassware production had been commandeered by Bilal b. Jarir for export to Sri Lanka (India Traders, 610–11, Lines 25–31). n Probably a stemmed or conical lamp with a bowl-like body that would have sat in a metal holder of some sort; the general type is well represented in glass from Qusayr al-Qadim. See Carol Meyer, Glass from Quseir al-Qadim and the Indian Ocean Trade (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1992), 84–5, who also notes similar finds from al-Qaraw near Aden active from the late twelfth century (see Donald Whitcomb, “Islamic Archaeology in Aden and the Hadhramaut,” in Araby the Blest, edited by Daniel T. Potts (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press, 1988), 245). o Usually a term designating parchment or papyrus, as Goitein and Friedman specify; here the term likely designates rag paper rather than finer quality paper, see India Traders, 620, n.35.

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in India and his family.”28 However, while it seems obvious that the majority of the household items sent were in demand precisely because they were not available commercially in Malibarat, this practice has not been critically evaluated or theorized, and the significance of these passages has been largely overlooked.29 Their potential for the historical study of the “Mediterranean Society” in India, as indeed in the Yemen, has been overshadowed by the more obviously commercial content of this correspondence and its ability to contribute very directly to existing economic and business histories.30 The use of the label “present” has further separated consignments sent at no charge from the paid household orders with which they so obviously overlap, and has excluded both from discussions of the bigger, central business of Jewish trade. The context and function that I attribute to this data are entirely new. Shopping for Family and Friends Putting aside for now the matter of whether items were charged or not, the documentary genizah attests to widespread practices of informal provisioning and “shopping,” cases in which individuals selected and then dispatched objects or indeed foodstuffs to distant colleagues, friends or family, or helped as intermediaries or couriers in the transport of such consignments. A search across the first three India Books alone yields a rich range of examples that establish the currency of such provisioning and shopping services; the pattern seen in Abraham’s correspondence is not unique. In India and the Yemen Jewish merchants turned to contacts in the west, to the Yemen and beyond to Egypt, depending on where they were based, to procure items unavailable at their site of sojourn or residence. Two documents testify to Abraham’s own role in shopping for India traders in India while he was back in the Yemen between 1140 and 1145. One account lists small quantities of foodstuffs, paper, clothes, furnishings and jewellery which Abraham had bought and shipped out to the trader Abu cAbdallah Ibn al-Kata’ib.31 And, of course, we have 28 29

30

31

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 60. Ranabir Chakravarti, “Indian Trade through Jewish Geniza Letters (1000 1300),” Studies in People’s History 2, no. 1 (2015), 37 8, accepts the existence of a separate category of gifts. For example in Chakravarti, “Indian Trade”; equally, Roxani E. Margariti, “Coins and Commerce. Monetization and Cross cultural Collaboration in the Western Indian Ocean (Eleventh to Thirteenth Centuries),” in Religion and Trade: Cross cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000 1900, edited by Francesca Trivellato, Leor Halevi and Catia Antunes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 192 215. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 650 2, Lines 1 21 (IB III, 21).

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the very memorandum around which Abraham later listed his luggage in which Joseph b. Abraham, then in Malibarat, requested Abraham in the Yemen to dispatch to him hard wheat (burr), oil (salıt), honey ( casal) and ˙ other Middle Eastern necessities (hawa’ij).32 In Malibarat Abraham also ˙ acted as an intermediary for other consignments from Aden, and one letter from Joseph b. Abraham instructs him to forward to another trader in Malibarat a satchel containing children’s clothes and a letter;33 other times Abraham sold on foodstuffs he had received to other sojourners.34 In turn, Aden’s Jewish community occasionally looked to the Fatimid capital and to Fustat for their shopping and household supply. In one business letter Madmun chases up an earlier shopping request for fine ceramic tablewares and rose marmalade,35 items clearly unavailable in the Yemen.36 Elsewhere Joseph b. Abraham requests that a fellow merchant traveling to Egypt purchase or have made house mats and the detailed dimensions provided leave no doubt that this was a personal order for Joseph’s own home.37 Undoubtedly the largest, most impressive order sent to Egypt from Aden is that which Joseph b. Abraham passed sometime in the 1130s for clothing, tablewares and all manner of foodstuffs in preparation for his son’s wedding.38 But it was not only Mediterranean things that traveled east; Egyptians and Yemenis also shopped for Indian Ocean objects and foodstuffs via intermediaries in the east. Abraham regularly sent his business partners Indian household items such as locks, qasca bowls or waterskins of preserved fruits – whether charged for or not, we˙ do not know.39 A letter of Mahruz b. Jacob written in Aden alludes to consignments of Indian textiles as well as a slave (cabd) that he had dispatched earlier to Egypt at his nephew’s request and clearly for the latter’s personal consumption.40 The principal obstacle to capturing other past exchanges of this type is the absence of a parallel textual record, since things themselves only rarely carry evidence of the system of exchange within which they moved, let alone the meanings and values they carried. Although hazy by 32 33 34 35 36 37 39 40

Ibid., 585 6 (IB III, 8), short English summary with full edition in Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 103 7 and particularly 104, Lines 12 13. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 562, Lines 16 19 (IB III, 1). For wheat supplied in India to the Muslim Abu cAli al Misri see ibid., 659, Lines 5 6 (IB III, 23). Ibid., 375, Lines 49 52 (IB II, 32), order placed by Madmun in Aden with a colleague who had traveled to Fustat. For other examples see ibid., 448 9, Lines 36 49 (IB II, 46) and 455, Lines 2 9 (IB II, 48). Ibid., 411 12, Lines 1 5 (IB II, 43). 38 Ibid., 421 9 (IB II, 44). See references in ibid., 326, Lines 27 8 (IB II, 16 19); 569, Line 3 (IB III, 3); 625, Lines 34 8 (IB III, 15); 629, Line 15 (IB III, 16). Ibid., 481 2, Lines 12 20 (IB II, 56 7).

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comparison, a wide range of textual sources bear witness to the longer history of such practices, at least across western Eurasia. Undoubtedly some of the most voluminous comparable evidence comes from the edges of the Roman Empire, where large-scale mobilities coupled with widespread literacy have ensured good textual survivals of this type of exchange between personnel stationed in military outposts and their families or colleagues. From the fort of Vindolanda in northern Britain, via the port of Alexandria, to Wadi Fawakhirin in Egypt’s Eastern Desert and Petra in Arabia, wooden tablets, papyri and ostraca record an extensive individual circulation of foodstuffs, clothing and other items, transported by uncountable intermediaries.41 This is probably the context in which we should understand an opaque reference in the firstcentury CE merchant manual the Periplus Maris Erythraei (The Circumnavigation of the Red Sea) to the effect that wheat was brought into various south Indian ports for the use of “those involved in shipping, because the [sc. local] merchants do not use it.”42 The phrase “those involved in shipping” likely refers to the Greek, bread-eating, crew and shipmasters who were central to Indo-Roman trade at the period. Informal provisioning and couriering must be very ancient, as old as mobility and separation themselves, a potent reminder of the way that things and foods have always reconnected distant people and places through their haptic, gustatory and other qualities. PreRoman examples no doubt remain to be identified and collated43 and a recently published letter from seventh- to sixth-century BCE Yemen written by, or more likely for, a sister sending foodstuffs to her brother offers a welcome early addition to this corpus, as well as a specifically Yemeni precedent.44 41

42 43

44

R.W. Davies, “The Roman Military Diet,” Britannia 2 (1971), 134 6 and more extensive discussion in R.J. Brewer, Birthday of the Eagle: The Second Augustan Legion and the Roman Military Machine (Cardiff: National Museum and Galleries of Wales, 2002), especially chapter 8 “Soldier and Civilian,” 158. For Vindolanda see Alan Bowman and David Thomas, Vindolanda: The Latin Writing Tablets (London: Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies, 1983), for example Tablet 346 (TVI Publication No. 38), 11 13, 379 88. For an overview of formal exchanges see Joe Williams, “Letter Writing, Materiality, and Gifts in Late Antiquity: Some Perspectives on Material Culture,” Journal of Late Antiquity 7, no. 2 (2014), 351 9. Periplus Maris Erythraei, Greek edition and English translation by Lionel Casson as The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 85. Cuneiform tablets excavated at Mari in Mesopotamia record courtly exchanges of food stuffs although their personal nature emerges clearly; see Hanne Nyman, “Feasting on Locusts and Truffles in the Second Millennium BCE,” in Commensality: From Everyday Food to Feast, edited by Susanne Kerner, Cynthia Chou and Morten Warmind (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 151 63. Peter Stein, “Correspondence in Ancient South Arabia,” Asiatische Studien 62, no. 3 (2008), 780 1.

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Thus the fact that close business friends added household items to commercial shipments at no charge need not be seen as unusual in and of itself, and certainly not as distinctively “Indian.” The more pertinent question is to understand the specific system of exchange within which the circulation of our consignments operated among the Jewish community of the twelfth-century Middle East and, within this, the precise nature of the relationship between things charged and not charged. Shopping within Suhba ˙ ˙ For all the emphasis placed on formal business partnerships, by far the majority of business collaborations among Jewish and non-Jewish merchants at this period, from Spain to India, was based around suhba, ˙ ˙ a widely practiced form of business relationship between two individuals which constituted, in Goitein’s words, “the organizational backbone of international trade.”45 Suhba was a strictly one-to-one relationship, for˙ ˙ mally initiated face-to-face, and it gave the two parties the right to designate the other as “an agent for particular goods and to request specified tasks on specified goods through written instructions in a letter.”46 Recent work by Jessica Goldberg has moderated Goitein’s belief that this was an informal system, underlining instead suhba’s “specific obliga˙ ˙ tions and limits, its formal structure in practice.”47 The term has received many translations from “friendship” or “formal friendship” to “informal cooperation” and “informal business cooperation” but I adopt here Jessica Goldberg’s phrase “reciprocal agency.” As Goldberg expresses it, “the exchange of services (khidma, pl. khidam) was expected to be of equal value; any order for commercial services would create a corresponding obligation for the principal [the associate who owned the capital] to carry out reciprocal services at some time or place.”48 Goldberg has also helpfully disentangled the core duties of wikala or “agency” from the array of reciprocal services undertaken under this system. At the core “an individual took responsibility for particular goods and capital and then had the capacity to conduct transactions on them,”49 but beyond this was a less well-defined array of services such as overseeing goods in transit, storing goods or helping other agents in their 45 46

47

Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 5, 277. Jessica L. Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean: The Geniza Merchants and Their Business World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 128. The bibliography is extensive. See further background references in Goldberg and now chapters on suhba in Mark R. Cohen, Maimorides and the Merchants: Jewish Law and Society ˙ ˙ Islamic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). in the Medieval Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 129 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 130, n.40.

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sales. Genizah merchants utilized a specific, Goldberg argues deliberately non-technical, vocabulary to designate these “extras”: these were khidma “service” (pl. khidam), haja “need” and shughl “business.”50 ˙ From the surviving correspondence it is clear that Abraham had established suhba relationships with Madmun and the latter’s cousins, Joseph ˙ ˙ b. Abraham and Khalaf b. Isaac. Although none of the letters explicitly states the existence of this relationship, the very content of the letters and their entreaties to perform reciprocal services (khidma) for one another point to this underpinning.51 Thus in 1133 Madmun invited Abraham, freshly settled in India, to “please honor me to do any need for him [my Lord]” (wa ma kana lahu min haja).52 He reiterated the invitation several years later, ˙ concluding a letter with the offer that “if you have any need (haja) or service ˙ (khidma) I would be happy to take care of them.”53 In the summer of 1148, less than a year before Abraham left India for the last time, it was Khalaf b. Isaac who reminded him that “if my lord has any need or service (wa ma kana li-mawlay min haja aw khidma), please honor me with it.”54 The business circles of˙ this group were obviously much wider than this and all also participated in partnerships and other forms of business relationship, sometimes with each other. Nevertheless relationships of suhba, “reci˙ ˙ procal agency,” are at the very forefront of the surviving correspondence.55 The very generic, non-technical nature of the terms employed – khidma, haja, shughl – made for suhba’s infinite adaptability. At the very ˙ ˙ ˙ edge of the main commercial networks from the Mediterranean and 50 51

52

53 54

55

Ibid. The India Book letters appear to be far less vocal in their references to suhba and ˙ asha¯buna¯, “our associates” or “our professional colleagues,” than the˙ eleventh ˙˙ century correspondence from the Mediterranean; however, this does not mean that the system was not practiced. Goldberg notes that in her core corpus, “67 percent of assignable transactions are done via reciprocal agency” (Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 143). Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 336, Line 10 (IB II, 20) and for the Judaeo Arabic Goitein and Friedman, Madmun, 170. Goitein and Friedman translate ha¯ja as “errand” ˙ suhba relation but I adopt Goldberg’s translation of the term as its use was so specific to ˙ ˙ ships; see Goldberg, Trade and Institutions, 130 and n.40. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 327, Lines 33 4 (IB II, 16 19) and for the Judaeo Arabic Goitein and Friedman, Madmun, 160. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 630, Lines 25 6 (IB III, 16) and for the Judaeo Arabic Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 157. In this instance Goitein and Friedman translate ha¯ja as “order”; however, I follow Goldberg’s translation “need” in order to ˙ better reflect the terminological consistency within the letters. The same vocabulary is found in a letter from Mahruz b. Jacob to Abu Zikri Kohen, see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 483 4, margin “whatever needs or services” (IB II, 56 7). A partnership is referred to in an early set of accounts drawn up by Madmun and which detail the division of a consignment of Indian iron just arrived in Aden between the partners Joseph b. Abraham, Khalaf b. Ishaq and Abraham; Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 323 4, Lines 27 36 (IB II, 16 19).

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Middle East, and even more so beyond them in Malibarat, the range of “services” and “needs” that could legitimately be requested within suhba ˙ and ˙ appears to have been considerably expanded to include the purchase couriering of household items, and they emerge from these sources as a distinctive feature of the practice of trade in this region. In Abraham’s correspondence and that of his colleagues just mentioned, commercial and household orders are discussed side by side, as one order of business, and it is apparent that many household orders were also packed and carried along with small commercial consignments. Understood within suhba as a system of exchange, to write for household items or food ˙provisions, ˙ to shop for a business friend and to dispatch such orders, whether charged or not, was very much a “mercantile affair,” as Jessica Goldberg would define it.56 It is worth underlining too that shopping services also exercised fundamental commercial skills: knowledge of products and their appropriate price, ability to pack items safely and organize their dispatch, and, of course, an understanding of the needs and tastes of the final consumer. The successful performance of shopping or other ancillary services for a business friend indexed a man’s worth and trustworthiness as much as his conduct in an ordinary business dealing. The exchange of these services made homes in Malibarat at the same time as it consolidated suhba relationships: it made business friends. ˙ ˙ It is within this system of exchange that I propose we situate the instances in which payment was withheld on certain items. While these consignments sometimes allowed for the expedition of more personal items, what we should recognize as hadiyas or “gifts” proper, the majority of items are not satisfactorily understood within this category. Instead, by withholding charges on certain items that had been requested, or perhaps adding in supplementary goods or items that they knew would be well received, business associates built up an advance of good will, credit in effect, for the services they had just requested in the main body of their letter, and others they were sure to request of their business friend in the future. One of Joseph b. Abraham’s letters in particular makes this explicit. He refers to a consignment of Middle Eastern necessities he was sending at no charge and explicitly asks Abraham to accept it “in return for some of your services (bi-qubū l dhalika li-bacd khidamik).”57 Joseph b. Abraham’s use of the term khidma (pl. khidam) directly invokes the suhba system, linking the expedition of necessities without charge to ˙ ˙ future services. It is no accident that three out of the four discussions of 56 57

Jessica L. Goldberg, “The Use and Abuse of the Geniza Mercantile Letter,” Journal of Medieval History 38, no. 2 (2012), 127 54. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 576, Line 11 (IB III, 4 6) and for the Judaeo Arabic Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 91.

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service just cited occur alongside or within lists of household necessities being dispatched to India and I would like to suggest that the relationship between the two is thereby made clear.58 As we have seen, there is plenty to suggest that mobile people have always sought to maintain an everyday normal in their translocation and have employed a variety of networks and systems of exchange to help them acquire the things necessary to achieve that. In this broader aim the India traders were no different; how they went about it, however, appears to be a novel translation of reciprocal agency to the Indian Ocean environment. Suhba’s inclusive understanding of service offered a perfect ˙ through ˙ framework which to secure access to these supplies, one independent of kinship networks or the vagaries of friendship by reason of its implicit connection to business relationships and, inevitably, professional reputation. For the India traders, domestic materiality – the making of homes in Malibarat, and indeed in Aden – was deeply entangled with the business of business, of making business friends. Thus a model of business relationship developed in the Islamic Mediterranean was subtly transformed in its translation to the Indian Ocean environment. The Indian household present and packed up in Abraham’s final list of luggage was constituted, in part at least, via a very particular operation of reciprocity and a unique network of social relations. The question of whether Muslim merchants and others operated similar exchanges, whether this is in effect a wider social practice, is something that I hope my colleagues will be able to answer in future. The Etiquette of Shopping Thus far I have suggested that household shopping, charged and not charged, be understood as a single service within suhba. I would like to ˙ ˙ propose that what counted above all else was the sacrifice of time and effort involved in shopping for the other party and organizing the couriering of these items. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the withholding of payment on certain items added another layer to the performance of this service, subtly altering the obligations and dependencies inherent in such exchanges. It is significant in this regard then that, at least in the surviving correspondence, consignments sent at no charge should outnumber paidfor household orders sixteen to six: Abraham’s person and his home were very largely the product of non-monetized exchanges, of a reciprocity of 58

Similarly, an entreaty to “honor me with whatever needs or services for your excellency that may arise” also accompanies the items Mahruz dispatched for his nephew in Egypt; see India Traders, 483 4, Line 34 (IB II, 56 7).

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pure services (khidma). This pattern appears to contrast with shopping orders sent from Aden to Fustat, many of which appear to have been charged for. The following sections consider the two assemblages separately to refine our understanding of the operation of this service between Aden and Malibarat. Analysis of the two assemblages – charged for and not charged – reveals clear-cut patterns suggestive of the operation of a very clear code governing what should not be charged. A significant number of items were sent exclusively at no charge: this included sugar, which features in twelve out of sixteen or 75% of consignments sent at no charge and never features in surviving paid household orders. Likewise raisins, which feature in over 75% of such consignments (thirteen out of sixteen), were never included among paid-for household orders. In two instances where either raisins or sugar are missing from the consignment, the respective writers both apologize for their unavailability, suggesting thereby that they were a standard component of the assemblages sent at no charge.59 Similarly, paper is present in over 50% of uncharged consignments (nine out of sixteen) and is charged on only one occasion.60 Ingredients for inkmaking too – vitriol and gums – feature together in 25% of consignments sent at no charge (four out of sixteen), and are never found in paid household orders. Gums without vitriol feature in a further two consignments sent at no charge. Finally a variety of afawıh or spice-condiments, simple drugs and substances – civet, kohl, costus, ladanum, litharge and purslane seeds – feature in six out of the sixteen consignments sent at no charge and were never included in paid-for household orders. By contrast, tablewares, here principally glasswares from Lakhaba, as well as kitchen utensils such as pans and sieves feature exclusively in charged-for household orders; only in one instance were a sieve and stone pan sent at no charge.61 Dining mats and dress items appear to have occupied a more neutral zone, and might just as easily be paid for as be included in consignments without charge. Of the twenty-four dining mats and one carpet sent to Abraham, although a majority, seventeen, were formally paid for, eight were nevertheless included in other consignments at no charge. Of the sixteen dress items mentioned in the surviving correspondence, eight were purchased as part of household orders while the other eight were included in other consignments at no charge. What explains these patterns? Sugar and raisins stand out particularly here, present in 75% of consignments sent at no charge and never present in paid-for household 59 60

Ibid., 577, Lines 16 18 (IB III, 4 6) and 613, Line 54 (IB III, 11). Ibid., 620, Lines 42 3 and n.35 (IB III, 12 14). 61 Ibid., 610, Line 23 (IB III, 11).

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orders. Chapter 5 discusses raisins as important components of Jewish ritual foods and this specific, cultural need may explain the presence of raisins in these consignments. Nevertheless, it is equally likely that they feature here as primarily sweet foods. As Sidney Mintz observed, “all (or nearly all) mammals like sweetness”; “sweet tastes have a privileged position in contrast to the more variable attitudes towards sour, salty, and bitter tastes.”62 Two letters from Khalaf b. Isaac specify that he sent sugar and raisins “for the children”63 and so suggest that these were sent as sweet treats. Nevertheless, this pattern raises complex questions about the function and symbolism of sweet foodstuffs in the period. Sugar was an important medicinal food and especially so in Malibarat where, as a “cold” substance, Middle Eastern medicine deemed it particularly appropriate for the treatment of fevers or general consumption during hot weather.64 The medicinal value of this sugar may explain why Egyptian sugar was imported to Malibarat rather than sourced in India, the home of sugar cane and an important manufacturer in its own right. However, sugar carried many more uses and bundled meanings far more appropriate to this context. Tastes are frequently imbued with moral or emotional associations, and the sweet and sociable associations of sugar and raisins made these particularly suitable items to waive charges on. Indeed, we may consider whether it was in fact considered improper to ever charge for such items. Ethnographic work in the Yemen points to sugar’s association with both generosity and hospitality. At Zabid Anne Meneley observed that “sugar is an index of generosity; to ask if someone wants sugar [in their tea] implies that the host or hostess is a bakhil or bakhila (miser),”65 or again, “sugar is what makes a drink an appropriate item for hospitality. As in our own lexicon, ‘sweetness’ is thought to be a positive quality of a person.”66 Evidence from Fatimid Egypt certainly indicates that sugar was among the items publicly distributed by the Caliph during Ramadan and other celebrations, or given to charitable institutions for distribution to the populous.67 Sugar and raisins may indeed be part of an even larger sweet assemblage and consignments to Abraham often feature other sweet foods 62 63 64

65 66

S.W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York and London: Penguin, 1985), 16, 17. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 619, Lines 39 40 (IB III, 12 14) and 629, Lines 16 20 (III, 16). Paulina B. Lewicka, “Diet as Culture. On the Medical Context of Food Consumption in the Medieval Middle East,” History Compass 12, no. 7 (2014), 611; see much broader survey in Sato Tsugitaka, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2015), chapter 5, “Sugar as Medicine.” Anne Meneley, “Food and Morality in the Yemen,” in Food: Ethnographic Encounters, edited by Leo Coleman (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2011), 23. Ibid., 24. 67 See Sato, Sugar, 123 5, 131.

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such as dates or rosewater – in effect a sugared rose syrup. Whether specifically mercantile codes of exchange can be identified remains to be seen, but it is noteworthy that Middle Eastern sugar, dates and rosewater, the latter often transported in glass bottles, also feature among the merchant tribute presented to the Chinese Sung court by envoys from across the Indian Ocean region.68 It seems probable that sweet items such as sugar and raisins could only be given freely at no cost. In this sense sugar and raisins are two components of this assemblage that do merit the appellation “gift.” Other codes and understandings no doubt underpinned the dispatch of the other items that were never charged for, namely paper, ingredients for ink, spice-condiments and medicines, and we are still far from understanding exactly how these operated. For all the disclaimers that the items sent were of no monetary value, this may have been a deciding factor. The only delivery of paper Abraham was ever charged for was of paper described as qirtas, rag paper, a lower quality than that he usually received ˙ and thus perhaps considered to be unworthy of having its cost waived.69 The Lakhabi glasswares Abraham ordered in huge quantities were also comparatively cheap and yet were always charged. Waiving charges on higher-value or high-quality items was, in this sense, a display of largesse that reinforced the message of generosity already inherent in sugar and raisins. Yet this alone does not satisfactorily explain why clothes and mats were sometimes charged, sometimes not. We are hampered in our understanding by the loss of Abraham’s own letters and shopping orders from his time in India. Without them we lack insights into the extent to which items sent at no charge corresponded to formally ordered items, which then saw some or all of their charges waived; or, by contrast, were items that Abraham’s sahibs selected in anticipation of ˙ ˙ his needs and tastes. The latter items would no doubt be calculated to achieve even greater goodwill than simply waiving costs on an item that had been explicitly requested. The protective coral Madmun sent for Abraham’s young son, or the single delivery of halal (kosher) cheese, may ˙ represent such items. Conversely, poorly executed, unskilled, shopping could sour relations, as is attested by at least one document,70 and in a relationship where contact might be maintained through a single annual letter and consignment it is clear that this approach left little room for error. The consignments likely mix both categories. This was clearly a service with complex rules and one that demands further analysis. For now, I return to more practical matters. 68 69 70

Hans Bielenstein, Diplomacy and Trade in the Chinese World, 589 1276 (Leiden: Brill, 2005); see overview pages 370 3, also 88 and 94. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 620, Lines 44 5 (IB III, 12 14) and n.35. Ibid., 491 2, Lines 52 5 (IB II, 61).

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The Practicalities of Shopping Abraham’s household provisioning relied on commercial shipping and the regular coming and going of other traders and nakhudas between Aden and the ports of Malibarat; it was likewise rhythmed by the monsoon and the short sailing seasons between Aden and Malibarat. Two rare dated letters written by Khalaf b. Isaac in 1147 and 1148 – both penned in the Jewish month of Elul, equivalent to the periods between 30 July to 27 August and 19 July to 17 August respectively – indicate that the consignments described therein were dispatched to Malibarat from Aden with the “great season” that ran from late August to mid September and one may suppose that this was also the season favored by Abraham’s other colleagues. As one might expect of an emporium such as Aden, the commodities Abraham received originated across Eurasia and Africa. However, there is a particular emphasis on commodities originating in Egypt and the wider Mediterranean beyond: notably items of clothing, paper, gums, sugar and wheat, as well as unique dispatches such as the seven molds of halal cheese. The supply of these ˙ items would have been critically linked to the great season sailings because of its overlap with the arrival in Aden of Egyptian and Mediterranean goods transiting through the Red Sea.71 Given this critical overlap and the importance of Mediterranean commodities in Abraham’s household orders, we can infer that each consignment probably represented a yearly delivery, timed to include goods newly arrived from the north and dispatched with the great season. The provisioning chain was undoubtedly fragile: any economic, political or logistical disruption could threaten the supply of Aden’s markets and ultimately Indian homes. Anything unavailable or forgotten at the time of sailing would have had to wait until the next sailing season – a full year for the next “great season,” six months away for the lesser. One would have hoped that these exceptionally detailed orders would allow for the extrapolation of patterns of yearly household consumption; however, this proves to be almost impossible not only because the correspondence is fragmentary and largely undated but because foodstuffs and substances are described according to the container they traveled in, or their cost, but not their weight. As the capacities of the majority of bottles or boxes are unknown and we do not know the market rate for different items, precise quantities are difficult to establish. We do, however, know

71

Ibid., 334, Lines 44 7 (IB II, 20) for the disruption caused by Eid one year; also Vallet, Arabie marchande, 225 7 for the fourteenth century interface.

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that one rubaciyya was equivalent to approximately 10 modern kilograms and we can infer that Abraham’s household consumed at least 10 kilograms of sugar, raisins and soap per annum, and also at least a dozen sheets of paper, usually more. What we cannot tell, given the fragmentary nature of the correspondence, is whether, and if so how, Abraham coordinated deliveries from his business partners. If multiple consignments arrived from different partners in the same year his household may have consumed considerably more of these items. It is similarly difficult to determine whether deliveries of items “not charged” and charged were coordinated. Quite contrary to the impression left by geographical and travel literature that Indian Ocean ports were filled with an abundance of commodities, shortages were also frequent and sometimes lengthy. What Abraham received depended on what was available in Aden, or Egypt, as well as the ingenuity of his business friends in obtaining those things. Sometimes certain items were simply not available: on one occasion Madmun apologized that there had been no paper for sale in Aden for the last two years and instead sent paper from his own personal stocks,72 but mostly even friends did not offer substitutes from their own household reserves.73 Even local products might be subject to shortages and we find similar apologies for the unavailability of raisins, likely grown in the Yemen,74 as well as local Lakhabi glass.75 Other times stone vessels broke before they were even dispatched, items were forgotten at home and some consignments were inevitably lost in shipwrecks.76 The items sent to Malibarat also reveal the quirks and kinks of twelfthcentury commercial routes. While many items such as Lakhabi glass, leather mats from the Horn of Africa, cheese, tree resin gums, soap and compounds such as vitriol follow a clear eastwards path from production centers in the Yemen, East Africa, Egypt or the Mediterranean east to Malibarat, others follow dogleg trajectories. Some high-end Indian products from the north of the subcontinent, such as costus and civet, appear to have reached Malibarat via Aden, a routing that suggests that northern Malibarat had stronger transoceanic connections to the west than to coastal shipping routes running north to Gujarat and Sind. It is notable too that wheat, as well as almonds, raisins and sugar, although produced 72 73 74 75 76

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 346, Lines 9 11 (IB II, 21 4). Ibid., 620, Lines 41 2 (IB III, 12 14) and 626, Lines 50 1 (IB III, 15). Ibid., 577, Lines 16 18 (IB II, 4 6). Ibid., 334, Line 47 (IB II, 20) and 611, Lines 26 31 (IB III, 11) where the whole production had been reserved for export to Sri Lanka. Ibid., 600 1, Lines 39 40 (IB III, 10) and 610, Lines 21 2 (IB III, 11).

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in other parts of South Asia, were all sourced in Aden from local Yemeni and Egyptian crops. These exchanges therefore open valuable insights into the boundaries of commercial networks at this period and the ways in which informal, personal networks extended these, in the process extending cultural zones and creating new hybrid cultures. Aden emerges in this context as a critical boundary, a thaghr or frontier in the truest sense of the term. Maintaining a Mediterranean Society? The following sections conflate the two assemblages – charged and not charged – to examine in more detail what was brought into Malibarat, when, how and why, and the role of shopping services in helping Abraham to maintain a Mediterranean lifestyle in Malibarat. It is perhaps not surprising that, beneath the “promiscuous profusion of things, natural and unnatural”77 circulating in these household consignments, the needs of Abraham and his wider household in Malibarat should ultimately be very focused. The many different necessities he received can be grouped under three simple headings. By far the greatest share of the household items reaching him, and present in his luggage too, can be grouped under the umbrella of “food culture.” The category comprises raw and processed foodstuffs, various afawıh, what Sidney Mintz usefully terms “spicecondiments,”78 and objects associated with the storage, preparation and consumption of food, what I label kitchenwares and tablewares although we should beware of the assumptions these terms carry. The remaining categories are surprisingly few: if we disregard the Mediterranean red coral Madmun sent to Abraham’s young son, we are left with dress items, soap, paper and ingredients for ink. The first two are in fact intimately related as soap (sabun) was customarily used for washing clothes and textiles rather ˙ than one’s person and therefore intimately bound to the proper care of the dress items received.79 Paper and ink ingredients might similarly be grouped as writing materials. Ultimately then, a large part of this complex assemblage satisfied two simple human needs: those for food and for covering. What remained, writing materials, met an essential mercantile need, that of correspondence. On the whole, these are not the high-end 77

78 79

Craig Clunas, “Trade Goods, Commodities and Collectables: Some Ways of Categorising Material Culture in Sung Yuan Texts,” in Arts of the Sung and Yüan, edited by Maxwell K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996), 45. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 78. See Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 336, n.46; also Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, 138 9. For soap in general see EI2, “Sabun.” For personal washing, ushna¯n, the pulverized ashes of alkaloid plants, were used.

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wares and gastronomic luxuries seen in the shopping lists sent to Egypt by Abraham’s colleagues in Aden but a provisioning in Mediterranean staples and household necessities which underlines Malibarat’s distance and relative isolation from the Middle East. Foodstuffs and the ways of eating them are all culturally learned and are firmly established by adulthood. The presence of these things in Malibarat thus bears loud testimony to Abraham’s maintenance of continuities, his normal everyday, even in his translocation to Malibarat and throughout the twelve years of his residence there. We should be wary of transposing modern, largely European and North American, values onto the past. Our contemporary culture of food experimentation and innovation is culturally learned and we cannot assume that medieval travelers confronted with unfamiliar foodstuffs and new experiences relished them as many today might. In his treatise on travel the Iranian polymath alGhazali (d. 1119) described the traveler as anxious because “separated from his custom and habit (sunna wa cada) in his fixed residence.”80 Whether these foodstuffs satisfied a particular nostalgia for the Mediterranean or assuaged homesickness is not discussed in the correspondence, although food may have played a particularly prominent role in this if, as David Sutton suggests in Remembrance of Repasts, food is agreed to have a particular power in encoding and releasing memory due to its synesthesia.81 Maintaining one’s normal everyday in mobility may also have carried medical underpinnings, a fundamental part of preserving what David Waines has termed “bodily equipoise.” Chapters 4 and 5 explore Abraham’s food culture in more detail while Chapter 8 focuses on the dietetic and medicinal aspects of his provisioning. Dress is no less a part of “custom and habit” and maintaining a Middle Eastern vestimentary culture emerges as another of Abraham’s preoccupations. Fū tas of various materials and design, often specified to be ˙ Alexandrian or Egyptian, are significant presences; the term designates an unsewn length of fabric that might be used as a cloak or to wrap various parts of the body.82 Maqtac robes, the large outer robes worn also by his ˙ colleagues across the Middle East, are also significant, as are mandıls, 80

81 82

Abu Hamid al Ghazali, Ihya¯’ cUlum al Dı¯n, English translation of Book XVII with Introduction and Notes by Lionel Librande as Al Ghazali on Conduct in Travel: Kita¯b A¯da¯b al Safar. Book XVII of the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Great Shelford: Islamic Texts Society, 2016), 23. David Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (New York: Berg, 2001). On other histories of Middle Eastern dress in South Asia see Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu Muslim” Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), chapter 2, “Cultural Cross dressing” with further references.

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commonly translated “handkerchiefs” and essential dining accoutrements. As the mandıl reminds us, all categories are permeable. If the category of textiles includes items associated with dining and thus food culture broadly defined, conversely the spice-condiments that made up afawıh were much more than foodstuffs. As cosmetics and medicines certain afawıh also maintained Middle Eastern bodies: kohl, used as an antiseptic around the eyes, civet as a perfume and breath freshening gums all participated alongside dress in Abraham’s continued projection and protection of a distinctively Middle Eastern self. If a later complaint by his future son-in-law Perahya b. Joseph is any indication – to the effect that Abraham had looked down upon him for his lack of “pomp and pushiness”83 – external appearances mattered to Abraham personally. But as we know, dress is always potently identitarian and perhaps nowhere more so than at active cultural faultlines. As Finbarr Barry Flood has brilliantly shown, the subcontinent was a place of sartorial transculturation – many Muslim communities adopted “Indian” dress styles, South Asian elites adopted and adapted different components of Persianate dress – but as the India traders show, another strategy was to not participate in these practices and this was also a political choice.84 The Written Person It is also within the context of the maintenance of bodily practices that we should understand the third and altogether unexpected category of necessity dispatched to India: writing materials, of which particularly Middle Eastern paper. I single this out for particular analysis as the luggage list itself is written on Middle Eastern paper and, we must presume, with inks made from imported ingredients. Paper was the preferred writing support in the Middle East at this period even if it was far from ubiquitous outside court circles and was widely recycled even in Fustat.85 The documentary genizah and the India Book shopping lists indicate very clearly that paper continued to occupy this preferred position even among India traders in Malibarat, where palm leaf or sized cotton were the most common writing supports.86 Indeed, the Yemen itself appears to have been heavily 83 84 85

86

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 772, Margin (IB III, 50). See Flood, Objects of Translation, chapter 2. See discussion in Marina Rustow, “A Petition to a Woman at the Fatimid Court (413 414 A.H./1022 23 C.E.),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 73 (2010), 1 27, a “pilot study” for a forthcoming monograph. On Abraham’s use of paper see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 61. In extremis Abraham and other merchants in India wrote on sized cotton cloth, one of a variety of Indian writing supports available to them, but such examples are surprisingly few in the India Book corpus.

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dependent on paper imported from Iraq, Egypt and Syria from at least the tenth century, and until perhaps as late as the end of the thirteenth century when local production centers emerged.87 In this context it is no accident that the type of paper Abraham received and the number of sheets should always be meticulously specified (see Tables 1 and 2). But paper and its preparation was not Abraham’s only concern and both vitriol and a variety of gums, essential ingredients in Middle Eastern ink recipes, were also sent.88 Vitriol was a key ingredient for tannin-based inks and is included in three consignments, on two occasions as a half ratl (roughly a pound), once as a ratl. Gums ˙ ˙ of various sorts were added for brilliance and also to thicken the ink and they feature in six consignments, generally sent a half ratl at a time. It is not clear ˙ what Abraham used as his primary source of tannin, although gallnuts appear to have been actively traded to China from Iran through maritime networks,89 some recipes provide alternatives90 and India had its own inkmaking traditions. Although more research remains to be carried out on the ink recipes used among India traders, there seems little doubt that Abraham made his own inks and was supported here too by his business friends. As Jessica Goldberg has demonstrated, letter writing was central to the operation of suhba or reciprocal agency, since it was through letters that ˙ ˙ business partners communicated their instructions. Indeed, it is a trope of letters written between sahibs in the Islamic Mediterranean that the ˙ ˙ absent merchant was made present in the person of his business associate and able to act over long distances through letters and the instructions they contained: “your letter is your presence” and “my letter substitutes for my presence” are two of the phrases encountered.91 It is clear from comments such as these that letters operated as classic loci of distributed 87

88

89

90 91

A. D’Ottone, “La produzione ed il consumo della carta in Yemen (secoli VI IX H./ XII XV). Primi resultati di una ricerca quantitativa,” Gazette du Livre Médiéval 44 (2004), 43 4. Present across the majority of ink recipes collected in Lucia Raggetti, “Cum grano salis. Some Arabic Ink Recipes in Their Historical and Literary Context,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 7 (2016), 294 338; observation made explicit in Ibrahim Chabbouh, “Two New Sources on the Art of Mixing Ink,” in Proceedings of the Second Conference of al Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation 4 5 December 1993, edited by Yasin Dutton (London: al Furqan Islamic Heritage Foundation, 1995), 67, where he analyzes the ink recipes given for some thirteen Islamic scholars of the ninth to eleventh centuries, noting that “the inks of these scholars have a number of ingredients in common. These are: gallnut, vitriol, gum arabic and fresh water.” Angela Schottenhammer, “Transfer of Xiangyao from Iran and Arabia to China,” in Aspects of the Maritime Silk Road: From the Persian Gulf to the East China Sea, edited by Ralph Kauz (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 141 2. Chabbouh, “Two New Sources,” 67. Passages cited in Goldberg, “Use and Abuse,” 133. Principle now established far more widely in Arnold E. Franklin, “More than Words on a Page: Letters as Substitutes for an Absent Writer,” in Jews, Christians and Muslims in Medieval and Early Modern Times, edited by Arnold E. Franklin et al (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 287 305.

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personhood, the idea that objects extend the biological or physical person of their human maker or giver.92 Abraham’s household consignments add further support to this, underlining just how vital the materiality of letters was to their efficacy, their ability to presence the absent merchant. If Abraham placed so much importance on acquiring Middle Eastern paper, vitriol and gums it is because paper and ink embodied the writer in a very essential way. In his correspondence as much as in his dress, Abraham projected a thoroughly Middle Eastern self. Non-commercial Exchange and Its Consequences Working through the household orders preserved in the India Book documents reveals a variety, volume and frequency of non-commercial circulation and exchange that is truly surprising in the context of current knowledge about the domestic worlds of the Indian Ocean littoral. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this is the extent to which Abraham’s projected self, and indeed his home, in Malibarat can be shown to have been the fruit of a sustained collective, communal effort. Without the shopping services of his business friends over the twelve years he sojourned in India, and the collaboration of countless intermediaries to courier his correspondence and household supplies, Abraham’s person would have been far more acculturated than it certainly already was. Except for a few exceptional locales where good preservation and thorough archaeology combine to yield developed knowledge of domestic environments, as at Qusayr al-Qadim on the Red Sea and Songo Mnara on the Swahili coast of East Africa,93 questions of individual consumption and ownership are nearly invisible in most textual sources at this period, and equally so in the archaeological record. In this context, commodity paradigms tend to dominate when, as underlined by Arjun Appadurai, “commodity” was only a phase, or sometimes several phases, in more complex biographies.94 The India Book documents now open a window onto new stages of the lifecycles of these things and the new values and 92

93

94

The idea, although not the exact terminology, is present in the very first “classic” anthropologies of Marcel Mauss’s The Gift (London: Cohen and West, 1924) and now widely applied to objects as varied as photographs or reliquaries. Distributed personhood is the term developed by Alfred Gell in Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122. See Katherine Strange Burke, “Archaeological Texts and Contexts on the Red Sea: The Sheikh’s House at Quseir al Qadim,” unpublished PhD, University of Chicago, 2007, and for East Africa Stephanie Wynne Jones, A Material Culture: Consumption and Materiality on the Coast of Precolonial East Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Arjun Appadurai, “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

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meanings created in this context – part of an actively expanding understanding of non-commercial modes of circulation between South Asia and the Middle East explored, notably, in Finbarr Barry Flood’s work on looting and gifting.95 In the process the India Book material adds to what is still a comparatively limited body of work on “gift-exchange” in the Islamic world, and which has tended to focus on elite, often openly “diplomatic” exchanges, or on exchanges within romantic relationships.96 The genizah letters from the western Indian Ocean offer a valuable opportunity to examine related systems of exchange but at other social levels and through documentary sources. These passages also take on a central importance within new histories of mobility and domestic materiality: the only written evidence we possess from the medieval Indian Ocean area of the processes through which long-term sojourners made homes away from home, strove to maintain aspects of their identity and, inevitably, forged new, hybrid domestic cultures. The written record here favors imported things, and it is easy to see this mode of circulation as one that extended cultural boundaries rather than mediating between cultures and triggering new boundary constructions. Yet one cannot transplant a whole culture; one cannot recreate the Mediterranean society in Malibarat. In Abraham’s home these imported items joined what must have surely been a proportionally far larger number of local and regional things. Only documents such as the luggage list, the nearest we come to a household inventory, offer a more balanced picture of the relationships between local and non-local things within the household of a Middle Eastern sojourner in Malibarat. These barely present local and regional things underline the degree to which imported things must have been translated into entirely new contexts of social use and meaning, inevitably generating new domestic cultures. In Malibarat, new habits and tastes, not least the consumption of rice as a staple food, took root, producing the quintessentially hybrid assemblage seen in the luggage list. Chapter 4, “Making a Meal of It,” explores the balance of local and global in the food culture of an Ifriqiyan Jewish sojourner.

95 96

Flood, Objects of Translation. See Linda Komaroff, “The Art of Giving at the Islamic Courts,” in Gifts of the Sultan: The Arts of Giving at the Islamic Courts, edited by Linda Komaroff and Sheila Blair (Los Angeles: LACMA, 2011), 17 32 and volume Bibliography for a relatively recent over view of material. Also the very useful work of Jocelyn Sharlet and notably her critiques of literary sources in “The Thought That Counts in Gift Exchange Poetry by Kushajim, al Sanawbari, and al Sari al Raffa,” Middle Eastern Literatures 14, no. 3 (2011), 235 70.

4

Making a Meal of It: On Food Cultures

Foodstuffs and utensils for the storage, preparation and serving of food, what we might better think of as one “super-category” of food culture, dominate the lists of household items couriered to Malibarat, as indeed they fill the luggage list itself. “Making a Meal of It” addresses the problem of how the single, disembodied things of the luggage list might be reassembled and re-embodied to present an archetypal meal among Middle Eastern Jewish sojourners in Malibarat. Lists are already terse texts; their limited grammar seems to strip things of their contexts and to beget only further lists. As if this were not challenging enough, the food culture of the India traders also sits in an almost overwhelming documentary and material void. It is known exclusively through the India Book documents; and yet Abraham and his peers did not write openly about, or otherwise comment on, their meals or dining, and they rarely if ever recorded their cuisine in written recipe form.1 How then do we begin to reconnect the isolated, disembodied things of Abraham’s luggage list, and do so in a historically grounded way? How do we write a historical anthropology of the food cultures of Middle Eastern sojourners in northern Malibarat when many of anthropology’s core data sets are simply not there? One medieval text offers a way out of this impasse, a rare solution to the problem of the luggage list’s disconnected things. A well-known Arabic travel account details a dinner eaten on the northern coast of Malibarat in the company of local Muslim elites only two centuries after Abraham’s luggage list was written. Read in tandem with the list, with which it is geographically and socially proximate, the source offers a unique record of foodstuffs and utensils, and the social entanglements of both. The shift from the dry, list format of Abraham’s luggage to that of a travel narrative could not be greater, but this source brings to life almost the self-same 1

For a rare example see a recipe for da¯dhı¯ wine found on a single sheet of paper, likely from Aden, mentioned in S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 93), vol. 4, 260 and n.52.

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assemblage of foodstuffs and utensils. Where Abraham’s luggage list emphasizes the relationship between single food provisions and their containers or packing materials, in this account many of the same foodstuffs are instead associated with other ingredients to make dishes and garnishes, and linked with specific vessels, utensils and furnishings involved in their serving and consumption. Animated by narrative prose these components reappear within a well-defined social context. But before I move on to read this text it is useful to examine quickly the void, in some cases quite needless, in which the luggage list currently sits. Much research on Jewish food cultures as documented through genizah sources has relied, albeit implicitly, on ethnohistorical methodologies. In this case, however, there is no direct continuity of Jewish settlement in northern Malibarat for us to turn to, and by the time the food cultures of later Indo-Jewish communities are documented elsewhere along the coast, these had been shaped by different conversion processes and by already-globalized foodways. There are also many caveats to the substitution of recipe books from elsewhere in the medieval Middle East, not least the fact that they are largely the products of well-supplied, metropolitan centers and an elite written genre that exists in complex relationship to the popular, lived cooking of other social classes and less connected places such as Malibarat. One of the most frustrating and unnecessary absences from this study is archaeological data. In many parts of the world, archaeology has been food history’s greatest asset; however, archaeologies of food in South Asia have mainly focused on the prehistoric period, the development of agriculture and staple foods.2 In this instance, the same archaeological void that stymies the study of medieval urban forms in coastal Malibarat also precludes the inclusion of any contemporary data on food preparation and consumption; even data on agriculture in this coastal tract is sparse 2

The bibliography is huge, but for an overview see Dorian Q. Fuller, “Fifty Years of Archaeobotanical Studies in India: Laying a Solid Foundation,” in Indian Archaeology in Retrospect. III. Archaeology and Interactive Disciplines, edited by S. Settar and R. Korisettar (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002), 247 364. For the place of prehistoric South Asia in Eurasian foodways see Martin Jones, Harriet Hunt, Emma Lightfoot, Diane Lister, Xinyi Liu and Giedre Motuzaite Matuzeviciute, “Food Globalization in Prehistory,” World Archaeology 43, no. 4 (2011), 665 75. Compare the wealth of botanical material available at the Red Sea port of Qusayr al Qadim in Marijke van der Veen, Consumption, Trade and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains from the Roman and Islamic Ports at Quseir al Qadim, Egypt (Frankfurt am Main: Africa Magna Verlag, 2011). Food archae ology is also a major new trend in Swahili archaeology, as demonstrated by papers at the conference on “Proto globalisation in the Indian Ocean World: Multidisciplinary Perspectives” held at Jesus College, Oxford, 7 10 November 2013 and now in course of publication.

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for the precolonial period. As for autochthonous writings about food, these are highly heterogeneous and badly understudied.3 Scholars looking for evidence of elite food culture and sociability in India encounter texts responding to quite other concerns; as Arjun Appadurai astutely summed up the situation: “food is principally either a moral or a medical matter in traditional Hindu thought.”4 As historian Daud Ali concluded, “the early medieval sources present nothing like the European emphasis on the lordly feast and on manners at table as a defining element of élite sociability.”5 Anthropologies of contemporary food, focused by definition on living cuisines, almost take for granted knowledge of a food culture’s core ingredients, its meal structures and other patterns of food consumption, likewise the larger physical contexts in which foods are produced and consumed.6 However, in asking anthropological questions of historic food cultures such as that of the India traders in Malibarat, even such a preliminary mapping often proves extraordinarily complex to achieve. In this void, this single Arabic account of a dinner proves an essential source through which to interrogate the earlier luggage list and Abraham’s wider correspondence. I take hope from the fact that, as Luce Giard so elegantly expressed it, “every dietary habit is a tiny historical cross-roads”;7 the study of even a portion of Abraham’s food culture should bear rich fruit. A Dinner with the Sultan of Honnavar The account I have identified comes from the Rihla of Ibn Battuta and concerns an iftar dinner he shared with the self-styled Sultan Jamal al-Din Muhammad ibn Hasan at the port of Honnavar to mark the end of a day of voluntary fasting.8 Ibn Battuta was hosted by the Sultan several times during his travels along this coast during the 1340s, on this occasion for 3

4 5 6

7 8

The principal sources are listed in K.T. Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), in Om Prakash, Economy and Food in Ancient India, 2 vols. (Delhi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan, 1987) and in Part III of the same author’s Cultural History of India (New Delhi: New Age International, 2004). On caste and food see P. Olivelle, Food for Thought: Dietary Rules and Social Organization in Ancient India (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2002). Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies in Sociology and History 31, no. 1 (1988), 11. Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 112. See, for example, Pierre Mayol, “Habiter,” in L’invention du quotidien. 2. Habiter, cuisiner, edited by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, rev. edn by Luce Giard (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 15 185. “Chaque habitude alimentaire compose un minuscule carrefour d’histoires”: Luce Giard, “Faire la cuisine,” in ibid., 240. Ibn Battuta is clear that this was an iftar, a dinner served after a voluntary fast.

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a brief three days, and this dinner belongs to a small number of Indian meals that Ibn Battuta chose to recount in detail. During my stay with him [the Sultan] he used to invite me to join him in breaking the fast and I, as well as the jurists cAli and Ismacil, attended for this purpose. Four small stools (kursı¯) were placed on the ground and while he seated himself in one of them, each of us sat likewise on a stool. The Sequence (Tartı¯b) of His Food. The sequence consists of this a brass table (ma¯’ida nuha¯s9) is brought out which they call a khiwa¯nchih on which is placed a brass platter˙ (tabaq nuha¯s) which they ˙ call a ta¯lam, which is pronounced with a fatha over the [letter] ta¯’ ˙and a fatha over ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ 10 the la¯m. Then a beautiful slave girl wrapped in a silk wrap appears who ˙presents the pots of food (qudū r al taca¯m) to him. With her is a large brass ladle (mighrafa nuha¯s kabı¯ra), with which˙ she picks up a ladleful of rice and serves it on to the ˙ ta¯lam, pours clarified butter (samn) over it and adds salted bunches of pepper ˙(cana¯qı¯d al filfil al mamluh), salted green ginger and citrus11 (al zanjabı¯l al ̄ ˙ h) and mangoes. The person eats a mouthful, akhdar wa l lı¯mū n al mamlu ̄ after which they take some ˙of the salted foods (mawa¯lih). When the ladleful ˙ ladleful of rice and placed by her on the ta¯lam is finished, she takes another ˙ 12 serves a cooked fowl on a plate (sukuruja) and the rice is eaten therewith also. When the second ladleful is over she takes another ladleful [of rice] and serves another kind of fowl which is eaten with it. When the various kinds of poultry are finished, fish of various kinds is served, with which one also eats the rice. When the fish courses are over, vegetables cooked in clarified butter (samn) and milk dishes (alba¯n) are served, with which one likewise eats rice. When all that is finished, kusha¯n, that is curded milk, is served and with that they finish their eating. When this is served, one knows that there is nothing left to eat. At the close one drinks hot water, for cold water would harm the people in the rainy season.13

Ibn Battuta has been so quoted and misquoted in scholarship on the Indian Ocean and Islamic South Asia that it is easy to dismiss him as a tired and only half-reliable source. Did he really travel as far as China and Southeast Asia? How could he accurately remember all the details 9

10 11 12

13

See discussion of the problematic use of terms for copper, brass and even bronze and the problems this raises for translation in Appendix, English translation, n.16; as with the luggage list I read nuha¯s as brass. ˙ This spelling is different from that used in Judaeo Arabic, see page 112 in this chapter. The terms lemon (lı¯mun/laymun) and lime (lı¯m) were used similarly vaguely and inter changeably; see discussion in Appendix, English translation, n.38. Also sukruja, see Reinhardt P.A. Dozy, Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes, 3rd edn (Leiden and Paris: E.J. Brill and G.P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1967), vol. 1, 668; or sukurraja according to M.M. Ahsan in Social Life under the Abbasids: 170 289 AH, 786 902 AD (London: Longman, 1979), 124, where it is described as a pot in use for sauces or salt. For an India Book reference see S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 448, Line 45 (IB II, 46). English translation adapted from Abu cAbdallah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edition and French translation by Charles Defrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti as Voyages d’Ibn Battûta (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1969), vol. 4, 68 70.

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that fill his account? Yet new work on the practice of rihla, broadly ˙ translated “travel,” among medieval Islamic scholars, specifically Houari Touati’s magnificent book Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages, helps us to situate Ibn Battuta within a long and respected Islamic scholarly tradition, in the process opening rich new interpretive angles.14 Ibn Battuta’s Rihla is important for being the most thorough para-ethnographic record of fourteenth-century Islamic South Asia in existence, and at a first level I read this passage for the observations it presents about the dining practices of Malibarat’s acculturated Muslim elite at this period. I am not suggesting that Ibn Battuta’s narrative offers us a template into which Abraham’s foodstuffs and utensils can simply be inserted, not least because of the particularities of each faith’s food culture. However, in the relative void of sources on the food culture of Middle Eastern sojourners in medieval Malibarat, the parallel reading of the two texts offers important clues to food assemblages, meal structures and postural cultures at a coastal location barely 150 kilometers north of Mangalore and barely two centuries after Abraham’s passage there. Although this was an iftar dinner, I read it as typical of the type of more substantial evening meal – the casha’ – commonly eaten by the inhabitants of the premodern Middle East.15 At the same time, Ibn Battuta’s is also an account profoundly shaped by rihla’s concern with the understanding and delimitation ˙ of the Islamic world and by a scholarly training focused around c iyan – “seeing” or perhaps “visual observation.” This passage is therefore just as much about the idea of food that Ibn Battuta, a Maghrebi scholar traveler, carried with him to Malibarat and imposed on what he saw (and ate), as it is about the food culture of the indigenized Muslim elite of Honnavar he joined and observed. This second layer of reading brings in turn new questions and insights into this hybrid food culture. A Dinner Menu Ibn Battuta’s observations point to the foundational structure of a dinner menu in this area: rice with clarified butter and pickles; rice with one or several meat or vegetable dishes; curds or buttermilk. The pattern, what Sidney Mintz has termed “the core-carbohydrate14 15

Houari Touati, Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages, English translation by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). It was common to eat twice daily: a light morning meal or “lunch” (ghada¯’) and an evening meal; see Paulina B. Lewicka, Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 414.

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and-fringe-principle,”16 is seen globally, across cultures. It consists of a core carbohydrate – wheat or rice, as here, or a root such as yam or potatoes – flavored and expanded nutritionally through the addition of side dishes, relishes or condiments, the so-called fringes. Although rice can be prepared in a wide variety of ways17 and Ibn Battuta does not describe how his rice was prepared, the fact that it was served with clarified butter and eaten with meat stews suggests that this was prepared in the South Asian manner, as boiled individual grains of rice. In South Asia the best varieties of rice, husked and polished, were – and still are – boiled and served as whole grains. These can easily be kneaded in the hand into small balls for dipping into, or scooping, fringe components of the meal, or the rice can be formed into a small reservoir to contain and mix the wetter fringe dishes. The components of this meal and its structure are both profoundly Indian in character, as confirmed by an almost contemporary menu from the Manasollasa (Delight of the Mind), a Sanskrit Mirror for Princes composed around 1129–30 by King Somes´vara III of the Western Chalukya dynasty. Although his capital Kalyani, modern-day Basavakalyan, lies some 800 kilometers northeast of Mangalore on the northern Deccan plateau, the Manasollasa is one of the few contemporary South Asian texts to discuss food at length and to offer a broad overview of menu structures as well as individual dishes and their cooking methods. The recipe book genre as understood in Europe and the Middle East only emerges as an Indic literary genre in the early sixteenth century, making the Manasollasa a unique resource.18 The section entitled Annabhoga, “Enjoying food,” provides detailed explanations of foodstuff preparation but is especially important to the present discussion for its concluding description of a full royal meal.19 The core meal structure consisted of (1) boiled rice (anna)20 “furnished with mung beans (mudga) and covered with hot ghee (dhṛta)”; (2) “boiled rice (odana) prepared with soft meats 16 17 18 19

20

S.W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 9 12. Prakash, Cultural History of India, 470, 477. See Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine.” The following revised English translation and summary is by Alastair Gornall from the Sanskrit edition by G.K. Shrigondekar; see Somes´vara III, Ma¯nasolla¯sa, Sanskrit edition by G.K. Shrigondekar as Ma¯nasolla¯sa of King Somes´vara, vol. 2 (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1939), 3.13, verses 1592 7. Currently this section is best known through Arundhati’s looser translation given in Somes´vara III, Ma¯nasolla¯sa, English translation by P. Arundhati as Royal Life in Ma¯nas¯olla¯sa (New Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan, 1994), 128 9. Defined as “food or victuals, especially boiled rice”; see M. Monier Williams, A Sanskrit English Dictionary (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1899), 46.

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and well mixed with broken pulses or smeared with various edible confections (leha)”; (3) boiled rice (odana) eaten with “different meats marinated (mṛsta) in sour (amla) foods,”21 with various types of sprouts and ˙˙ with s´aka produced from fruits and leaves (perhaps pickles).22 The meal was finished with (4) thick curd (dadhi), buttermilk (takra) and rice (anna) mixed with rock salt, or alternatively milk (ksıra) or fermented ˙ rice water (kañjika). Pure, cool water was sipped throughout the meal and 23 helped to improve its taste. In the quantity and variety of its ingredients and dishes this is very obviously an elite menu, and the whole was accompanied by an equally lavish array of side dishes and palate fresheners many of which scholars are still struggling to identify: should diners wish, the marinated meats were to be accompanied by vatakas (vadas), parpatas (pappads), and ˙ ˙ sweet kharkhan.das and upakhan.das, likely dishes based around khan.da ˙ ˙ ˙ or crystallized sugar. In the middle of the meal the king was to eat payasa (rice cooked in milk, mixed with sugar and ghee), followed by sweet and sour fruits. Throughout he was also to drink panaka, lick s´ikharin.ı (a dish of curds and sugar with spices) and sip majjika (buttermilk with sugar and spices).24 Nevertheless, if we compare this menu to the Honnavar meal, the same carbohydrate core, in the form of rice, is clearly visible, as are the principal fringes: clarified butter, pickles, meats and dairy in various forms. Important too is the largely parallel structure of the meal: an opening course based on rice with clarified butter; meat, fish and/or vegetable dishes served in multiple courses with pickles and other fringes; finally dairy preparations, either sweet or salty. At Honnavar pickles were present from the very first course and water was not drunk until the very end of the meal; however, otherwise the parallels are noteworthy. A number of the single foodstuffs listed in Abraham’s luggage list map very directly onto the dishes described in the exactly contemporary Manasollasa and in Ibn Battuta’s later account, thus suggesting some of the ways that they might have been prepared, combined and consumed: rice, clarified butter, pickles in abundance and an animal protein are all present. As a regional product, rice is never written for in Abraham’s correspondence, but the enormous quantities listed as provisions (zad) in his luggage indicate a similar reliance on rice as the foundation of his meals: he transported five gunnies (one large, four small) and two baskets of rice (Lines 3–4 21 22 23 24

Literally “marinated in sour.” Ś a¯ka refers to any botanical food including fruits and edible leaves. In the present context the term likely describes pickles or chutneys. Outline meal taken from the revised translation of this passage by Alastair Gornall. Identifications taken from Achaya, Indian Food, 91.

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and 5–6). Alongside this are the familiar fringes: jars of clarified butter (samn) (Line 28) to pour over rice, and the citrus and ginger, and mango pickles (Line 22) so essential as its garnish. Two waterskins of preserved “fish” (jahlatayn hıtan) (Line 23) brought ˙ ˙ a core animal protein to the menu.25 Fish was a staple animal protein among all coastal communities, although each region certainly had its own particular preservation methods and specialities. Paradoxically, although premodern literary references paint a consistent picture of fish consumption in coastal India we have little detail about the species consumed, their preparation or indeed their wider trade before the fourteenth or fifteenth century.26 One exception is the Manasollasa which includes fish preserves in its archetypal menu together with an extensive discussion of both freshwater and sea fish.27 Although the sources do not yet allow us to paint a precise picture of the twelfth-century fish culture of Malibarat, much less Mangalore, we may guess that a wide variety of marine and riverine fish was eaten, prepared in a wide variety of ways, and that fish food cultures existed at all levels of society. Fish was also widely consumed among Jewish communities in the Middle East, with tuna an especially prized fish – as the expedition of a present of salted tuna from Kairouan to Cairo indicates28 – and Mediterranean Jews certainly brought their own particular fish food culture into this Indian “fishscape.” At least if we are to trust the Manasollasa, elites ate other meats too: fowl as here, but many other animals as well. Of course, Abraham’s luggage list records provisions (zad) assembled for a transoceanic crossing, and what one planned to eat on a lengthy journey by sea was in some respects different from a meal on land. As an assemblage constituted for maritime travel Abraham’s provisions relied more heavily on preserved foods such as pickled fruits and roots, and his fish cannot have been fresh. Nevertheless, I begin from the premise that these were two overlapping rather than entirely distinct assemblages. Local biogeographies, deeply ingrained cultural ideas of food, the constraints of food preservation without refrigeration and, above all, the innate conservatism of most food cultures conditioned provisioning even in mobility. Bread-eaters still planned to eat bread, rice-eaters still wished for rice, and preserved foods occupied an equally

25 26 27 28

See discussion in Appendix, English translation, n.40. See various references in Achaya, Indian Food, 44, 52. Nalini Sadhale and Y.L. Nene, “On Fish in Manasollasa (c. 1131 AD),” Asian Agri History 9, no. 3 (2005), 177 99. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, 126.

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important place in landed contexts too. Abraham packed continuities, and within the distributed object that is the luggage list are also stories of the food cultures of Middle Eastern sojourners in Malibarat. The correspondences between these two food assemblages is noteworthy, particularly when compared to the reliance on bread or biscuits as a key staple in Mediterranean and European food cultures. Ibn Battuta’s account is especially important for the way that it associates these foodstuffs with specific utensils and tablewares and, once again, the overlap with certain of the items listed among Abraham’s luggage is striking. At Honnavar rice was the foundation and centerpiece of the meal and large brass serving spoons were used to ladle it from pots onto a brass platter (tabaq nuhas) known locally as a talam. Ibn Battuta’s spelling ˙ ˙ diverges slightly from the earlier Judaeo-Arabic, which prefers ta’ (technically a voiced aspirated stop) to his ta’ (voiceless post-dental emphatic ˙ stop); however, the underlying source word leaves no doubt: talam is an Indic loanword. Mediated into the Arabic of Honnavar’s elite via Malayalam or Kannada, the term derives ultimately from the Sanskrit sthala, and in each language it designated a particular type of flat platter typically used to serve rice.29 All these utensils feature in Abraham’s luggage and we find three talam platters among the copper items on Line 37, together with three ladles and a large ladle itemized in Lines 24–5. Although the latter are termed marabb rather than mighrafa they appear to indicate substantially the same utensil as described by Ibn Battuta. There seems little doubt that talam is used in both texts to designate substantially the same type of object as it was adopted by Middle Eastern communities in Malibarat. As today in India, the talam was loaded directly with rice and other garnishes while the other components of the meal were placed around it, either directly next to the rice, or in separate dishes much as a thali is served today. Ibn Battuta helpfully underscores the talam’s foreignness by instructing his readers in how to pronounce this non-Arabic word correctly;30 however, the profound absorption of this Indic word into the local Judaeo-Arabic lexicon of twelfth-century Malibarat is confirmed by the development of a plural along distinctly Arabic lines – talam in the singular yields the broken plural tawalim.31 A major issue in the comparison of Ibn Battuta’s iftar dinner and Abraham’s foods is, of course, the impacts of their respective faiths on 29

30 31

See discussion in Elizabeth Lambourn, “Borrowed Words in an Ocean of Objects: Geniza Sources and New Cultural Histories of the Indian Ocean,” in Irreverent History: Essays for M.G.S. Narayanan, edited by Kesavan Veluthat and Donald Davis Jr. (New Delhi: Primus Books, 2014), 211 38. Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edn and French trans. as Voyages, vol. 4, 68. See discussion in Appendix, English translation, n.57.

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their food cultures and the potential challenge to Jewish diners that lay at the very core of this menu, namely its combination of meat and dairy. Although south Indian recipes do not cook meat in milk – a combination explicitly prohibited to Jews in the Book of Exodus (23:19 and 34:26) – as both the Manasollasa and Rihla make clear, meat dishes and milkbased foods were served within the same meal, samn or clarified butter drenched the rice that was then laden with meat stews, and a milk-based drink concluded the Honnavar meal. While this was unproblematic for Muslim diners, it posed a potential problem to observant Jews. We do not know how Abraham and his peers approached this in practice in the twelfth century but we do know that, by the later medieval period, a wide variety of responses and solutions had developed, both in the Middle East and in Europe, and rabbinic Judaism had already begun to contemplate and legislate a wide range of possible interactions between meat and dairy. Solutions considered the order within which meat and dairy were consumed, appropriate spacings between the consumption of each, the separation of each on the table or rinsing the mouth between courses.32 A far simpler solution, however, was to avoid the issue altogether by eating food that was parve, “indefinite, neutral” in Hebrew: vegetables, pulses or indeed a meat such as fish that might be freely combined with dairy would have allowed observant Jews to eat a substantially Indic menu. (Re)reading Ibn Battuta on Rice Just as much as any modern ethnographer, Ibn Battuta participated, observed and wrote in ways dictated by his training and influenced more subtly by particular personal assumptions and prejudices. As Houari Touati demonstrated, voyage – “travel” in the English translation of the French – was an essential component of medieval Muslim scholarship, a method in fact. Unlike European frontier-breaching “explorers,” however, Muslim scholars traveled largely within the dar alislam and did so to reiterate and reaffirm the idea of a territory of Islam (the dar or mamlaka of Islam) and their own Muslim identities. “Rather than from a hermeneutics of the other, meaning derived from an exegetic construction of sameness.”33 For Touati, Ibn Battuta represents the last of the great travelers of the Muslim world, the end point of a rihla tradition ˙ 32

33

Overview and further references in Louis E. Grivetti, “Food Prejudices and Taboos,” in Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Food (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), vol. 2, 1500 2. Grivetti has published extensively on meat and dairy within global food cultures. Touati, Islam and Travel, 3.

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begun in the ninth century. Predictably, this encounter was not without its tensions as Ibn Battuta and his co-author Ibn Juzayy attempted to reconcile a world view still anchored in the classic rihla tradition with a new, frag˙ mented post-Caliphal Muslim world. Touati points to Ibn Battuta’s highly anachronistic description of Baghdad as the residence of the Caliphs as evidence for a world view that was still that of the ninth-century Abbasid Empire.34 Yet in contrast to this, Ibn Battuta’s descriptions of the Muslim communities who facilitated his travel across Eurasia and Africa participate in his construction of the vastly expanded Muslim world of the fourteenth century, however diverse and alien it sometimes proved to be. It is this expanded understanding of dar al-islam that allows Ibn Battuta to extend his ethnographic observations beyond the Arabian Peninsula – where most earlier scholars finished their travels – and to offer the first focused account of the Muslim communities now flourishing across the Indian Ocean area. Reading Ibn Battuta’s Rihla as an account of novelty and difference within the Islamic oecumene, and as one destined primarily for an Arabophone audience, allows us to respond more sensitively to its inclusions and its omissions. His narrative highlights the new foods he was experiencing, the novel ways these were served and the more remarkable or unusual material culture associated with this, whilst likely omitting details that would have been familiar to his intended readership. For all that Ibn Battuta’s account intersects so beautifully with the luggage list, Touati’s analysis of Ibn Battuta as a traveling scholar also pushes us to the realization that rice and its serving utensils, the talam and ladle, operate in his account as props in a coordinated choreography of “otherness.” It is difficult to underline sufficiently how alien rice would have been to most Middle Easterners, and certainly to those born and raised in Ifriqiya. Although rice had been grown and eaten in parts of the Middle East since the early first millennium, rice was only ever a staple food in a very limited number of water-rich areas such as Khuzistan.35 34 35

On Ibn Battuta’s mental models, see ibid., 263 5. The history of rice cultivation and consumption in premodern Asia and Africa has been a dynamic area of research over the last decade, with genetics, archaeobotany and land scape archaeology adding to what was once a history necessarily limited to textual sources. Dialogue between these disciplines is still not as developed as it should be but this is not the place to give the critical bibliographic review the topic so urgently requires. I wish only to signal some notable landmarks, including, for the more recent work, publications with extensive bibliographies. Marius Canard’s early “Le riz dans le Proche Orient aux premiers siècles de l’Islam,” Arabica 6 (1959), 113 31 remains a pioneering article. The question of rice’s westwards spread was treated in A.M. Watson’s Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and thus in the extensive refinements, and responses, to it. A multi authored survey led by Dorian Q. Fuller remains one of the most recent and comprehensive overviews of the correlations and disjunctures between genetic and archaeobotanical evidence across this vast area (see Dorian Q. Fuller

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More generally, and certainly in North Africa and Egypt, rice was eaten sweetened and spiced as a dessert and Paulina Lewicka has argued that it was only in the Mamluk period that rice became sufficiently widely available in Egypt to constitute the primary ingredient of pilafs and other rice-based savory dishes.36 Our own familiarity with boiled rice makes it easy to overlook how unpalatable this form may have been to many Middle Easterners. In fact, Ibn Battuta, a born bread-eater, concluded his description of the Honnavar dinner with what can only be described as a diatribe against rice. He complains that “another time I put up with this Sultan for eleven months and in the course of this period I ate no bread (khubz), for their food is rice” [my italics].37 Ibn Battuta goes on to relate how he ate rice and nothing but as the foundation of his meals for the whole three years he traveled in Malibarat, Sri Lanka and the Maldives until, by the end, he could only bear to swallow it if it was washed down with water.38 When Ibn Battuta dined with the Sultan of Honnavar in the 1340s, rice likely was an omnipresent foodstuff on the northern coast of Malibarat, since rice, some from Mangalore, is mentioned as an import to Aden in the preceding decade.39 Nevertheless, Ibn Battuta’s account of his difficult relationship with this alien food is also a device to underscore, once again, the gap between the Islamic Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean world. His comments about rice follow a long line of such observations in earlier Middle Eastern trade manuals and geographies. According to the

36 37 39

et al., “Consilience of Genetics and Archaeobotany in the Entangled History of Rice,” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 2, no. 2 [2010], 115 31). Sarah C. Walshaw’s “Converting to Rice: Urbanization, Islamization and Crops on Pemba Island, Tanzania, AD 700 1500” (World Archaeology 42, no. 1 [2010], 137 54) still provides a good synthesis of textual and archaeological evidence for East Africa. For a particularly thorough evaluation of the place of rice in Egyptian cuisine see Lewicka, Food and Foodways, 139 54; and for a more recent survey of the Middle Eastern material see Mark Nesbitt, St John Simpson and Ingvar Svanberg, “History of Rice in Western and Central Asia,” in Rice: Origin, Antiquity and History, edited by S.D. Sharma (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2010), 312 44. Lewicka, Food and Foodways, 143 54. Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edn and French trans. as Voyages, vol. 4, 70. 38 Ibid. See Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les Sultans Rasulides du Yémen (626 858/1229 1454) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), 100, 98 with refer ences to the Rasulid source the Mulakhkhas al Fitan. The area around Mangalore receives 85 percent of its annual rainfall in just four months, meaning that, however water rich the region, rice cannot be grown without appropriate infrastructure. For 1870 89 data see Harold A. Stuart, South Canara (Madras: Government Press, 1895), vol. 2, 59. Inscriptional evidence suggests that the investments in the irrigation systems that underpinned the later “rice boom” were only made when these parts of the coast came under the control of the kingdom of Vijayanagara from the mid fourteenth century; see Shreedhara B. Naik, “Society and Politics in South Kanara 1500 AD to 1800 AD,” unpublished PhD, Department of History, University of Mangalore, 2007, 71.

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tenth-century addendum to the Notices of China and India (Akhbar al-Sın wa-l-Hind), “they [the Indians] grow rice alone: they know no other crop, and have no other staple food.”40 Boiled rice was the staple food of the inhabitants of South and Southeast Asia,41 and these peoples were riceeaters; those of the Middle East and Mediterranean were, as was Ibn Battuta himself, bread-eaters. Even though wheat was grown as a less common staple in parts of India, in South Asian minds it remained associated with non-Indian “others.” Thus the Dhanvantari-Nighantu, a sixth- to tenth-century Sanskrit medical treatise, explicitly describes wheat as the food of the Yavanas, literally “Ionians,” a term that now designated West Asians more broadly.42 Being a rice-eater or a breadeater was a highly significant civilizational sign. Like all broad-brush labels, the characterization of Indians as riceeaters needs to be qualified. Although by the mid-twelfth century rice was widely grown and consumed across South Asia and there is archaeological evidence for rice cultivation along many parts of the western seaboard from the Terminal Bronze Age/Iron Age (1000–1 BCE),43 Kathleen Morrison has made the significant point that over the last two millennia in South Asia rice was never the staple carbohydrate but always the grain of the elite or those aspiring to elite status.44 At some time in the first millennium, rice production increased substantially and “rice-based elite cuisines and ritual practices” emerged and overtook, ideologically at least, other south Indian staples such as millets.45 Textual sources evidence a “cult of rice” as an aspirational staple and ritual food, that “came to supplant the millet complex, not so much in sheer production as in cultural value.”46 The fact that Middle Eastern observers considered rice to be an Indian staple is of itself significant and suggestive of the social level at which many interactions took place, while rice’s omnipresence in the early twelfth-century Manasollasa’s royal meal, and in Abraham’s provisions, marks both as elite food cultures. Morrison situates this tipping point somewhere between 300 BCE and 1000 CE, a huge timeframe 40

41 42 43

44

45

Akhba¯r al Sı¯n wa l Hind, Arabic edition and English translation by Tim Mackintosh Smith as Accounts of China and India in Two Arabic Travel Books, edited by Philip F. Kennedy and Shawkat M. Toorawa (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 117. This is a more forceful repetition of information given in the earlier portion (61). André Miquel, La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du 11e siècle (Paris and La Haye: Mouton and Co., 1967 88), vol. 2, 99. Prakash, Cultural History of India, 545, n.4 citing Kasa¯ra Bhavi XII.3. Fuller et al., “Consilience of Genetics and Archaeobotany,” 126 and fig. 6. Already in the second millennium BCE as many as five different rice varieties are mentioned by name in the Indian sources, see Prakash, Cultural History of India, 457 and n.21. Kathleen D. Morrison, “From Millet to Rice (and Back Again?): Cuisine, Cultivation, and Health in Southern India,” in A Companion to South Asia in the Past, edited by G. Robbins Schug, S.R. Walimbe and K.A.R. Kennedy (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2016), 359. Ibid., 365. 46 Ibid.., 361.

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that is itself indicative of the current lack of hard archaeological evidence for what was in effect a South Asian agricultural revolution every bit as important as that in the Islamic world. We still have only a hazy understanding of when, where and how rice became a major agricultural product of northern Malibarat, the foundation of its prosperity through into the Colonial period. However, it seems likely that when Abraham settled in Tulunad intensive riziculture was not yet current locally and rice would have constituted a high-status food. It has been suggested that the preservation of the word kudu, horse gram (Macrotyloma uniflorum), in local Mangalore toponyms points to the enduring importance of this popular legume in local food culture.47 In alIdrisi’s only slightly later description of this coast, based on information from returning traders, it is Kannur (Jurfattan), some 100 kilometers to the south, that is noted for its surplus in rice and other grains (hubū b).48 ˙ means Whatever finer chronology eventually emerges, Morrison’s work that we can no longer simply label rice an Indian staple without understanding the social implications of its possession and consumption. Rice in India may not in fact have been so distant in status from the “luxury” rice eaten across much of the Middle East. Ibn Battuta’s diatribe also leaves no space for the subtle sub-divisions that existed within the cult of rice. The port of Kannur did not just export “rice”; a great number of varieties were cultivated and which rice you consumed, as also how you prepared it, spoke eloquently of your social position and where you came from.49 The elite ate whole grains; broken grains were given to those lower in the social order. Ibn Battuta was served not just “rice” but a particular variety that would have been recognized and appreciated within the local food culture. A complex local rice culture certainly existed even in the twelfth century and Abraham’s gunnies of “rice” must have contained one specific variety, or perhaps several varieties.50 This system of values, the idea that foodstuffs had provenance and were valued for particular qualities,

47

48

49

50

B.M. Ravindra and D. Venkat Reddy, “Neotectonic Evolution of Coastal Rivers of Mangalore, Karavali Karnataka, India,” International Journal of Earth Sciences and Engineering 4, no. 4 (2011), 569. Abu cAbdallah Muhammad b. Muhammad al Idrisi, Kita¯b Nuzhat al Mushta¯k fı¯ Ikhtira¯q al A¯fa¯k, Arabic edition of sections on India by Maqbul Ahmad as India and the Neighboring Territories: As Described by the Sharif al Idrisi in his Kitab Nuzhat al Mushtak fı Ikhtiraq al Afak (Aligarh: Dept. of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Muslim University, 1954), 65. Currently an aspect far less well understood than rice genetics. Rice varieties are listed in the Ma¯nasolla¯sa but for a good overview see relevant sections in Achaya, India Food and Prakash, Economy and Food and Cultural History of India. On present day rice cultures and different communal preferences see Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella, “Food, Memory, Community: Kerala as both ‘Indian Ocean’ Zone and as Agricultural Homeland,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 31, no. 1 (2008), 188.

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would have been familiar to Middle Eastern sojourners even if the foodstuffs themselves were often novel. The fringe dishes to this rice in the Honnavar meal are less controversial, though by no means bereft of civilizational suggestions and social stratification. If pickling itself, whether in salt or an acidic liquid such as vinegar, was a widespread food technology, it is the exotic things pickled that would have stood out to Ibn Battuta’s readers. Mangoes and fresh bunches of pepper are quintessentially Indian fruits, part of the reason Ibn Battuta described his pickles in such detail: he ate “salted bunches of pepper, salted green ginger and citrus and mangoes.”51 Nowadays we are most used to using dried peppercorns, but the plant is a vine which produces bunches of fruit, and whole bunches of pepper could be preserved in salt and eaten. Similarly, while we are probably most used to seeing and using the rather fibrous rhizomes of mature ginger, young ginger shoots have a mild taste, and it is these young shoots which are commonly preserved, as described here, and evidently mixed with lemons whose acidity would also have played a role in preserving them. Ibn Battuta likened pickled mangoes to the preserved citruses (al-lım wal-laymū n) eaten in the Middle East.52 The use of clarified butter and other dairy products would not have been out of place in the Middle East but these foods did carry other, Indic significances. Kathleen Morrison has in fact suggested that such dairy products belong with rice and spices as part of a single elite food assemblage characterized by the labor-intensive nature of its components: rice and other irrigated produce were water-intensive and required irrigation infrastructure; dairy products from cows and buffalo required grazing lands which involved forest clearance; pepper, cardamom and other spices grew in very particular environments up through the Western Ghats and may have been, even at this period, obtained through forager networks.53 Predictably enough, this elite assemblage underpins all the texts cited here and it is here that Abraham’s own list of luggage finds its place – a clear indication, if it were needed, of the position of the India traders in Malibarat. Ibn Battuta’s characterization of rice and foods such as mango pickles as Indian foods was undoubtedly archaic even at the time he wrote, barely able to keep up with shifting food frontiers in the 51

52 53

In South Asia pickling largely involved salting or brining rather than preservation in vinegar. The Ma¯nasolla¯sa offers an insight into the wide range of fruits, vegetables and leaves preserved in this fashion; see Somes´vara III, Ma¯nasolla¯sa, Eng. trans. as Royal Life, 126. Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edn and French trans. as Voyages, vol. 3, 126. Morrison, “From Millet to Rice,” 366.

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western Indian Ocean.54 The cultivation of quintessentially South and Southeast Asian plants such as rice and coconuts had spread to East Africa by at least the tenth century.55 Arguably by the fourteenth century any clear food frontier was considerably dissolved. Bananas and betel vines were cultivated on the Dhofar coast of Oman, and a contemporary increase in Indian rice exports meant that rice had even become the local staple grain on the Omani coast.56 The India traders regularly sent malih, “salted foods,” ˙ including citrus and mangoes, back to Aden57 and the increased traffic between South Asia and the Mediterranean in the twelfth century even brought news of pickled green mangoes to Sicily, where al-Idrisi described them as a food eaten in India like olives.58 In spite of this, in Ibn Battuta’s account, rice and wheat bread, mango and pepper pickles functioned as civilizational markers and his diatribe against rice knowingly works within older discursive traditions that would have been familiar to many of his readers. Deliberate Absences In his orchestrated discourse Ibn Battuta deliberately silenced other, perhaps more familiar, aspects of the Sultan’s dinner. The Sultan of Honnavar, as indeed Abraham, lived and ate in a culture long deeply reliant on the coconut, yet coconuts are glaringly absent from this account, their discussion reserved for another part of the Rihla. The southern periphery of India, including Sri Lanka, the Maldives and the Laccadives, had been one early center of coconut domestication, attested through textual and linguistic evidence to the first millennium BCE.59 The coconut provides in a single tree everything from food and 54

55 56 57 58 59

A huge number of botanical species are now understood to have been in active movement across Afro Eurasia since prehistoric times. For two recent broad ranging syntheses of the Indian Ocean area, see Dorian Q. Fuller, Nicole Boivin, Tom Hoogervorst and Robin Allaby, “Across the Indian Ocean: The Prehistoric Movement of Plants and Animals,” Antiquity 85 (2011), 544 58 and Haripriya Rangan, Judith Carney and Tim Denham, “Environmental History of Botanical Exchanges in the Indian Ocean World,” Environment and History 18 (2012), 311 42. See amongst others Walshaw, “Converting to Rice.” Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edn and French trans. as Voyage, vol. 2, 81 2. For example Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 619, Line 36 (IB II, 12 14). al Idrisi, Nuzhat al Mushta¯k, partial Arabic ed. as India and the Neighboring Territories, 20. On early coconut domestication and the importance of human agency, see B.F. Gunn, L. Baudouin and K.M. Olsen, “Independent Origins of Cultivated Coconut (Cocos nucifera L.) in the Old World Tropics,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 6 (2011): e21143 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0021143 far earlier than the epigraphic and linguistic evidence examined in Damodar Dharmanand Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay: Popular Book Depot, 1956), 272 5.

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water to fuel and construction materials, and has been described as “the Swiss Army knife of the plant kingdom.”60 It is difficult to think of a nontropical equivalent – a single plant able to sustain habitation in salty coastal environments almost single-handedly – and it is no surprise that the coconut eventually spread from its Indo-Pacific heartlands to almost every tropical and sub-tropical clime around the globe. Certainly by the early medieval period coconuts grew all across the tropical zones of the Indian Ocean rim, as well as being imported to the Gulf and the Yemen, and it is little surprise that accounts of their versatility became near tropes of medieval travel literature.61 Ibn Battuta himself extolled the delights of the coconut in his coverage of the Maldives and we may wonder whether their aphrodisiac qualities, much underlined by him in this passage, made them an inappropriate topic of discussion in the context of an iftar dinner between learned Muslims. Notwithstanding their absence from the Honnavar account, coconut water and flesh from young coconuts, milk from mature nuts, coconut oil, and coconut wine too, were all key components of coastal tropical food cultures and would have been present in some form or other in the meals prepared there. They are certainly present in the luggage list among the provisions as “one basket of coconuts” (Lines 6–7), and their maritime use is discussed further in Chapter 6. Other more familiar components of the Honnavar dinner are passed over quickly, likely because they held little discursive potential. Ibn Battuta paid little attention to utensils and serving dishes beyond the talam and ladle. A briefly mentioned sukuruja or bowl alludes to a wider tableware assemblage that was not considered essential to the narrative. Ibn Battuta also did not venture into the Sultan of Honnavar’s kitchens, leaving the servant girl with her pot as our only glimpse of food preparation. 60

61

Washington University in St. Louis, “Deep History of Coconuts Decoded: Origins of Cultivation, Ancient Trade Routes, and Colonization of the Americas,” Science Daily, 24 June 2011, available from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110624142037 .htm. Gulf imports attested in Charles Pellat, “Gahiziana, I: Le Kitab al Tabassur bi l Tigara attribué à Gahiz,” Arabica 1 (1954), 159; also in Ibn Wahshiya’s book of agriculture, Ahmad ibn cAli Ibn Wahshiya, Al Fila¯ha al Nabatı¯ya, facsimile and English translation as The Book of Nabatean Agriculture (Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic Islamic Science, 1984), 478 9. Imports to the Yemen detailed in Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 317, Line 12 (IB II, 13 15). For overviews of the coconut’s spread in the western Indian Ocean from archaeological and textual sources see Watson, Agricultural Innovation and most recently Tom Hoogervorst, “If Only Plants Could Talk . . .: Reconstructing Pre modern Biological Translocations in the Indian Ocean,” in The Sea, Identity and History: From the Bay of Bengal to the South China Sea, edited by Satish Chandra and Himanshu Prabha Ray (Manohar: New Delhi, 2013), 71 5.

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“The Sequence of His Food” Ibn Battuta’s account is especially valuable for the way it captures the human handling and consumption of what are, in the list of Abraham’s luggage and other India Book documents, static assemblages. This complex choreography raises some very basic questions about the ways that our earlier twelfth-century assemblage was served and consumed. Another particularity of the Honnavar dinner, at least to an outsider such as Ibn Battuta, was the fact that the delivery of food was structured sequentially, in what we would term “courses.” The noteworthy character of this is underlined by the insertion into his narrative of a formal subtitle “The Sequence (Tartıb) of His [the Sultan’s] Food.” Here was something else novel, duly signaled by means of this heading. In the Middle East, appetizers and desserts certainly existed, but meals were typically centered around a large shared dish from which participants helped themselves with their hands; smaller dishes might hold pickles or other condiments, but at a typical meal all the food would be presented in one serving. Ibn Battuta used the term tartıb – translated as “order” or “sequence” – throughout his travel narrative to describe sequenced events or categories of objects, but the term only appears twice in relation to food and both times in India where it prefaces a description of the sequence of dishes served at a meal. Besides this Honnavar meal, the other instance is in Ibn Battuta’s account of his journey from Multan to Delhi during which meals were served every evening to his party courtesy of the Tughluq Sultan’s retainers. This traveling household camped every evening and ate a large meal composed of multiple “courses,” a way of serving food that Ibn Battuta again found unusual enough to describe in detail.62 Although the menus are quite different, the emphasis on order or sequence in these accounts differs markedly from his account of a public dinner held by the Sultan in Delhi, where he states explicitly that all the dishes were brought out of the kitchens and placed on the floor in one serving.63 Almost inevitably, the sequential structure of Indic meals encouraged and heightened the sensory orchestration of food and accentuated contrasts inherent in Indic food taxonomies. It is notable that besides classifying tastes (sweet, salty, sour, pungent, bitter and astringent), Indic sū pa s´astra, the science of food, as indeed

62

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Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edn and French trans. as Voyages, vol. 3, 123 5. In a later comment Ibn Battuta makes clear that this was the standard menu also served at court for public dinners; see ibid., vol. 3, 241. Ibid., vol. 3, 239 42.

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Ayurvedic medicine, also identified five textures: food to be chewed (charvya), food that did not need chewing, soft foods (bhojya), food to lick (lehya), suck (chusya) and drink (peya).64 Taste and smell are, we now know, intimately related and to this sensory array we can also add texture and temperature.65 Different courses and their accompaniments deliberately contrasted these different flavors, smells, temperatures and food textures; certain foodstuffs were even deemed appropriate to certain seasons just as in music certain ragas are appropriate only to specific seasons or times of day. By serving a meal in courses, diners were led through a choreographed sequence of contrasting sensory experiences.66 As a scholar trained in the primacy of direct visual observation – “seeing” or, in Arabic, ciyan – above other forms of sensory engagement, many of the specifically Indic subtleties of the Honnavar dinner no doubt passed Ibn Battuta by.67 Although Islamic medicine and culinary culture also recognized six different tastes and different modes of food consumption, Middle Eastern cooking has been characterized as heavily structured around stews and soups, with a strong emphasis on sweet–sour combinations. If the Sultan of Honnavar’s food culture was as hybrid as his courses, tableware and furniture lead us to believe, there would have been many more sensory layers to this meal than his Maghribi visitor ever realized. Without contemporary descriptions we can only wonder whether, through their Indian slaves and wives, India traders also adopted the Indic practice of sequencing the arrival of different dishes and, if so, whether the distinctive Indian aesthetic inherent in “courses” was also integrated into their food culture. Ibn Battuta’s text does not provide answers but it at least alerts us to the fact that Middle Eastern dining practices became more plastic through contact with South Asia. Postural Cultures of Dining Ibn Battuta’s account in fact begins with a description of the dining furniture used at the Sultan’s dinner. As he relates it, “four seats (kursı) were placed on the ground” and after this “a brass table (ma’ida) is brought out which they call a khiwanchih on which is placed a brass platter 64 65

66 67

Achaya, Indian Food, 64. On smell in Indic and Middle Eastern systems, see James McHugh, Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in South Asian Religion and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and for the medieval Middle East the collection of articles in Julie Bonnéric (ed.), “Histoire et anthropologie des odeurs en terre d’Islam à l’époque medievale,” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 64 (2015). The Ma¯nasolla¯sa’s dinner menu hints at this aesthetic; see Somes´vara III, Ma¯nasolla¯sa, Eng. trans. as Royal Life, 129. On ciya¯n see Touati, Islam and Travel, chapter 4 “Autopsy of a Gaze” and pages 250 5.

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(tabaq).” Ibn Battuta’s attention to these details suggests that this dining ˙ configuration was worthy of description and, just as he later explained the strange term talam, he is careful to specify the local use of the Persian term khiwanchih, literally “small table,” to designate what he termed ma’ida in Arabic.68 As much as this meal crystallized the differences between Mediterranean-born bread-eaters and Indian-born rice-eaters, in noting these details Ibn Battuta appears to be pointing to another arena of cultural difference, that between those who ate at tables and sat on some form of “chair” or low stool versus those who ate and sat on the floor. The distinction is as nuanced as that between wheat- and rice-eaters, since “tables” – in fact low supports that carried trays of some sort – were ubiquitous in both Middle Eastern and South Asian dining.69 Ibn Battuta may not have been surprised to eat from a small table but his attention to the fact that the locals termed it a khiwanchih suggests that this was considered more a Persianate dining practice than an Arab or indeed Berber custom. Ibn Battuta’s observations in fact sit within a longstanding debate among Islamic legal scholars, traceable back to the very foundation of the discipline in the ninth century, about the permissibility of the khiwan/khuwan to Muslim diners and its difference from the raised eating surface known as ma’ida.70 Opinions varied widely from toleration, for example by the Iranian polymath al-Ghazali (d. 1111),71 to uncompromising prohibition – notably by one of Ibn Battuta’s Maghribi contemporaries, the Maliki Ibn al-Hajj (d. 1336), who regarded the extra height of the khiwan/khuwan as ostentatious.72 Besides constituting a further documentation of the particular customs of Indian Muslims, within this context, Ibn Battuta’s description of the furnishings upon which diners and their food were placed joins an ongoing discussion about correct Muslim practice that he expected his more erudite readers to recognize. I would like to suggest, however, that ultimately this debate is about far more than Islam and its respective schools of law. Early ethnographic and 68

69 70 71 72

The term derives from the Persian khwa¯n but was subject to multiple variant pronunciations in Arabic, as khuwa¯n or khiwa¯n (pl. akhwina or khuwun) and also as ikhwa¯n (pl. akha¯win or akha¯wı¯n), see Joseph Sadan, Le mobilier au Proche Orient médiéval (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 67 9. Sadan underlines the Persian associations of the form, noting that the term appears in pre Islamic poetry, used by an Arab poet familiar with the Persian court (p. 69). By the time it was used by Ibn Battuta the two terms are deemed to have been interchangeable (ibid., 69 70). See the extensive discussion of table forms in the Middle East in Sadan, Mobilier, chapter IX “Huwan et ma’ida.” The topic is covered patchily across different publications; see Sadan, Mobilier, 71 and footnotes; also Lewicka, Food and Foodways, 416 with notes. Lewicka, Food and Foodways, 416 citing Abu Hamid al Ghazali, Ihya¯’ cUlum al Dı¯n (Cairo: Dar al Shacb, n.d), vol. 2, 3. Ibid. citing Abu cAbdallah ibn Muhammad al cAbdari Ibn al Hajj, Al Madkhal ila¯ Tanmiyat al Acma¯l bi Tahsı¯n al Niyya (Cairo: al Matbaca al Misriyya bi l Azhar, 1929), vol. 1, 226.

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anthropological work on posture and motor habits underlined the profoundly cultural nature of both and in 1955 Gordon W. Hewes proposed that the way we use, or do not use, the ground or floor divides humanity into clear cultural blocks.73 Hewes unfortunately did not look in detail at the Middle East or South Asia, or at the tables that inevitably emerge once even low stools are used, but his important insight underlines the fact that the final opinions of al-Ghazali and Ibn al-Hajj may have less to do with Islam than with their respective postural cultures. The Islamic Middle East was a postural frontier where those with a culturally learned affinity for floor-sitting, seen among Bedouin or desertic peoples, encountered those raised in the Eurasian use of chairs and tables.74 Joseph Sadan’s 1976 study of furniture in the Middle East only began to sketch out this complex question and, as the art historian Michael Rogers noted, “it is difficult to give a sharply focussed picture of furniture” in the Islamic world because of poor survival and the fact that the archival material “remains fragmentarily published and is often incomplete and difficult to evaluate.”75 The long history of domestic tables and chairs remains to be written and it is telling that Rogers’s 1996 overview continues to be of relevance. Malibarat contributes further perspectives to this muchneeded discussion, bringing new data from another zone of encounter.76 From the large numbers of leather dining mats, termed variously natc ˙ or hasır, that feature in Abraham’s household orders we must conclude ˙ ˙ that, like Ibn Battuta, he was a floor-sitter.77 In the western Indian Ocean these leather mats were commonly sourced among the pastoralist communities of the Horn of Africa and Abraham received mats principally from Berbera, with another three more expensive pieces noted as habashı or Abyssinian (Tables 1 and 2).78 Descriptions of such ˙ dining mats in Islamic sources underline their convenience: they were simply unfolded for use and then shaken clean of food remains 73

74

75 76

77 78

Gordon W. Hewes, “World Distribution of Certain Postural Habits,” American Anthropologist N.S. 57, no. 2,1 (1955), 231 44; also “The Anthropology of Posture,” Scientific American 196, no. 2 (1957), 122 33 and referring to work by Frank Boas and others. For the striking prevalence of high chairs and tables in western Asia, including pre Islamic Mesopotamia, Iraq and Iran, see various essays in G. Herrmann (ed.), The Furniture of Western Asia Ancient and Traditional (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996). J.M. Rogers, “Furniture in Islam,” in The Furniture of Western Asia Ancient and Traditional, edited by Georgina Herrmann (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996), 246 7. For another, later, site of encounter, see Nancy Um, “Chairs, Writing Tables, and Chests: Indian Ocean Furniture and the Postures of Commercial Documentation in Yemen, 1700 1750,” Art History 38, no. 4 (2015), 719 31. On their use see Sadan, Mobilier, 64 6 under sufra. For records of the importation of Abyssinian leather mats to Aden in the later thirteenth century, see references in Vallet, Arabie marchande, 406, n.133.

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afterwards.79 These items were closely associated with mobility and in this context they would also be used as large wrappers to fold up and keep any remaining food.80 Of course, Abraham may have purchased Indian tables and chairs in Malibarat and have dined in the Indian manner; however, these repeated imports suggest that ground covers played an important part in his food culture. Different postural cultures certainly co-existed within the Jewish community and we have some evidence for a diversity of dining cultures in twelfth-century Aden. Persianate terminologies for tablewares persisted amongst Bundar family members even several generations after their arrival in the Yemen; Joseph b. Abraham’s use of the Persian term zır khiwan, literally “table jug,” for Arabic marfac in one order not only establishes this ewer’s relationship to the table but is significant for its maintenance of a Persianate terminology. Even more tellingly, this order to Abraham’s metal workshop specifically requests a number of tablewares “to place . . . on a platter (sahn) on the table (ma’ida),”81 ˙ ˙ not used for eating. In A an indication perhaps that the floor was Mediterranean Society Goitein observed that this type of furniture, “although mentioned sporadically in letters and inventories, seems not to have been in general use”;82 nevertheless, references to small tables under the Persianate form of khwū ncha/khiwancha appear to be more common in thirteenth-century documents,83 and it may be this westwards spread of the table that elicited Ibn al-Hajj’s indignation as well as Ibn Battuta’s acute interest in the surface one ate off and how one sat in relationship to it. Neither Ibn al-Hajj nor al-Ghazali mentions the need for chairs (kursıs) as their tables remained low. Dining couches and chairs, essential complements to raised tables, had, however, been a feature of elite Persianate dining since Antiquity.84 In South Asia too, although the very simplest dining involved nothing more complex than a clean floor surface to sit on and leaf plates, numerous accounts of elite dining describe the use of low tables and raised seats or cushions.85 South Asian dining practices have not been closely studied but the wide currency of seating, at least among

79

80 81 82 84 85

Sadan, Mobilier, 64 5. Also referred to by the Persian term faylam, see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 207, Line 13 and n.10 which mentions another occurrence of the term in an unpublished inventory from Aden (IB VII, 12, Line 12). Sadan, Mobilier, 64 5. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 565, Lines 6 8 and 566, Line 20 (IB III, 2). Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, 144. 83 Ibid., vol. 4, 145, n.45. See multiple examples in Herrmann (ed.), Furniture of Western Asia. Jyotsna K. Kamat, Social Life in Medieval Karnataka (New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1980), 11.

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medieval royal and Brahmin elites, is confirmed by a passage in the Manasollasa which advises that for dining the king should sit on a gaddika or “raised seat.”86 A small vignette in an earlier poem written in the ambit of the court of Somes´vara III’s predecessor also describes how Brahmins at a communal meal indecorously bundled their dhotis and sandals under their seats.87 Profound differences of posture still persist in Kerala today between Muslims and non-Muslims. Caroline and Filippo Osella have underlined the way that, whether eating at home, at school or in more formal settings, Keralan Muslims insist on being seated together on the floor around a large shared plate from which they help themselves. Hindus, by contrast, habitually dine at tables, eat in courses, have individual “plates,” and are served by a standing household member who remains by their side as they eat.88 In larger gatherings the Osellas noted that Keralan Hindus tended to dine in a line, avoiding conversation and eye contact.89 A longue durée study of the interface between Arab, Persian and Indic dining cultures is clearly needed to better interpret historical accounts; nevertheless, the Sultan of Honnavar’s dinner emerges as the ultimate dining hybrid, as Middle Eastern, one might even say “Muslim,” as it was Indic. The menu, the courses, the use of chairs with tables, as indeed the slave-girl server, are characteristic of elite Indic dining, yet these elements are fused with a characteristically Middle Eastern preference for eating together from a shared plate, a practice which of necessity shaped the spatial configuration of diners, and encouraged sociality. From Foodstuffs to Food Cultures and Beyond Placed in conversation, Ibn Battuta’s account of the Honnavar dinner and Abraham’s luggage list outline the hybrid food cultures that developed along this coast as well as their variation according to the different levels of connectedness among acculturated elites and long-term sojourners. A constant inflow of Middle Eastern sojourners and settlers made this dynamic an ongoing, and perhaps recurring, process rather than a straight linear development towards ever-greater acculturation; each encounter was a unique fusion of local southern Indian menus, dining 86 87

88 89

The term is uncommon and the translation of “raised seat” is given initially in ibid., 11, and continued in Arundhati’s translation. Ibid., 12 and n.76 citing the Kannada language poem Samayaparikshe (Critique of Religious Faiths) by the Jain poet Brahmasiva composed under Vikramaditya VI (r. 1076 c. 1125). Osella and Osella, “Food, Memory, Community,” various references scattered across 189, 193, 195 6. Ibid., 182 3.

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practices and material cultures with elements from across the Middle East and greater Eurasia. What we cannot see, alas, without descriptive accounts from the India traders themselves is the precise ways that local and “global” foodstuffs, preparation techniques and patterns of consumption were melded in the homes of long-term sojourners such as Abraham. How was the yearly or at best bi-annual delivery of Mediterranean foodstuffs and utensils integrated into the largely local food culture – a problem the less wellconnected Ibn Battuta did not face? A food culture is at once among the most deeply embodied aspects of culture; it is impossible not to carry with one ideas about food. And yet, in practice, it is impossible to replicate a food culture outside its source environment. As Hasia Diner has observed, “home cannot be reproduced perfectly. They [immigrants] cannot eat precisely what they had once known, and even when they go to great lengths to reproduce these foods, they rarely can do so, or at least not exactly.”90 Were Mediterranean staples such as wheat or sorghum prepared and served alongside rice and local millets, or was wheat reserved for particular dishes, for bread certainly and perhaps for that North African favorite, couscous? Was wheat bread even reserved for the Sabbath and the ritual blessings essential on that day, or was it eaten more regularly as a familiar home food? What is more, how were these foods and ingredients prepared and served when your wife, traditionally the mistress of the kitchen, was Indian? Did Abraham teach his wife how to cook? Did communities of local converts already possess this knowledge or were Brahmin cooks employed? The stone cooking vessels present among Abraham’s household orders and returning west in his luggage suggest the adoption of certain Yemeni cooking practices, since Ifriqiyans did not have a tradition of using stone vessels. Was this a nod to Abraham’s frequent Yemeni visitors and their food culture, or should we consider the possibility that Abraham’s own food culture had already transformed during his journey east, even before he reached Malibarat? And what of the dates, raisins, almonds and sugar, or the bottles of rosewater or the Sicilian cheeses or the Yemeni nuts and the wine and the many other non-Indian foods Abraham received? When, where and how do you eat such foodstuffs when they arrive, decontextualized and alone in the middle of an otherwise dominantly local Indic food culture? We are, unfortunately, far from being able to answer these questions, not least because we have no clear picture of the volume and frequency of these household deliveries, no record of Abraham’s local shopping, and 90

Hasia K. Diner, “Introduction,” Social Research 81, no. 2 (2014), 412.

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no archaeological evidence from Malibarat to make up the void. The surviving correspondence only tells us that this taste for things Mediterranean and Yemeni continued throughout Abraham’s two sojourns, and that these things presumably found a durable place in the diet of his family and friends. Implicit in these questions too are social contexts of dining that are even more thickly veiled by the sources: family meals certainly – daily and, of course, around the Sabbath – but we can also imagine meals with his closest business friends when trade brought them to Malibarat, likely as guests in his own home. Abraham may also have hosted and attended larger, more formal merchant dinners for a wider circle of merchant colleagues, as was the Middle Eastern custom.91 Where we can be certain is that commensality in the purity-aware worlds of Malibarat would have required very careful planning. Both Ibn Battuta’s meal at Honnavar and the many possible meals of Abraham Ben Yiju just conjured are also reminders of longer patterns of food consumption made over the course of weeks, years and lifetimes, the “syntagmatic relations” of foods first explored by Mary Douglas.92 Ibn Battuta described an iftar held to mark the end of a day of voluntary fasting but it belongs within a longer, repeating Islamic lunar calendar of fasts and feasts, each one associated with its own particular foods. It reminds us of the different but similarly cyclical patterning of the Jewish lunisolar year, with its own rhythm of fasts and feasts and periodically prescribed ritual foods. Chapter 5 turns to the most central of Jewish rituals and its associated foodstuffs, the celebration of the Sabbath, and the particular challenges that Malibarat posed to its correct enactment.

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For an early reference to merchant dining at Siraf see Akhba¯r, ed. and trans. as Accounts of China and India, 130 3.On present day memories of “Arab” feasting among Keralan Muslims see Osella and Osella, “Food, Memory, Community,” 189 95. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus (1972), 63.

5

A Jewish Home: On Ritual Foods

The Hebrew script of the luggage list is such a potently identitarian sign that it risks infusing the things it records with an obvious “Jewishness” that they may not have had when they sat awaiting transhipment or on-board ship, or indeed in Abraham’s home beforehand. If our first encounter was with the mountain of luggage itself rather than with the list in its tell-tale script, would we be able to determine that it belonged, not just to a merchant from the Middle East or the Islamic Mediterranean, but to a Jewish merchant? There is nothing in the luggage list that signals what might be thought of today as a primary “sign” of Judaism – a particular ritual object such as a menorah, for example, or a copy of the Bible. Instead, the nature of the list encourages us to approach the question from another angle, asking whether there is a distinctive patterning in this complex distributed object – the presence of unexpected things, an absence of expected things, or perhaps changes in the proportions and relationships among things – that marks it as one that could only have been assembled, made, by a Middle Eastern Jew?1 The contents of Abraham’s luggage list and his wider correspondence naturally bring to the center questions about the domestic materializations of Judaism, a problem familiar to archaeologists of religion who have long wrestled with the challenge of defining diagnostic criteria in domestic assemblages; of understanding what traces a particular religion might leave at home.2 This focus proves to be particularly appropriate here since Jewish ritual practices are recognized as being heavily centered on the home, not least at the dinner “table,” and have been from at least the late first millennium BCE. Chapter 5 therefore continues the domestic focus of Part I but shifts from the entanglements of domesticity and business, to 1 2

I am grateful to Ofer Livnat for assistance with research on this chapter. See different approaches in Timothy Insoll (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) and his earlier volume Archaeology and World Religion (London: Routledge, 2001).

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its intersections with religion. Beyond even this, however, I wish to argue that in frontier ports such as Mangalore, domestic spaces played a doubly important role as sites for ritual observance and through it the reaffirmation of Jewish identity. While we know from grant documents and surviving structures that South Asian polities actively encouraged and supported the construction of religious edifices by West Asian sojourners, any purpose-built structure required significant, long-term investment and organization, conditions generally present only when there was a sizeable, permanently resident community.3 Synagogues are not essential to religious practice and indeed there is no evidence for the existence of a synagogue at Mangalore in the twelfth century, or at any other time, although a formal synagogue may have existed at Pantalayini-Kollam where a Jewish community is mentioned in a fourteenth-century source.4 One may even question whether, outside the main sailing seasons, there would have been a sufficiently large Jewish population in Mangalore to constitute a minyan, the quorum of ten adult males required for the performance of a number of key religious obligations. As discussed in Chapter 2, Mangalore may have been a comparatively new entrant to Middle Eastern trade. In this context Abraham’s home would have become a primary place of religious observance and the question of the domestic materialization of Judaism thereby takes on a singular importance. Jewish Gastro-politics My question is, or has been, controversial. In Tim Insoll’s 2001 collected volume Archaeology and World Religion, Rachel Hachlili categorically stated that Jewish homes would have been indistinguishable from those of other faith communities.5 Yet a growing body of archaeological scholarship sees material evidence in domestic assemblages, 3

4

5

For Indian grant documents substantiating this see Elizabeth Lambourn, “Describing a Lost Camel Clues for West Asian Mercantile Networks in South Asian Maritime Trade (Tenth Twelfth Centuries CE),” in Ports of the Ancient Indian Ocean, edited by M. F. Boussac, J. F. Salles and J. .B. Yon (Delhi: Primus Books), 351 407. On the complexity of founding and maintaining a permanent religious edifice in India see Elizabeth Lambourn, “Islam beyond Empires Mosques and Islamic Landscapes in India and the Indian Ocean,” in A Companion to Islamic Art and Architecture, edited by G. Necipoglu and Finbarr B. Flood (New York: Wiley Blackwell), vol. 2, 755 76. Jewish population described in the geography of Shams al Din Abu cAbd Allah Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al Dimashqi; see his Nukhbat al Dahr fi cAja¯’ib al Birr wa l Bahr, French translation by M.A.F. Mehren as Manuel de la cosmographie du moyen âge (Copenhagen: C.A. Reitzel, 1874), 234. Rachel Hachlili, “The Archaeology of Judaism,” in Archaeology and World Religion, edited by Timothy Insoll (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 119 20.

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particularly kitchen and tablewares, for the application of specifically Jewish purity laws that in effect generated distinct Jewish homes. Widespread finds of stone vessels and tables from early firstmillennium Jerusalem and other sites have been understood as a response to material taxonomies elaborated in the second century BCE, according to which stone is considered impervious to contracting ritual pollution. Vessels made from this material, it is argued, would have been easier to manage in a ritually observant Jewish household and thus more widely employed by this faith community.6 Porous earthenware was, by contrast, highly susceptible to pollution and the problems of managing vessels made from such materials are evidenced by finds of the pierced bases of earthenware vessels – vessels that could not be repurified and therefore needed to be rendered permanently non-functional. The archaeology deserves further, and more openly critical, examination if it is not to risk accusations of teleological reasoning. But the emic materialities that underpin this discussion point to useful new approaches to the material culture of Jewish communities and individuals at all periods. As Mira Balberg has shown in her analysis of what she terms the “rabbinic impurity discourse,” this was not a purely abstracted textual tradition but one devised to help observant Jews manage the daily omnipresence of pollution in very practical ways, to help them “try to be pure.”7 Her use of the verb “try” is important; as she underlines elsewhere, “concern with impurity is not tantamount to panic about impurity; rather it is simply a state of being constantly conscious of the prospect of contracting impurity and of trying to avoid it to the best of one’s ability, while still considering it to be, at times, unavoidable.”8 Rabbinic notions of intentionality, prior knowledge and proportionality all helped to make daily observance a negotiable, livable possibility.9 The India Book documents leave us in no doubt that Abraham and his peers were similarly concerned with trying to be pure and, more generally, trying to follow correct ritual practice, whether they were at home or traveling, in the Mediterranean or the Indian Ocean. Abraham’s own training and practice of halaka, Jewish law, have already been mentioned but others in his circle and immediate family were no less observant. Letters from the Mediterranean discuss arrangements to avoid 6

7

Mira S. Balberg, Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 41, n.112 for further bibliography. Also Y. Magen, The Stone Vessel Industry in the Second Temple Period (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2002) and, for a closely argued counter to this interpretation, Stuart S. Miller, At the Intersection of Texts and Material Finds: Stepped Pools, Stone Vessels, and Ritual Purity among the Jews of Roman Galilee (Göttingen: Vendenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2015). 8 9 Balberg, Purity, 45. Ibid., 36. Ibid.

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embarking or disembarking from ships on the Sabbath, a forbidden activity,10 while a query from Madmun to the head of the Palestinian Academy in Fustat concerning the purity status of a comparatively new, particularly translucent type of Chinese porcelain evidences discussions among Aden’s Jewish community about the application of purity rules within the home.11 One might certainly continue in this direction and attempt to analyze all Abraham’s household goods from within the taxonomies of rabbinic Judaism, but this is another book, an alternative ordering of the luggage list, that I leave to my peers in the appropriate field. In this chapter I want to come at the question of the “Jewishness” of Abraham’s luggage through the particular patterning of the foodstuffs he transported. As for its heir, Christianity, Jewish ritual is heavily imbricated with food, and specific foodstuffs are central to the marking of holy days.12 By the time Abraham sailed, bread and grape wine had been central to marking the Sabbath for well over a millennium:13 bread and wine were consumed as part of the Friday evening repast that began the day of rest, and at other moments throughout the Sabbath, the 10

11

12

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S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 737, Lines 8 9 and 738, Lines 13 17 (IB III, 43) with discussion of disembarkation on the Sabbath in n.16. On “china” in the Yemeni Jewish household of the twelfth century see Elizabeth Lambourn and Philip I. Ackerman Lieberman, “Chinese Porcelain and the Material Taxonomies of Medieval Rabbinic Law: Encounters with Disruptive Substances in Twelfth century Yemen,” The Medieval Globe 2, no. 2 (2016), 197 234. A vast body of literature has historicized these developments as well as charting the diversity of “Jewish food.” John Cooper’s Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993) still offers a critically informed but broad ranging overview from the food history perspective with an introductory overview of the history of food studies in scholarship on Judaism. For early periods see Gillian Feeley Harnik, The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Food in Early Judaism and Christianity (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Jordan D. Rosenblum’s inno vative Food and Identity in Early Rabbinic Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), melding textual and material sources; Susan Marks and Hal Taussig, Meals in Early Judaism: Social Formation at the Table (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); also selected chapters of David M. Friedenreich, Foreigners in Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). Broader and more contemporary surveys include Leonard J. Greenspoon, Ronald Simkins and Gerald Shapiro, Food and Judaism (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 2005). On the history of bread and wine in the Friday evening repast and the introduction of the Kiddush and Havdalah into Jewish ritual, likely in the first century BCE, see the overview discussion in Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied, 58 62 and further references. For a historical overview of the ritual use of wine see Louis Ginzberg, “A Response to the Question whether Unfermented Wine May Be Used in Jewish Ceremonies,” American Jewish Year Book 25 (1923 4), 401 7. On bread in Judaism and Christianity see a variety of essays with fuller bibliography in No’am Ben Yossef (ed.), Bread: Daily and Divine (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2006).

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consumption of both was accompanied by formalized ritual blessings specific to each foodstuff and appropriate to the moment of its consumption.14 Bread and wine also feature as core ritual foods on other Jewish holy days while foods as diverse as bitter herbs, pomegranates and citrons are all central to other rituals and customs. Else this chapter become another book, I focus my discussion on the Sabbath as a biblically mandated day to be “kept” and one which represented a foundational tenet of Judaism. I focus here on the presence in Abraham’s luggage of plentiful supplies of hard (durum) wheat, referred to as burr (Line 6), together with ready-ground flour (7), and two baskets of bread (10 and 24), as well as a single bottle of wine or nabıdh (19). Although the term nabıdh does not necessarily designate a grape wine, for the moment I leave it translated broadly as “wine,” implying a grape wine of some sort.15 Goitein, it should be noted, considered that nabıdh was used more often in genizah and Arabic sources to designate grape wine than the more specific but “offensive [term] khamr” which designated only grape wine,16 but I will return to this term and the question of the variety of “wines” that were permitted in Jewish ritual later in this chapter. The central question I want to explore is whether we can read this assemblage as specific to Jewish ritual needs and therefore uniquely “Jewish” in the context of Malibarat: as evidence for both future observance of the Sabbath during the ocean crossing to Aden, but also as a valuable clue to the ritual practice of Jewish sojourners in Malibarat. At a time when most sources present few individuals and no personalities, personal faith and individual religious practice have found little place in the larger narratives of medieval Indian Ocean history. Discussions of religion have operated at the macro level of religious institutions and networks or, under banners such as “Islamization,” largescale, longue durée processes of transcultural encounter and sociocultural change. Once again, the India Book documents offer the opportunity to engage in another scale of inquiry, at the level of the lived practices of one individual and his peer group. In the process this chapter explores some of 14

15 16

On the evolution of ritual and the considerable variations within practice see Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied, 58 62. The subsequent Kiddush, before the morning meal on the Sabbath and, according to some opinions, on the final meal of that day, is ordained by rabbinic custom. On bread in Jewish ritual see Avigdor Shinan and Yair Zakovitch, “Bread Miracle and Wonder,” 33 51, in Bread: Daily and Divine and Daniel Sperber’s “‘To Eat Bread before the Lord.’ Bread in Jewish Ritual and Custom,” 53 67 in the same volume. See Appendix, English translation, n.34. S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 93), vol. 4, 254.

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the western Indian Ocean’s less well-known foodways, and notions of materiality and object biography distinctive to rabbinic Judaism. Brief Histories of Wheat and Wine (in the Western Indian Ocean) Malibarat’s climate was completely unsuited to the cultivation of either wheat or vines and I want to begin by emphasizing just how remarkable is the presence of hard wheat and wine in luggage that had been assembled in a land of “rice-eaters,” and where there were, to quote the mid-ninthcentury Notices of China and India (Akhbar al-Sın wa-l-Hind), “no grapes.”17 Although we have no other luggages to compare directly, commodity histories of wheat and grape wine indicate that neither was commercially available in Malibarat in the twelfth century, likely because there was no, or very limited, demand for either. In the medieval period Malibarat certainly lay well outside the areas of wheat’s “natural” commercial circulation from the eastern Mediterranean. Hard wheat fed much of the Middle East and, through exports, the Red Sea ports and the main pilgrimage centers of the Arabian Peninsula. Its drought tolerance, long storage life (a consequence of its low water content) and high nutritional value made it an ideal staple food,18 but the difficulties of Red Sea navigation and the already huge demand for wheat in this area appear to have set a natural limit to these routes.19 In the Yemen and beyond, commercial networks for wheat faltered. The Yemen – famously nicknamed al-khadra’ “the Verdant” ˙ for its agricultural wealth – did grow wheat; however, it was only one of 17

18

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La¯ cinab la hum. Akhba¯r al Sı¯n wa l Hind, Arabic edition and English translation by Tim Mackintosh Smith as Accounts of China and India in Two Arabic Travel Books, edited by Philip F. Kennedy and Shawkat M. Toorawa (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 63. Grapes grow in the mountainous north of the subcontinent, for example in Kashmir, but not extensively elsewhere. The history of South Asian viticulture and the commodity history of grape wines and raisins in the subcontinent is unwritten but see a brief summary in K.T. Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 212. Grape wines are not discussed in James McHugh’s other wise extensive introduction to intoxicating drinks in South Asia, itself an indication of their rarity, see his “Alcohol in Pre modern South Asia,” in A History of Alcohol and Drugs in Modern South Asia: Intoxicating Affairs, edited by Harald Fischer Tiné and Jana Tschurenev (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 2013), 29 44. See Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700 1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 20. For an extensive discussion of wheat as an ingredient in Egyptian cuisine, also integrating genizah material, see Paulina B. Lewicka, Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 155 73. Various tenth century sources such as Ibn al Kindi and al Muqaddasi highlight the importance of the Egyptian grain supply to Arabia via the Red Sea.

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a number of cereals in cultivation and neither the most common nor the best adapted to the region. Daniel Varisco has underlined that “a substantial portion of the greening of southern Arabia has resulted from the cultivation of sorghum,”20 while R.B. Sergeant cites a Yemeni proverb – “don’t say ‘wheat’ till it is in the lap” – that underlines the precarity of its cultivation there.21 Although quantitative data on the relative proportions of different cereals cultivated in medieval Yemen is unavailable, anecdotal evidence is plentiful. Abraham Maimonides, son of the better-known Moses, noted of the early thirteenth-century situation that “dhurra [sorghum or common millet] and dukhn [bullrush millet] . . . are the food of most of the people of your land [Yemen] and only a minority eat wheat (burr).”22 R.B. Sergeant for his part turned to a sixteenth-century fatwa for evidence of the ratio of different cereals cultivated, with millet and kinib (Eleusine coracana, finger millet) together accounting for two-thirds of annual consumption, and wheat and barley between them the remaining third.23 It is no surprise to find Middle Eastern wheat listed as an import to Aden in the thirteenth century and there is some evidence that this was also the case in the twelfth.24 However, wheat supplies were always precarious and Ronnie Ellenblum’s work suggests that Egypt’s ability to export wheat was severely affected by repeated droughts between 950 and 1072, culminating in a seven-year famine between 1065 and 1072. The Yemen cannot have remained unaffected by this.25 Even in times of plenty, wheat products increased in price the further they traveled from their centers of cultivation and a number of travelers through the Red Sea record carrying their own provisions as a way of guarding against inflation. Stranded at Aydhab for three months in 1050 the Iranian traveler and pilgrim Nasir-i Khusraw sent to Aswan for 100 mann or just over 150 kilograms of flour (ard), enough to eat bread as his main food for some considerable time.26 As we will see shortly, Jewish 20 21 22

23 24 25

26

Daniel Varisco, “Production of Sorghum (Dhurah) in Highland Yemen,” in Medieval Folk Astronomy and Agriculture in Arabia and the Yemen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 56. Cited in R.B. Sergeant, “The Cultivation of Cereals in Mediaeval Yemen,” Arabian Studies 1 (1984), 64, n.58. Abraham Maimuni, Teshuvot, Judaeo Arabic edition and Hebrew translation by A.H. Freimann and S.D. Goitein as Teshuvot Ravenu Avraham Ben ha Rambam: Mekhunasot Mitokh Kitve yad ve Sifre Defus (Jerusalem: Mekize Nirdamin, 5698/1937), 128. Sergeant, “Cultivation of Cereals,” 33. Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les Sultans Rasulides du Yémen (626 858/1229 1454) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), 203 6. Ronnie Ellenblum, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950 1072 AD (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 29, 31 (table 2.1 and fig. 2.3), and 151 5. Nasir i Khusraw, Safarnama, Persian edition and English translation by Wheeler M. Thackston as Nasir i Khusraw’s Book of Travels [Safarnama] (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2001), 87.

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traders also carried considerable quantities of wheat with them as they left the Nile ports for the Yemen and India beyond. Malibarat also lay well beyond the main centers of wheat cultivation in South Asia, in the northern plains and, to a lesser extent, on the Deccan plateau. Nevertheless, as discussed in Chapter 4, by the twelfth century, if not before, the Indian “cult of rice” as Kathleen Morrison terms it ensured that rice, not wheat, was firmly established as the subcontinent’s most desirable carbohydrate, with millets a second choice in the south. Wheat certainly did not reach Malibarat as a trade commodity in the midfourteenth century when another North African born bread-eater, the Muslim Ibn Battuta, had to endure years without bread when he resided and traveled in Malibarat and the Maldives. The situation persisted into the seventeenth century if not beyond, if we are to believe the Frenchman Pyrard De Laval who only encountered bread and bakeries when he reached Portuguese Goa.27 We have similarly no evidence for the regular commercial circulation of grape wine to Malibarat at this period. Although an Indian taste for wine had ensured a lively export trade in Iranian and Roman wines across the subcontinent in the early first millennium CE, current opinion holds that trade to have petered out by the seventh to ninth centuries, if not before.28 Certainly by the mid-ninth century the anonymous author of the Akhbar was explicit that Indians did not drink intoxicating beverages or even vinegar.29 A small export trade to Sri Lanka may have continued into the medieval period if we are to believe al-Idrisi’s report that grape wines from Iraq and Fars were exported there for consumption by local elites, but otherwise he is clear that there were no grapes in any of the countries of India and China.30 It is unclear whether the Islamization of the Middle East substantially

27

28

29 30

François Pyrard De Laval, Voyage, French edition and commentary by Xavier de Castro as Voyage de Pyrard de Laval aux Indes Orientales (1601 1611) (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, 1998), vol. 1, 250. The wine trade is amply recorded in the Periplus Maris Erythraei, Greek edition and English translation by Lionel Casson as The Periplus Maris Erythraei (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); on the material traces see Roberta Tomber, “Rome and Mesopotamia Importers into India in the First Millennium AD,” Antiquity 81 (2007), 972 88. Akhba¯r, Arabic ed. and Eng. trans. as Accounts of China and India, 59; the absence of grapes is later stated explicitly (63). Abu cAbdallah Muhammad b. Muhammad al Idrisi, Kita¯b Nuzhat al Mushta¯k fı¯ Ikhtira¯q al A¯fa¯k, Arabic edition of sections on India by Maqbul Ahmad as India and the Neighboring Territories: As Described by the Sharif al Idrisi in his Kitab Nuzhat al Mushtak fı Ikhtiraq al Afak (Aligarh: Dept. of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Muslim University, 1954), 19.

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interrupted this trade, or whether demand in India changed. However, the Middle East continued to produce and consume grape wine and other alcohols. In spite of its prohibition under Islam, grape wine continued to be produced and consumed by Muslims and nonMuslims alike and wine and other intoxicating drinks were widely culturally referenced.31 The Yemen itself had a strong tradition of viticulture with Ta’if renowned for its grapes.32 A genizah document of around 1150–51 refers to “the room for wine” (dar al-nabıdh) belonging to a certain Ibrahim of Aden, and Goitein and Friedman draw the ethnohistorical analogy that such rooms were a staple in welloff Yemeni Jewish homes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.33 S.D. Goitein’s sections on wine in A Mediterranean Society make the point that wine played an important role in the social as much as the religious life of medieval Jews and it was not unusual to find large wine cellars amongst the Jewish elite in the Middle East.34 By contrast, a gentle spatter of references suggest that, where wheat and wine did reach Malibarat before 1500, they did so through non-commercial networks, via the type of personal provisioning examined in Chapter 3. Already in the first century CE the Periplus Maris Erythraei (The Circumnavigation of the Red Sea) records that there was no commercial demand for wheat in the southern Indian ports such that it was transported there only for the use of “those involved in shipping, because the [sc. local] merchants do not use it.”35 The phrase “those involved in shipping” likely refers to the Greek, bread-eating, crew and shipmasters who were central to IndoRoman trade. The India traders and nakhudas likewise organized their own supplies. The memorandum around which Abraham’s luggage list is written records Joseph b. Abraham’s request (to the Yemen) for supplies of hard wheat (burr) to be dispatched to him in India;36 another document records Abraham’s shopping for the trader Abu cAli al-Misri during the period he (Abraham) was back 31

32 33

34 35 36

André Miquel, La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du 11e siècle (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1967 88), vol. 3, 452 65; also the highly specialized P. Heine, Weinstudien: Untersuchungen zu Anbau, Produktion und Konsums des Weins im arabisch islamischen Mittelalter (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1982). See Miquel, Géographie humaine, vol. 3, 455, 457 9. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 705, Lines 20 1 (IB III, 32) and n.10. For the Judaeo Arabic see S.D. Goitein and M.A. Friedman, Abraham Ben Yiju India Trader and Manufacturer: India Book III, Cairo Geniza Documents (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010), 264. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, 254. Periplus Maris Erythraei, Eng. trans. as The Periplus Maris Erythraei, 85. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 585 6 (IB III, 8), in summary and in full in Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 103 7 and particularly 104, Lines 12 13.

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in the Yemen and his dispatch to India of a consignment of household necessities which included wheat.37 As I discuss shortly too, we can establish that all the wheat reaching Abraham in Malibarat also did so through personal courier networks out of Aden. A continuous small-scale couriering of wheat to West Asian sojourners may explain why, in the thirteenth century, the Chinese port administrator Zhao Rugua reported the seemingly impossible fact that wheat was grown in Malabar (Nanpi).38 When Portuguese sources in the early sixteenth century noted that at Calicut Muslim communities there imported their wheat from the Middle East and that wheat was correspondingly expensive if one attempted to buy it, they too likely described a non-commercial circulation of wheat for personal use.39 Wine is less visible before 1500 but we have a single record of Abraham receiving a bottle of nabıdh as part of a household consignment.40 Early sixteenth-century sources prove more useful and the Florentine merchant Girolamo Sernigi saw a gap in the market for grape wine, noting that, although the Portuguese had reportedly found some barrels of Malvasia wine in Calicut, brought via Cairo,41 “wine would prove a good article in these parts, and very acceptable to these Christians.”42 The suggestion again is that Calicut’s well-connected Muslims provisioned for their own needs but that wine did not circulate commercially. The contemporary problems of provisioning in wine for the mass were also discussed at length by the Jesuit saint Francis Xavier.43 The casual presence among Abraham’s provisions of both wheat and wine must therefore be recognized as out of the ordinary, and particularly so given the less globally connected foodways of the twelfth century. 37 38

39 40 41

42 43

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 659, Lines 5 6 (IB III, 23). Zhao Rugua, Zhufanzhi, English translation by Friedrich Hirth and W.W. Rockhill as Chau Ju Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu fan chï (New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1966), 96, also 88. See discussion in R.S. Whiteway, The Rise of Portuguese Power in India 1497 1550 (New Delhi and Madras: Asian Educational Services, 1989), 109 10. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 590, Line 24 (IB III, 9). In Vasco Da Gama, Roteiro da Viagem, English translation and edition by E.G. Ravenstein as A Journal of the First Voyage of Vasco Da Gama 1497 1499 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1898; reprinted New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 1998), 131. Da Gama, Roteiro, English trans. as Journal of the First Voyage, 135, repeated in a longer list 140. See sections on Jesuit provisioning in Dauril Alden, The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540 1750 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 628 9.

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Marking the Sabbath in Malibarat – A “Practical and Material Affair” Scholarly discussions of Jewish ritual and practice typically focus on more obviously erudite issues than whether two key foodstuffs were available to Jews or not, how that availability impacted on the consumption and valuation of these foods, and how their very materiality was entangled with ritual meaning and symbolism. Foodstuffs are often consigned to the footnotes as “realia” while the focus turns to a larger, more abstract meal and its symbolism, or even to the content and wording of the blessings themselves. Against this background, approaches advocated in the field of material religion are extraordinarily important in emphasizing that, on the contrary, “things, their use, their valuation, and their appeal are not something added to a religion, but rather inextricable from it”;44 that “it is key to approach religion as a mundane, practical and material affair – as present in and making a world.”45 The neglect of the more material aspects of Jewish practice is not an exclusively Jewish problem. Material religion has played an important part in revealing the extent to which Protestant, and to a lesser degree Enlightenment, biases towards the spiritual and textual have shaped the study of religion at the expense of its physical and more everyday materializations.46 It is thus through its encounter with European intellectual movements that the study of Judaism was “spiritualized” and “textualized,” with Jews in Europe and later North America encouraged to distance themselves from the more material aspects of religious belief and practice, then labeled as “primitive.” It is no accident perhaps that the heavily materialized nature of Judaism is often taken for granted by contemporary practicing Jews, at the same time that it is underplayed in scholarship on premodern Judaism and is only beginning to emerge in the New Jewish Studies.47 There exists, of course, a large body of foundational scholarship by art historians, 44 45

46 47

See Birgit Meyer, et al. “The Origin and Mission of Material Religion,” Religion 40 (2010), 209. Birgit Meyer, “Mediation and the Genesis of Presence. Toward a Material Approach to Religion,” inaugural lecture at the University of Utrecht on 19 October 2012, available from dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/257546, 20 (reprinted in Birgit Meyer, “Mediation and the Genesis of Presence,” Religion and Society: Advances in Research 5 [2014], 205 54). This lecture provides an exceptionally clear statement of material religion approaches on which I rely here. See also the essays in Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, edited by Dirk Houtman and Birgit Meyer (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman, “Introduction. Material Religion How Things Matter,” in Things, edited by Houtman and Meyer, 1 2. But see the pathbreaking Howard Eilberg Schwartz (ed.), People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press,

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archaeologists and others about artifacts made by or for, or owned by, Jews, but these studies do not automatically equate with an interest in the materialization of Judaism, and the theoretical groundings of each are often very different. Of course, bread and wine are common Mediterranean foodstuffs as well as ritual foods; as one recent study neatly sums it up, they are both “daily and divine.”48 As such they can be regarded as part of the larger category of “home” foods – alongside Sicilian cheese, Egyptian sugar, rosewater, dates and the like – couriered to Abraham in Malibarat and, given the evidence above, to other Middle Eastern sojourners too. There is nothing to suggest that wheat could not have been used as an ingredient in other dishes, or that wine was not enjoyed in non-ritual social contexts. Certainly in the Indian home or luggage of a Muslim sojourner, wheat would not have carried a religious meaning. Nevertheless, in Jewish ownership and translated to Malibarat, the divine “load” of each foodstuff invariably increased with corresponding transformations to their value and meaning. In Malibarat the observation of even the simplest Sabbath rituals, with the correct foodstuffs, represented a considerable logistical challenge and, as such, their maintenance would have constituted a potent performance of Judaism and affirmation of Jewish identity. Sensitive as ever to his sources, Goitein intuited the amplified significance of the Sabbath and its correct observance to Jewish sojourners in India. Commenting on a reference to a consignment of wheat that was being dispatched to Abraham in India, Goitein briefly noted that Abraham: needed wheat, perhaps, not so much as food, as for religious purposes, for according to the Jewish ritual, the full grace cannot be recited except after the eating of bread made of one of the five main grains grown in Palestine (wheat, barley, etc.). A scholar like Ben Yijū certainly would have hated the idea never to pronounce the full grace. Therefore, he and certainly also the other Jewish merchants out in India needed to have wheat bread, at least for the Sabbath meals.49

The “full grace” Goitein referred to is the Birkat ha-mazon, the Full Grace After Meals, an extended benediction specific to a meal that had included bread made from one of five grains, wheat, barley, spelt, rye or oats,

48

1992). On the very recent nature of this enterprise see Lawrence Fine’s introduction to the 2002 collection Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002) and Ra’anan S. Boustan, Oren Kosansky and Marina Rustow (eds.), Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Ben Yossef (ed.), Bread. 49 Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 602, n.45.

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associated with the Land of Israel.50 The Birkat ha-mazon was not restricted to the Sabbath but, as Goitein suggests, being able to recite it on that day was a way of reinforcing the Sabbath’s special status and, given the centrality of bread to the Sabbath by this period, was effectively integral to it. Goitein’s short excursus into Jewish practice in India was prompted, no doubt, by his familiarity with two Judaeo-Arabic responsa (plural of responsum, a legal opinion) about the blessings appropriate to different breads and wines, which had been issued to Yemeni Jews barely half a century after Abraham’s lifetime.51 With A.R. Freimann, Goitein had published these as part of a larger edition and translation of the responsa of Abraham Maimuni, Maimonides’ son, and his successor as Head of the Egyptian Jewish community between 1204 and 1237. The collection includes over a dozen opinions sent to the Yemen in 1215–16 in response to queries from authorities there about correct custom and practice.52 As Mordechai A. Friedman has underlined, these exchanges belong within the context of a major internal struggle between reformers and traditionalists within the Jewish community.53 Although the exchanges centered for a large part on the ketubba, the marriage payment, two responsa dealt with the Birkat ha-mazon and another blessing, the Kiddush, and, very significantly in the context of the present discussion, the foodstuffs appropriate to their recitation. As mentioned briefly already, these blessings were associated with specific foodstuffs, and Yemeni Jews, it appears, had undertaken substitutions that, at least in the opinion of Moses Maimonides, threatened correct ritual practice. The most detailed surviving responsum was likely addressed to the Jewish community of Sharab, at least so argued Goitein,54 while a considerably abridged version of the same was addressed to Aden. It is the longer responsum that I discuss here.55 As one would expect, Abraham 50 51 52

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Sperber, “Bread in Jewish Ritual and Custom,” 53 and link to Deuteronomy 8:7 10. Maimuni, Teshuvot, Judeo Arabic edn and Hebrew trans. as Teshuvot Ravenu Avraham, 126 9 (no. 84) and 196 7 (no. 109). Dating given in Mordechai A. Friedman, “Responsa of R. Abraham Maimonides from the Cairo Geniza: A Preliminary Review,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 56 (1990), 38. The responsa have been extensively studied by Friedman producing a correspondingly extensive bibliography, largely in Hebrew, but for another English publication see his “Abraham Maimuni’s Prayer Reforms. Continuation or Revision of his Father’s Teachings,” in Traditions of Maimonideanism, edited by C. Fraenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 139 54. Maimuni, Teshuvot, Judeo Arabic edn and Hebrew trans. as Teshuvot Ravenu Avraham, 126, n.2. I am grateful to Mordechai Akiva Friedman for encouraging me to look in more depth at this responsum and to Ofer Livnat for translating it into English; any errors of interpreta tion are, of course, my own.

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Maimuni’s reply to the Yemeni Jews deployed intricate rabbinic technicalities and made extensive use of the Torah, the Talmud and later rabbinic texts. The responsum deserves full translation into English with fresh analysis but what I wish to retain from it here is the fact that Yemeni Jews had evidently begun to recite the Birkat ha-mazon after eating bread made from dhurra and dukhn, that is bread made from varieties of millet, rather than wheat bread.56 Abraham Maimuni’s responsum is unequivocal, he could find no justification in earlier texts for this practice and pointed to a number of earlier opinions in the Talmud, as well as from the eleventh-century Ifriqiyan rabbi Alfasi, to the effect that when bread from one of the five grains was not available only a condensed summary of the Birkat could be recited. Nevertheless, concerned that the formula of the Birkat ha-mazon might be forgotten entirely among Yemeni Jews if wheat bread was so rarely eaten, he recommended the recitation over dhurra and dukhn bread of a version of the Birkat ha-mazon that simply omitted the name of God while maintaining the rest of its phraseology.57 This was not exactly the Full Grace but still a far more generous interpretation than that of previous authorities, and a neat adaptation of ritual practice to a specific regional food culture constrained by both local biogeography and commercial networks. Against this background one can better understand Goitein’s extended note and in particular the way he allowed himself to interpret Abraham’s anxieties – “Ben Yijū certainly would have hated the idea never to pronounce the full grace,” writes Goitein – well beyond the actual text of the document mentioning Abraham’s wheat delivery. It has been observed that by this period already bread had come to occupy “a singular halakhic status” within rabbinic Judaism.58 Unlike wine, bread from the five grains was never a neutral, non-ritualized food, and its consumption at any time was to be accompanied by specific blessings. Goitein was certainly correct in suggesting that such a concern would have been typical of the Jewish scholarly class to which Abraham belonged and for whom rabbinic opinions about the proper performance of key rituals represented, not abstracted theoretical discourses, but concrete guidance for right living. In India Abraham had access to imported Yemeni sorghum and would have found local millets and rices aplenty to bake other breads but if he wanted to recite the Full Grace on the Sabbath correctly, and without compromise, he needed wheat for wheat bread. Maimuni’s responsum implies that bread made from dhurra and dukhn had been used by Yemeni Jews as a substitute for wheat bread for some 56 57

Maimuni, Teshuvot, Judeo Arabic edn and Hebrew trans. as Teshuvot Ravenu Avraham, 126 8. Ibid., 128. 58 Sperber, “Bread in Jewish Ritual and Custom,” 53.

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time already. This may have been a relatively recent phenomenon triggered perhaps by a period of famine in Egypt at the turn of the thirteenth century that also impacted, as we will see shortly, the provision of grape wine to Egyptian synagogues. However, Yemen’s climate and agricultural history suggest that this may have been a longstanding practice given that the majority of the community relied upon locally grown millets. Abraham’s anxieties about the same issue, this time in India, as well as Abraham Maimuni’s argumentation and use of much older rabbinic opinions, together underline the fact that this was an age-old problem, almost inevitable in the context of the Jewish diaspora and the wide variety of Eurasian food cultures Jews now lived in. How does one translate religious practice across ecological and cultural regions when one’s rituals are fundamentally enmeshed with food and when those core ritual foods are distinctly Mediterranean? Jews in other regions developed other local substitutes, notably involving rice. The well-watered Iraqi province of Khuzistan was an early center of rice domestication and rice quickly became the staple grain there, apparently leading to the use of rice bread in Jewish ritual.59 If Khuzistan is an extreme case in the Middle East, debates in other Talmudic texts suggest that the problem was not unique to the upper Gulf: rice was also cultivated in the wetter parts of the Syrian coast, and it goes without saying that the problem would have been omnipresent in India. The point I want to make in this context is that the making present of bread in Malibarat – from the sourcing of the ingredients to its manufacture – was as important as, and inextricable from, the recitation of the blessing that accompanied its consumption. The position of the Yemen and Malibarat at the very edge of Middle Eastern foodways and networks, in what need to be recognized effectively as “ritually hostile” environments, operated as a stressor able to highlight or even reveal materializations of Judaism usually taken for granted in the Jewish heartlands in the Middle East. Although Goitein follows Abraham Maimuni’s emphasis on the centrality of the spoken blessings to the correct observation of the Sabbath (and other holidays), extensive rabbinic debates about the quantity of active ingredient needed to make bread “wheat bread,” or wine “grape wine,” indicate that the materiality of these foodstuffs was no less important. It is telling that both the Mishnah and the Palestinian Talmud permit Sabbath dough-offerings and Passover unleavened bread to be made from a mixture of wheat and rice flour so long as the taste of wheat 59

The Babylonian Talmud includes several different opinions about the acceptability of saying the Full Grace over rice bread; see Pesahim, 35a and 50b 51a.

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predominated (my italics).60 In rice-growing areas such a mixture might extend supplies of an expensive imported grain, but above all, in these contexts, it is clear that bread was no longer a food staple but a religious medium and its “bread-ness” resided in the use of the five grains sanctioned for this usage. Maimuni’s responsum underlines the mnemonic power of the five grains; as remembered in Deuteronomy (8:8), Israel was the land of “wheat and barley,” the five grains embodied the promised land, and the consumption of bread made from these grains was always a potently symbolic act for the diaspora. As David Sutton suggests in Remembrance of Repasts, food has a particular power in encoding and releasing memory due to its synaesthesia:61 the fact that, as Caroline and Filippo Osella put it, “food engages and crosses smell, vision, taste, touch and even hearing.”62 Some have even underlined the extent to which our digestive systems and brains are hardwired together. Our enteric nervous system (ENS) is an independent system of hundreds of millions of neurons located in the intestines and connected to the central nervous system (CNS) through the vagus nerve. Food memory is neurobiological.63 We may guess that all these senses contributed to the rabbi’s definition of appropriate “bread-ness,” although it is taste, the “wheat-ness” of bread, that forms the focus of their discussion. As material approaches to religion advocate, this new perspective helps to foreground the extent to which even something as quintessential as the Sabbath ritual is a surprisingly “practical and material affair” and also, under certain circumstances, an unusually complex one to orchestrate. “Surely It Will Not Be Difficult to Find Raisins” For all Goitein’s emphasis on Abraham’s need for wheat bread in order to pronounce the Birkat ha-mazon, in Malibarat bread was not his only problem. Two important rituals bracketed the Sabbath and set it apart as a holy day, and both required a grape wine. I am 60

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Hallah 3:7; Yerushalmi, Hallah 1:1; see discussion in Jacob J. Schachter, Judaism’s Encounter with Other Cultures: Rejection or Integration? (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1997), 265 6. David Sutton, Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory (New York: Berg, 2001). Caroline Osella and Filippo Osella, “Food, Memory, Community: Kerala as both ‘Indian Ocean’ Zone and as Agricultural Homeland,” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 31, no. 1 (2008), 174. For a discussion in the Indian context and further scientific bibliography see R. Schechner, “Rasaesthetics,” TDR: The Drama Review 45, no. 3 (2001), 27 50.

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speaking of the Kiddush, or “Benediction,” spoken over a cup of wine before the meal at Friday sundown as the Sabbath began, and the Havdalah, literally “Separation,” the ritual that concluded the Sabbath the following evening, marking its separation from the working week. While not biblically mandated, by the twelfth century these two rituals had been part of common Jewish practice within the home for over a millennium and gradually entered the synagogue too; with the Full Grace they gave a distinct structure to the Sabbath. Where then is Abraham’s wine? As we have seen, a lone reference records a single bottle of nabıdh sent to Abraham by Joseph b. Abraham at “no charge,” some time towards the very end of his Indian sojourn, and there is one bottle in the luggage. Although Goitein argued that the term nabıdh was frequently used to designate true grape wine, it remains inherently ambiguous.64 Apart from this, wine by any name does not feature in the lists of household shopping and there is no record of its circulation to other India traders. This silence may be an accident of the sources – perhaps correspondence with other individuals that was discarded or somehow lost records the supply of Abraham’s household in Malibarat with grape wine. More likely, however, it is historians who need to look differently. Commodity histories of wine almost universally assume it to be a liquid – that is, fermented wine made from the juice of freshly picked grapes. But there were many processes for making “wine” even from grapes, and among the many Arabic terms for wine is zabıb, literally “dried grapes,” “currants” or “raisins,” a clear clue to the main ingredient for this wine and the fact that it designated a separate if related grape beverage made from the infusion of raisins in water.65 Raisins would simply be rehydrated in water for varying amounts of time, sometimes boiled, in order to produce a sweet wine which, for clarity, I will refer to here as “infusion of raisins” or “raisin infusion.” If consumed relatively soon after its manufacture the resulting infusion of raisins was nonalcoholic; if allowed to ferment, and especially if sugar was added to the mix, it produced a mildly alcoholic beverage. It was, nevertheless, an entirely distinct product from fermented grape wine.66 Raisins and raisin infusions deserve their own commodity histories but in the present context it is enough to observe that the manufacture and consumption of raisin infusions is well attested in the Middle East, even if its history is more difficult to capture in the sources since raisins, not wine, were the traded commodity and their transformation often took place in 64 66

Appendix, English translation, n.34. 65 See EI2, “Zabıb.” The very different manufacturing methods of true raisin wine are discussed in Nicolas Belfrage and Simon Loftus, “Dried Grapes: The Classic Wines of Antiquity,” Journal of Wine Research 4, no. 3 (1993), 205 25.

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the domestic environment and with very simple utensils.67 In grapegrowing areas an infusion of raisins would have represented a poor substitute for true grape wine, but beyond it offered an important substitute and one that was in fact widely consumed. The solution to the problem of Abraham’s wine and its apparent absence from his household is to rethink our assumptions about the constituent ingredients and manufacture of wine, in fact its very materiality. As Chapter 3 has demonstrated, Abraham received regular deliveries of raisins from his business friends (Table 1), opening the suggestion that he may also have used some of these to supply his home with zabıb wine for ritual use. On occasion these consignments are stipulated to be “a gift for your son” or “for the children”68 and as such they have been interpreted as sweet treats, which they certainly were, but this overlooks the far more serious use to which some of these raisins could have been put, namely to manufacture raisin infusions for domestic and more particularly ritual consumption.69 The rich footnotes of Jonathan Sarna’s study of kosher wine in nineteenth-century America trace the equally fascinating earlier history of raisin infusions, since American Jews turned to the Babylonian Talmud and other sources in an attempt to solve the problem of the lack of commercially produced kosher wine.70 As Sarna demonstrates, raisin infusions offered a perfect alternative for those who, whether through geographical translocation or scarcity, had no direct access to true grape wine. A ninth-century opinion from Amram Gaon (d. 875), head of the Jewish Academy of Sura in Iraq, clarifies some of the circumstances that might lead to such a substitution, namely “if one cannot find wine within a reasonable distance from one’s home, or if one is on-board ship and cannot obtain any wine, one may obtain wine for the four Passover cups by 67

68 69

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The majority of grape wine recipes given in the Kita¯b al Ta¯bikh start from raisins, not grapes, see al Muzaffar ibn Nasr Ibn Sayyar al Warraq, Kita¯b al Ta¯bikh, English transla tion, introduction and commentary by Nawal Nasrallah as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayya¯r al Warra¯q’s Tenth century Baghdadi Cookbook (Leiden: Brill, 2007), chapters 114 and 120. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 356, Lines 10 11 (IB II, 25 6) and 619, Line 40 (IB III, 12 14). There is evidence for the couriering of raisins between Yemen and India for this purpose in the eighteenth century since it is known that Yahya b. Yosef Salih, a Yemeni sage, “would send his friends in India coffee and raisins for wine in return for the spices and fragrant oils they sent him,” cited in Orpa Slapak (ed.), The Jews of India: A Story of Three Communities (Jerusalem: Israel Museum, 1995), 87. Jonathan D. Sarna, “Passover Raisin Wine, the American Temperance Movement, and Mordecai Noah: The Origins, Meaning, and Wider Significance of a Nineteenth century American Jewish Religious Practice,” Hebrew Union College Annual 59 (1988), 269 88.

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soaking raisins in water.”71 As Judaism moved beyond its Mediterranean and Near Eastern heartland, raisin infusions became an increasingly acceptable alternative to grape wine, even, Sarna notes, in areas with established winemaking traditions such as Spain, France and Germany. The “preponderant rabbinic opinion,” he states, “considered unfermented raisin wine and fermented grape wine to be equal in status.”72 The use of khamr zabıb was certainly widespread in the Middle East, and with Middle Eastern Jews actively sojourning in South Asia in the twelfth century it is likely that they carried this practice with them. A document from the Jewish community in Fustat, dated barely fifty years after Abraham’s death, points to this practice among Egyptian Jews in times of scarcity, when they could not find grape wine. A list of expenses for the Palestinian synagogue in Fustat from 1201 lists 1 dirham spent on zabıb, literally “raisins,” for the Havdalah. In his publication of the document Moshe Gil translated zabıb directly as “raisin wine” although the translation “raisins” is perhaps more neutral, given that it may have been the synagogue’s rabbi who effected the transformation of raisins into an infusion of raisins.73 The use of raisin infusions on this occasion is likely connected to the drought and famine that had decimated Egypt in the preceding years, impacting the grape harvest in the process, and so the availability of grape wine. A similar example of zabıb’s versatility as a substitute comes from Abbasid Egypt. When the Caliph alMutawakkil (r. 822–61) attempted to prohibit the manufacture and sale of wine within the Abbasid Empire as part of a wider move against dhimmis, protected religious minorities, the History of the Patriarchs of the Egyptian Church reports that, “as there ceased to exist (any wine), the Christians began to take raisins and to soak them in water and press them out, so that they might not be deprived of the Eucharist.”74 One may guess that Egyptian Jews were similarly affected by these measures and resorted to the same substitution. Indeed the timing of this move against dhimmis in the Abbasid Empire may even hint at the political context within which Amran Gaon in Iraq issued his opinion about the use of raisins. Abraham Maimuni’s responsa to the Yemen suggest that 71 72 73 74

Ibid., 271 citing Seder Rav Amram Ha Shalem, Hebrew edition by Aryeh Leib Frumkin (Jerusalem, 1912), vol. 2, 226, and further references. Sarna, “Passover Raisin Wine,” 271. Moshe Gil, Documents of the Jewish Pious Foundations (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 97. Sawirus Ibn al Muqaffa’, Ta’rı¯kh Bata¯rikat al Kanisah al Misriyah, Arabic edition and English translation by B.T.A. Evetts as History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1907 15), vol. 4 (10, fasc. 5), 9 relating an incident during the tenure of the Patriarch Cosmas (851 58).

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raisin infusions were a recognized solution here too. Alongside his discussion of bread, Maimuni also addresses the matter of the type of wine that is ritually acceptable for the Kiddush. Ideally, he opines, the Kiddush should be pronounced over grape wine (khamr al-cinab); however, as the Ifriqiyan authority Alfasi had explained, “if you have difficulty finding grape wine, surely it will not be difficult to find raisins (zabıb) and to make wine of them.”75 Even if Abraham Ben Yiju does not discuss how he used his deliveries of raisins, we can point to an eclectic range of Indian sources that evidence the later currency of infusions of raisins among Jewish communities there as well. Perhaps the more surprising are depositions given as part of the inquisition tribunal set up in Portuguese Goa in 1560 and studied recently by José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim. Among these testimonials da Silva Tavim noted observations that “Cochin’s rabbis made a drink out of water and white raisins.”76 The fact that this raisin infusion was made by rabbis suggests that the resulting “wine” may have been produced specifically for ritual use, although other references may indicate a parallel non-ritual consumption.77 The ritual use of raisin infusions continued among Indian Jews into the mid-1980s by which time, paradoxically, global foodways had changed so much that it had become cheaper to make Kiddush wine from fresh grapes.78 We may not yet have an overview of the preponderant rabbinic opinions for the Yemen and India, but it seems possible to suggest that here too, and perhaps even at an earlier date than in Europe, an infusion of raisins was regarded as a ritually acceptable substitute for grape wine, if not its exact equivalent. Raisin infusions had many advantages over grape wine. Raisins were lighter and more portable than containers of liquid wine, they did not spoil as easily and could be stored for use year-round. Raisins were also a versatile foodstuff, eaten as snacks, used as ingredients in complex dishes, or infused in water Raisins also avoided any possible complications associated with the production and transportation of fermented grape wine in dominantly Muslim environments. Nevertheless, just as the monumentality of 75 76

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Maimuni, Teshuvot, Judeo Arabic edn and Hebrew trans. as Teshuvot Ravenu Avraham, 129. José Alberto Rodrigues da Silva Tavim, “Purim in Cochin in the Middle of the Sixteenth Century According to Lisbon’s Inquisition Trials,” Journal of Indo Judaic Studies 11 (2010), 12, n.64. Ibid. Nathan Katz and Ellen S. Goldberg, Kashrut, Caste and Kabbalah: The Religious Life of the Jews of Cochin (Delhi: Manohar, 2005), 56 and 71, n.25. Recipes from the 1980s can be found in, amongst others, the Bene Israel Cook Book (Bombay: The Jewish Religious Union Sisterhood, 1986).

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caravanserais has overshadowed the study of less tangible networks of hospitality in the Middle East, so too the solidity of Classical amphorae and Mesopotamian torpedo jars has distracted debate from wine’s varied materialities and its archaeological and textual traces. In raisins Abraham was provisioned in India with a regular supply of wine for the Sabbath and other holidays. It is perhaps no accident then that this important foodstuff and ingredient should always have been supplied to him in Malibarat at “no charge” and be present in over three-quarters of these consignments (Table 1). Although we do not know what solutions earlier Jewish sojourners and communities in south India and Sri Lanka devised for this provisioning, the India traders give us insights into twelfth-century responses and it is abundantly clear that even in Malibarat well-connected urbanites like Abraham did not wish to compromise strict rabbinic opinion. Abraham Maimuni’s responsum also includes a final detail that may shed important light on Abraham’s luggage and the particular complexities of keeping the Sabbath at sea. Besides raisin infusions, Abraham Maimuni’s responsum points to a second substitute for khamr cinab to be used for the Kiddush namely nabıdh, defined here as a mixture of grape juice, honey and water (al-nabıdh al-muwallad al-murakkab min ma’ cinab wa casal wa ma’).79 Maimuni appears to discuss this as a foodstuff as distinctively Yemeni as millet bread; it is “your nabıdh” he writes, the nabıdh of the Yemenis.80 Although Maimuni indicates that this was not a wine generally accepted for ritual use by “Westerners” – his own father, Maimonides, had not allowed it81 – in line with his own policy of enabling rather than impeding ritual observance in the Yemen, Abraham Maimuni accepted the use of nabıdh for the Kiddush. We can infer from the general context of the debate that, like millet breads, this type of nabıdh had been in ritual use in the Yemen already for some time. Maimuni naturally does not provide a recipe or further explanation; however, the addition of honey to grape juice would have aided fermentation, producing a more alcoholic beverage better suited to long-term storage than a raisin infusion. One can only wonder, given the startling absence of raisins from the luggage list, whether the single bottle of nabıdh (Line 19) Abraham Ben Yiju carried in his luggage was Yemeni nabıdh that had been couriered to him for ritual use during the journey. Ready-prepared, obviating the need to soak and strain raisins while 79

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Maimuni, Teshuvot, Judeo Arabic edn and Hebrew trans. as Teshuvot Ravenu Avraham, 128 9. On the precedent of Abba Arika (Rav), when grape wine, raisins and even nabı¯dh were unavailable, the Kiddush might even be transferred to wheat bread. Ibid., 129. 81 Ibid., confirmed by Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah.

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on-board ship, with a long shelf-life too, Yemeni nabıdh was the prefect wine for observant mobility. If Abraham, himself a Westerner, had not been accustomed to using this wine when he first traveled east, his luggage suggests that, by the time he returned “home,” he may have adapted to Yemeni custom. A Jewish Home I wish to suggest then that the presence of hard wheat (burr) and grape wine broadly defined (in the form of raisins and nabıdh) in Abraham’s earlier domestic assemblage in Malibarat and in his luggage represents a profoundly significant materialization of Judaism, evidence for a discrete ritual sub-assemblage at home and in mobility. This is not the same as saying that wheat and raisins can only be considered diagnostic markers of Judaism when – if, one day – they are recovered archaeologically in Malibarat. The India Book documents offer us what archaeology rarely can, namely rich biographies of people and things that allow us to drill into the meanings and symbolism of specific foodstuffs. Wheat, raisins and grape wine, however difficult to obtain in Malibarat, were also cultural foods and so, as the commodity histories reviewed earlier in this chapter suggest, were not exclusive to Jewish domestic assemblages. It may therefore be the combination of wheat and wine in a single assemblage, or the volume of each, that marks Abraham’s luggage as religiously rather than simply culturally significant. Only better archaeology in coastal Malibarat will allow us to gauge the frequency with which Middle Easterners of any faith carried wheat or wine out to Malibarat, or organized the couriering of personal supplies while sojourning there – a subtly different but logistically far more complex undertaking. Had there been widespread demand for wheat and wine in Malibarat one might have expected to find some trace of commercial exports, and that does not appear to have been the case, in either the twelfth, the fourteenth or even the seventeenth century. Personal couriering, as used by Abraham in the twelfth century, may also not have been widespread as it is dependent on exceptionally mobile and tightly connected individuals. The fact that Indian Christians relied on substitute foodstuffs for the Eucharist – rice flour replaced wheat, palm wine grapes or raisins82 – would support the view that neither wheat nor raisins reached southern India in substantial quantities until well after 1500. Against this background it seems apposite to ask whether provisioning in key ritual foods might itself be seen as a form of religious practice. 82

Brief survey of sources in Jacob Vellina, “Orientalium Ecclesiarum Impact on the Malabar and Malankara Rite Catholics in India,” Parole de l’Orient 5, no. 2 (1974), 311 12.

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“Fabricating” Bread and Wine In laying out an agenda for material religion the German scholar Birgit Meyer also discusses the making of “religious media,” specifically what she calls “practices of fabrication”: the ways that humans fabricate, make, “a sense of the presence of something beyond” by “mobilizing texts, sounds, pictures or objects, and by engaging in practices of speaking, singing, being possessed and so on.”83 It is clear that, in this sense, wheat and wine function as “religious media” within Judaism. The many ethnographic studies in the exhibition catalogue Bread: Daily and Divine, although written and photographed even before Meyer’s “manifesto,” have begun that agenda but there is undoubtedly a place, and a need, for more developed study of bread and wine within the frameworks of material religion.84 Unfortunately, we lack documents and evidence to pursue this approach for the twelfth-century India traders and I will instead approach this question from another angle. In the space that remains in this chapter I want to continue to explore the ways that the provisioning of such ritual foodstuffs might be understood as religious practice in and of itself and contribute in other ways to the understanding of the luggage list as a distinctively Jewish assemblage. Meyer’s “fabrication” is rooted in Bruno Latour’s work on fetishes and much scholarly effort has indeed focused on the fabrication of fetishes and representational religious imagery; nevertheless, for me the term raises an important broader point about the making of religious media. What if we interpret “fabricate” very literally, naively even, in a quasi chaine opératoire or product lifecycle sense of the term, including in our remit investigation of the production, sourcing and transportation of key elements (ingredients) and the physical making of whatever sort that makes a religious medium? These primary steps are surely as much part of the materialization of religion as the later stages of the lifecycle of religious media? Judged only by the static snapshot of the luggage list, there is no definitive proof for the final ritual use of the wheat and wine that Abraham transported, nor even the specific faith of their owner. If this were an archaeological assemblage it would be difficult to progress much beyond this assessment except by comparing it to other static assemblages – a luxury we do not have in this case. The joy of the India Book documents is that many are so detailed in their resolution and so tightly nested that it is 83 84

Meyer, “Mediation and the Genesis of Presence,” 22. Foodstuffs have been comparatively discreet in the literature emerging in Material Religion, the flagship journal, although Nicole Boivin’s “Grasping the Elusive and Unknowable: Material Culture in Ritual Practice” (Material Religion 5, no. 3 [2009], 267 87) helpfully opens the door to its better integration.

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possible to observe the circulation of objects and foodstuffs across the Middle East and South Asia at a level that is usually impossible with anonymous archaeological finds. The India Book documents are, we know, strongly focused on supply chains, couriering and provisioning, and the remainder of this chapter experiments with the idea that the very chains of supply through which ritually necessary foodstuffs reached Malibarat might also constitute aspects of the fabrication of religious media and therefore the materialization of religion. Well-connected India traders like Abraham could turn to noncommercial networks for supplies of ritually sanctioned grains, and three documents offer clues to the networks through which he was supplied in wheat while in India. One is a letter from Khalaf b. Isaac sent to Abraham in Malibarat, which includes a brief reassurance that “the wheat (burr) has been packed for you by my lord, the most illustrious Sheikh Madmū n.”85 ˙ In another letter detailing Abraham’s debits, Madmun lists three dinars for c the “nakhuda Abū Sa ıd, the price of wheat (burr) from Mangalore”; in other words Madmun was collecting money Abraham owed Abu Sacid for an earlier delivery of wheat.86 A final message from Madmun does not mention wheat explicitly but is, I will suggest, to be interpreted as a discussion of that foodstuff: in it Madmun simply informs Abraham that “concerning what you mentioned about Musallam al-Kackı, he has not sent you a thing this year, nor have I seen a letter of his.”87 In the first two cases the wheat discussed must have originated ultimately in Fatimid Egypt or Syria, the nearest areas of large-scale wheat cultivation at the period, but in all three Madmun b. Hasan Japeth, the son of the Head of the Jewish community in Aden – and later the head in his own right – emerges as central to receiving and dispatching this grain to Malibarat. The more complex question is whether this wheat was purchased locally, on the open market in Aden, or whether it reached Madmun, and ultimately Abraham, through other networks and routes. A number of India Book documents help to sketch out the networks north of Aden, at the same time elucidating Madmun’s cryptic remark about Musallam. The first and most important document is a letter written in Alexandria some time in the late 1130s or 1140s by the head of merchants in Egypt, 85 86

87

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 601 2, Lines 46 7 (IB III, 10). I follow Friedman’s revised translation. Ibid., 354, Lines 3 4 (IB II, 25 6), dated c. 1134. This reading contrasts with Goitein and Friedman (354, n.8) who interpret Abu Sacid to be the principal recipient of this wheat. However, in this scenario one would need to understand why Abraham owed Madmun money as a result of this transaction. As Abraham owes the money I interpret him to have been the intended recipient of wheat transiting via Mangalore through Madmun’s and Abu Sacid’s courier networks. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 348, Lines 26 8 (IB II, 21 4).

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Abu Zikri Kohen, and addressed to his brother-in-law, the Yemeni India trader Mahruz b. Jacob who was then in Fustat. The two had married each other’s sisters, an “exchange marriage” common among the Jewish community of the period, and shared a house in Fustat. Besides discussing their all-important household supplies of wheat (referred to here by the Egyptian Arabic qamh), Abu Zikri added a marginal note suggesting ˙ that Mahruz have the trader Musallam deposit 2, or even 3, irdabbs of wheat at Akhmim, a staging post on the Nile in Upper Egypt, “to serve you as provisions (li-l-zad) for the journey.”88 The irdabb was the official weight and unit of measurement for wheat in the Middle East and 1 irdabb equaled around 70 kilograms; Abu Zikri was thus recommending that his brother-in-law have around 140 or even 210 kilograms of wheat readied for this journey. We do not know exactly which journey Abu Zikri referred to, but as Mahruz was then undertaking round trips between Fustat and various Indian ports via Aden it seems evident that this wheat was to be collected by Mahruz on his way out to India. The Egyptian Jewish grain trader Musallam is known from other India Book documents where his nisba, al-Kacki, the “trader in” or “maker of” kack or hard biscuits, seems to suggest a special focus on wheat and wheat products.89 From Akhmim this wheat might travel further upstream to another port such as Qus or directly begin its crossing of the Eastern Desert to the Red Sea coast (Fig. 3). From there boats departed for India, perhaps with a stop in Aden, Mahruz’s home town. The quantities mentioned here may seem excessive at first glance but it has been suggested that 12 irdabbs of wheat, or 840 kilograms, represented the yearly supply for an entire middle-class family, and on this basis 2 or 3 irdabbs of wheat should have fed Mahruz for at least a year – in effect the time it took to travel out to India and back.90 Mahruz had supplies enough to eat wheat bread on a daily basis and to recite the Birkat ha-mazon whenever he wished. Carrying one’s own supplies of wheat 88

89

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Ibid., 486, Line 24 and Lines 1 5 (IB II, 58), summary of the document with full transcription and commentary in the Hebrew edition; see S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, Madmun Nagid of Yemen and the India Trade: India Book II, Cairo Geniza Documents (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010), 386. His full name is given twice: in IB II, 21 4 see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 348, Line 27 and also II, 52 (ibid., 468). A Musallam, perhaps this individual, appears multiple times in the accounts of Abu Zikri Kohen; see for example an account of 1134 translated in S.D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 299 304, Letter 68, 299 304. On the wheat consumed by a family see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 486, n.8. Comparative data also exists for yearly supplies of corn to Roman soldiers, with each soldier estimated to have eaten one third of a ton, or just under 340 kg, of corn per year; see R.W. Davies, “The Roman Military Diet,” Britannia 2 (1971), 123.

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certainly had a logistical rationale: the commodity chain was otherwise long and notoriously unpredictable, with price inflation rampant along the route to Aden. Mahruz’s example suggests that many in fact carried huge quantities of provisions out of Upper Egypt to avoid these problems – the smaller amount, 2 irdabbs, of wheat would have represented only an extra camel-load of baggage – thereby guaranteeing supplies for the length of their journey.91 That substantial provisions of wheat and flour circulated with travelers is suggested by a passing remark about their taxation at a rate of 15 percent in Aden under Ayyubid rule – not it seems a common practice as the writer is outraged – although such a system would only repay the effort involved if comparatively large quantities were being transported by individuals.92 Mahruz’s exchanges with Abu Zikri Kohen also offer one line of interpretation for Madmun’s cryptic reference to the “thing” keenly awaited from Musallam al-Kacki. If this was the self-same Musallam who supplied Mahruz with wheat, perhaps the thing Abraham was waiting for was exactly this, a consignment of Egyptian wheat. Abraham’s own correspondence from India has not survived, and of the replies he received it is those of his key business associates that he preserved. Orders sent directly to Egypt and replies mediated by Madmun have not survived in the Cairo Genizah and this perhaps explains why we have only the barest traces of these wheat networks. Wheat is mentioned only exceptionally between Abraham and his main correspondents: when Abraham is anxious to know about its dispatch or perplexed that he has no news from his main supplier, or when, exceptionally, it is supplied to him via another India trader in Mangalore. Others in his circle certainly appear to have ordered their wheat directly from Egypt and an unpublished India Book letter of the 1130s or 1140s records Madmun’s cousin, Joseph b. Abraham, organizing a delivery of Egyptian wheat for Aden via Aydhab, here through the trader Abu Imran b. Nufayc.93 Together these references not only underline the importance of Red Sea networks out of Upper Egypt for wheat supplies to Aden but also document multiple connections between 91

92 93

Later clues to personal provisioning through the Red Sea emerge in Yemeni sources and Éric Vallet has suggested that foodstuffs from Egypt weighing under 40 kg were exempted from tax in Aden; see “Entre deux ‘mondes’. Les produits du commerce égyptien à Aden (XIIIe XVe siècle),” in Espaces et réseaux en Méditerranée VIe XVIe siècle. I. La configura tion des réseaux, edited by Damien Coulon, Christophe Picard and Dominique Valérian (Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2007), 212. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 510, Lines 3 4 (IB II, 66). Also a practice in Alexandria according to Ibn Jubayr. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 407, 602 and n.45 (IB VI, 36, recto Line 19, verso Line 17); date given in S.D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden: Brill, 1966), 356.

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Abraham’s most intimate circle and what appear to be private networks of wheat provisioning. The labors of Abraham’s business friends in transporting, tracking, packing and dispatching both wheat and raisins might initially be interpreted as simply another service (khidma) rendered within the bonds of reciprocal agency or suhba, a simple enough addition to the household ˙ goods and foodstuffs already making their way out to Malibarat. However, considering the ultimately ritual use of both foods within Judaism, their role in the circulation of these important foodstuffs deserves to be recognized as a distinct form of materialization in its own right, and as an essential component of the fabrication of these religious media. I would like to suggest that it is therefore in what Alfred Gell would term their “micro-histories of accretion,” their foodstuff biographies if you will, that the Jewish identity of Abraham’s wheat, as indeed his raisins, is materialized. “Micro-histories of Accretion” – Jewish Foodways in the Indian Ocean World Two mid-thirteenth-century documents drawn up by Jewish judges in Alexandria testify to a widespread concern among observant Jewish consumers with the “micro-histories of accretion” of their food. These documents allow us to sketch out in a very practical way the intellectual frameworks and physical practices within which certain foodstuffs circulated among Jewish consumers. I begin with cheese. Dry and hard ripened cheeses from Crete and Sicily appear to have become a popular export to Egypt in the medieval period.94 Within this broader export pattern, however, Jewish customers demanded cheeses that were “pure” or ritually unimpeachable, since the rennet commonly used in cheese making was sourced from offal and therefore forbidden in Judaism. Cheese makers developed alternatives for Jewish consumers, allowing the production of what we would today term kosher cheeses, more often termed halal in the Judaeo-Arabic of ˙ 94

See Charles Perry, “Sicilian Cheeses in Medieval Arab Recipes,” Gastonomica 1 (2001), 76 7. For an excellent discussion of cheese circulation more broadly see Lewicka, Food and Foodways, 232 5. On cheese in genizah sources see also Nadia Zeldes and Miriam Frenkel, “The Sicilian Trade. Jewish Merchants in the Mediterranean in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Gli Ebrei in Sicilia dal tardoantico al medioevo: studi in onore di Mons. Benedetto Rocco, edited by Nicolò Bucaria (Palermo: Flaccovio Edittore, 1998), 252 3.

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the time.95 The bigger challenge, however, lay in certifying this cheese’s status, since in this pre-scientific world the difference between kosher and non-kosher cheese was impossible to determine by visual and physical examination alone. The use of rennet alternatives leaves no visible physical trace in the final cheese product; how then to communicate this cheese’s status? One response to these challenges was certification, and these two documents record the purity of the cheese to be sold, based on the testimony of the Jewish merchant who transported it. One consignment weighing a qintar and a half, over 65 kilograms, arrived in Alexandria with ˙Maymun b. Nissim of Syracuse, who was determined by the judges to be “an honest merchant”; any potential buyer was reassured that they might purchase the cheese “willingly since it [the cheese] is kosher (kasher) and obtained from a reliable person.”96 Another consignment of 180 molds, weight unspecified, arrived with the equally honorable Abu-l-Hasan b. Sadaqa who declared to the judges that his cheese was tahor or “pure.”97 We may guess perhaps that, as these certificates eventually made their way into the Cairo Genizah, they accompanied these cheeses to Fustat. Remarkably, pure cheeses like these occasionally reached Malibarat in the twelfth century, since we know that Abraham once received seven molds of halal cheese sent from Aden by Joseph b. Abraham.98 ˙ However, the second certificate highlights the other challenge in the preservation of a foodstuff’s purity. Not only did each cheese need to be “pure” at the point of manufacture; of equal import was the fact that it remained so throughout the commodity chain, as it circulated through commercial networks. Forbidden animal products such as rennet 95

96

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For an overview of the problem from a rabbinic perspective see David M. Freidenreich, Foreigners and Their Food: Constructing Otherness in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Law (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 55 6. The permissibility of such cheeses to Muslim consumers, as they came from non Muslim lands, was also discussed by Islamic scholars such as the Andalusian jurist Abu Bakr al Turtushi (d. 1126); see Daniel G. König, Arabic Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 11 12, 99. This issue was first raised by Goitein (Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, 251), but for a full translation of the documents see Shlomo Simonsohn, The Jews in Sicily. I. 383 1300 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 457, Lines 8, 11 12 (document 218), dated the equivalent of 1 June 1241. Simonsohn, Jews in Sicily, 459, Lines 2 3 and 4 5 (document 220), dated the equivalent of 5 December 1243. Friedman also points to another document attesting the sale of Sicilian “kosher” cheese in Alexandria in 1214; see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 562, n.58. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 562, Lines 12 13 (IB III, 1). Note 58 on the same page mentions an unpublished India Book document (VII, 41, Line 24) referring to a shipment of cheese from Alexandria to Aden.

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represent only one part of a far larger and much more complex body of thinking within rabbinic Judaism about purity and pollution, and their transmission or eradication through particular material substances, different forms of contact and material states or, quite simply in this case, adulteration or substitution. Each document therefore also maps and guarantees this cheese’s chain of custodianship up to its arrival in Alexandria. The merchant Maymun b. Nissim states that he came from Syracuse and was “a reliable person”;99 more explicitly the second certificate assures any potential Jewish consumer that Abu-l-Hasan b. Sadaqa’s cheese came from Messina and that it “had been in his care throughout” the journey.100 As Goitein neatly summed it up, these certificates testify to the product having been “transported, and stored under the supervision of reliable coreligionists.”101 This commodity chain probably had financial consequences in the case of the cheese imports to Alexandria, as certified cheeses likely commanded a premium among observant Jews, but the core issue was about religious observance and right practice. These thirteenth-century certificates are important and relevant to Jewish practice in the twelfth-century western Indian Ocean because they articulate and materialize a wider system of circulation tacitly active among observant Jews. If cheese likely represented a particularly problematic food per se, the certificates indicate that its susceptibility to contamination or substitution while in transit was of equal concern to consumers. During this phase of its lifecycle, cheese was liable to the same dangers as any other transported foodstuff destined for consumption by observant Jewish consumers. Foods might be adulterated or substituted outright; they also risked pollution activated by exposure to water, and through that to other pollutants. This will be a system familiar to practicing Jews today but for non-specialists it is worth pausing to examine this in more detail. Perhaps one of the most accessible descriptions of the rabbinic purity system is that given by Jacob Neusner, who likens uncleanness to “fluidlike substances or powers” which flow invisibly between food, drink, utensils and human bodies.102 This ontology has clear Classical roots. Developed in the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East during Late Antiquity, rabbinic Judaism was firmly grounded in prevalent ideas about matter and materialism, personhood, and a far less binary understanding of subjects and objects. By the medieval period, layers of commentary and 99 101

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Simonsohn, Jews in Sicily, 457, Lines 8, 11 12. 100 Ibid., 459, Lines 2 3 and 4 5. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, 258. IB III, 52 records that the judge Perahya Ben Yiju accompanied a consignment of kosher cheese to Alexandria (India Traders, 778, Line 13). EJ, “Purity and Impurity in Judaism”; also Mira Balberg, “Artifacts,” in Late Ancient Knowing: Explorations in Intellectual History, edited by Catherine M. Chin and Moulie Vidas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 17 35.

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religious opinion had added to biblical injunctions and practices instituted during the late first millennium BCE to produce what can only be described as a unique rabbinic materiality, built on distinct material taxonomies and with a clear theory of the agentic qualities of particular substances and states. Pollution, as well as its opposite purity, was understood as an active, physical state. Neusner offers a useful summary of this wider system in which liquids – water, dew, oil, wine, milk, blood and honey – were particularly prominent. As Neusner explains: dry inanimate objects or food are not susceptible to uncleanness (Lev. 11:34, 37). But what is wet is susceptible, so that liquids activate the system. What is unclean, moreover, emerges from uncleanness through the operation of liquids, specifi cally, through immersion in fit water of requisite volume and in natural condition. Liquids thus also deactivate the system, with water in its natural condition con cluding the process by removing uncleanness.103

Arguably, the management of pollution became particularly important in the case of foodstuffs which, in the main, are unlike human bodies and objects and cannot simply be repurified through ritual immersion or washing. Wet wheat and flour or raisins become unusable, and a polluted grape wine cannot be repurified; their loss had financial consequences and required additional effort for their replacement, particularly so in Malibarat at the very end of the supply chain. Mobility exacerbated these inherent problems. It goes without saying that the transport of dry goods, particularly by sea or river, exposed them to “activation” by water, or the other catalytic liquids, if not packed carefully and overseen throughout the journey. That journeys over water constituted a particular danger is confirmed by one earlier, Talmudic source which opines that “wheat coming from Alexandria is [ritually] impure, because of their bilge pumps.”104 Evidently the pumps of certain ships were not deemed efficient enough to prevent their cargoes of commercial wheat from becoming wet and thus susceptible to pollution. Liquids, such as grape wine, were even more problematical and susceptible from the very start of their production because of their liquid state and, in the case of wine, because of concerns about its prior involvement in any form of idolatrous libation.105 The micro-histories of transportation offered by these certificates are therefore essential guarantees of the continued purity of the product after transportation. As Abu-l-Hasan stated, his cheese had been in his care throughout the sea journey from Messina to Alexandria. 103 104 105

EJ, “Purity and Impurity in Judaism.” Daniel Sperber (ed.), Nautica Talmudica (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1986), 133 4, citing Talmud Machshirin 3.4, 657. On the intricacies of this see Friedenreich, Foreigners and Their Food, 209 13.

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The concluding paragraphs of this chapter translate this approach to Abraham’s own provisioning and that of other India traders. We cannot gauge how minutely Abraham and his associates attempted to protect their personal shipments from these risks but the sources whisper hints of these concerns. Joseph b. Abraham’s reassurance to Abraham that the cheese he sent was halal bears clear testimony to this ˙ group’s active respect of the core Jewish dietary laws, the first concern of the written certificates. If this is not a particularly surprising conclusion in itself as regards this educated scholarly elite, Joseph’s letter also achieves the second objective of the certificates, namely to reassure the end consumer, here Abraham, that the product he received had been in the care of reliable persons throughout its journey. Abraham’s halal cheese was ˙ packed by his associate Joseph b. Abraham in person, an observant Jew and a relative of the head of Aden’s Jewish community, and although it was part of a larger consignment of household provisions, the seven molds were dispatched separately in a “little basket” (zunaybil). The whole household consignment of seven packages, each addressed to “Abraham Yiju, shipment of Joseph,” was entrusted to Shaykh Ahmad alRubban b. Abu-l-Faraj – from his name, the captain of the ship.106 Tables 1 and 2 have already set out the complex social networks through which Abraham was supplied in India. The letters that accompanied these packages therefore established, often in minute detail, who had packed the consignments, as well as the chain of custodianship during travel (who carried which packages on whose ship); in effect they recorded a network of trust. The tables reveal interesting patterns, although perhaps not unexpected ones given Malibarat’s distance from the main Jewish centers of the period. It is surely not an accident of the sources that all Abraham’s household provisioning was undertaken by his closest associates, all coreligionists, and in the case of wheat, as I suggest, via the Jewish grain trader Musallam al-Kacki. We cannot verify that all the couriers were themselves Jews, but a large number certainly were. Whether or not this was the case, Abraham’s provisioning patterns, such as they survive, suggest that it was the purchasing and packaging of his supplies by “reliable coreligionists” that was of paramount importance, the religion or indeed the religious training of the courier who carried them on the last leg to India less so. This perspective encourages us to reconsider Mahruz’s decision to transport a year’s supply of wheat from Akhmim to India, and the advantages of that beyond protecting against the vagaries of Red Sea supply 106

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 562, Lines 13 14 (IB III, 1). Perplexingly Goitein and Friedman (ibid., 153) suggest, based on the title shaykh, that the latter was a Muslim when this title was commonly used by the Jewish community.

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chains and price inflation. It can be no accident that Mahruz’s wheat was ordered from a Jewish grain dealer, an individual who could be expected to understand rabbinic purity systems as he packed and transported the grain. Exactly as with the Sicilian cheese, Mahruz was able to ascertain that his wheat had a clear biography even before it reached him, and from there he was able to supervise personally every stage of its packing, transportation and storage on land and at sea, and so guarantee, as far as possible, its continued pure state. Similarly, Joseph b. Abraham’s assurance to Abraham that his wheat was being packed by Madmun himself, the son of the Head of the Jewish community in Aden, was surely meant to reassure him that the chain of custody was intact. If this wheat had reached Madmun in Aden through the aforementioned Musallam al-Kacki it would have arrived in Malibarat with an uninterrupted transportation history through specifically Jewish networks going back to the Nile ports. It is, I propose, these “micro-histories of accretion,” these long biographies, that ultimately make Abraham’s luggage distinctively Jewish, and particularly so the discrete ritual sub-assemblage of wheat products and the bottle of nabıdh that it contained. These biographies had a direct impact on the perceived materiality of the foods received: purity was a physical state. These examples can only raise broader questions about the observance of Jewish communities in places such as Malibarat, which were far from networks of guaranteed pure foodstuffs and probably had very small Jewish populations. Obtaining provisions from Jewish colleagues in Aden probably represented the easiest way of guaranteeing that these supplies were ritually unimpeachable, but the majority of Abraham’s food in Malibarat undoubtedly consisted of locally produced rice, coconuts and dried fish and we have little idea of how he and other Jews applied Jewish food laws in this context. If we follow Mira Balberg’s interpretation that observant Jews showed concern rather than panic about such issues, we may guess that a good deal of compromise was involved. Elite houses in Malibarat typically included small garden plots and a good deal of home food production may have taken place. Whatever the answers to these broader, and in many ways more pressing, questions, observant Jewish consumers such as Abraham and his peer group emerge from the India Book documents as acutely aware of commodity chains and their own place within them. Stories of the accretion of individual items and sub-assemblages were alive in the luggage list to a degree that should surprise many contemporary First World consumers. Foodstuff biographies had a fundamental and direct impact on the very material properties, meaning and value of Judaism’s core ritual foodstuffs, bread and wine, in the process making Abraham’s luggage a distinctively Jewish assemblage.

Part II

A Mediterranean Society at Sea

Part II turns to the future of Abraham’s luggage. Although there is much that we can never know about the immediate present in which the list was written, it nevertheless presents a unique record of things dynamically in transit in the maritime environment of twelfth-century Malibarat and their immediate future is clear. With a determined logic and fitness for purpose, the list opens with items – rice, hard wheat (burr), coconuts, flour (daqıq) – packed bi-rasm al-zad, “for the travel provisions.” The surviving document offers us the only known extensive record of a luggage assemblage from the premodern Indian Ocean world and it thereby crystallizes new questions about cultures and technologies of maritime travel in this area. Answering those questions is, however, considerably more challenging than working with the (for the most part) generous sources used in Part I. As with so many aspects of their lives, the India traders did not write explicitly about their time at sea; indeed it is as if the moment they boarded their ships passengers entered a state of suspended animation. As discussed in the Introduction, this is by no means a problem unique to the genizah sources but a far deeper silent challenge to the study of the inhabitation of the Indian Ocean before the Colonial period. Surviving sources allow us to focus with relative ease on coasts and their ports as nodes of exchange and interaction; we know a fair amount too about the cargoes of commodities that criss-crossed the ocean and, through oceanography, ever more about the ocean itself; yet the time humankind spent at sea, between ports, disappears from the sources and so from critical inquiry. The “nested” denseness of genizah sources exploited in Part I thins to a bare cover; the strategy adopted in Chapter 4 of putting the things of the list in conversation with a proximate narrative text from outside the genizah is unworkable too, as we have no near contemporary account of an Indian Ocean crossing that is substantially free of literary tropes or sufficiently detailed. I am left to search for new methodologies, new ways to coax explanations from this terse list. 161

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The “promiscuous profusion” of Abraham Ben Yiju’s luggage, to reprise Craig Clunas’s phrase, easily distracts us from the fact that, at its core, ocean voyaging was about survival in a hostile environment. As a much-repeated and elaborated hadith expressed it, “travel is part of life’s suffering, it robs each one of you of sleep, food and drink” (al-safar qitca min al-cadhab yamnacahadakum nawmihi wa tacamihi wa sharabihi).1 ˙ ˙ ˙ adopting a largely biological-nutritional By approach, a bodily functionalism if you will, a human being’s primary needs at sea can be identified quite directly. As this hadith demonstrates, irrespective of time, place and culture, beyond gender and social position, a human body could only survive a five- to six-week ocean crossing if it received sufficient hydration, nourishment and rest. These three categories are mapped directly onto the things of the luggage list and so, while Chapter 6 discusses hydration and nourishment in terms of water storage and core provisioning in water and rice, Chapter 7 turns to sleep and explores the making of cabins with their beds and furnishings. Finally, Chapter 8 addresses the question of travelers’ health and the medicinal foodstuffs that supported hydration, nourishment and rest. Where relevant, the underlying physiological operation of a particular foodstuff or substance is explained and justified through references to studies of human physiology and broadly ethno-pharmacological research. Of course, while humans are biological creatures with innate needs, the ways of satisfying these needs are always socially and culturally learned and these chapters develop grounded perspectives on the way these universal needs were met at this specific historical moment and in this particular region. An altogether unexpected consequence of the biological approach has been to encourage completely fresh readings of wellknown, one might even say tired, geographies and travel accounts, as well as implicating archaeological material and textual genres such as medical and dietetic literature which are never usually discussed in this context. These newly read texts and things complement and extend the luggage list, “nesting” it in ways that initially seemed impossible. Besides helping to elucidate the luggage list, above all these sources and things point to the existence of a coherent set of travel practices and technologies across the Indian Ocean area, a habitus of mobility distinctive to the Indian Ocean world. There is no doubt that Part II has a very different texture from the first five chapters, a change I have felt it important to introduce with this second, short introduction. There is no obvious remedy for the 1

Cited in Houari Touati, Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages, English translation by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 93 4 with further references.

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silence of precolonial texts about the inhabitation of the Indian Ocean; however many new sources are identified, we cannot fundamentally change textual genres and conventions. Instead, the key to the future development of these strands lies firmly in the camp of maritime archaeology and the dialogue between material and written sources. I hope that in twenty years’ time these chapters will be supplemented, superseded even, by new research across the Indian Ocean area and particularly in its western sector. Other Godavaya wrecks,2 more ThaikkalKadakkarappally boats,3 will have been located and professionally excavated, and each new ship will gradually right the imbalance that currently exists between our understanding of maritime travel in the premodern Mediterranean and Red Sea versus the oceanic sectors of the Indian Ocean. In the meantime, I hope that the questions and hypotheses generated here will begin to fill out a conspicuous silence in the study of premodern mobilities.

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Deborah N. Carlson and Ken Trethewey, “Exploring the Oldest Shipwreck in the Indian Ocean,” Institute of Nautical Archaeology Quarterly 40, no. 1 (2013), 9 14. Another recent find, the seventh or eighth century Phanom Surim wreck from Thailand, is in course of publication. Victoria Tomalin et al., “The Thaikkal Kadakkarappally Boat: An Archaeological Example of Medieval Shipbuilding in the Western Indian Ocean,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 33, no. 2 (2004), 253 63.

6

The “Simple” Bare Necessities: On Water and Rice

For all the emphasis in India Book letters and travel narratives on the dangers of storms and shipwrecks, on long crossings such as those between Malibarat and the Arabian Peninsula the dangers of dehydration, malnourishment, illness and exposure to the elements were just as real and potentially deadly; in between the household items and workshop production returning to Aden with Abraham Ben Yiju were items specifically selected for the sea journey ahead. This chapter adopts a biological-nutritional approach to extract from the luggage list those food items that constituted the necessities of maritime travel. In this Abraham’s Luggage adds its voice to an emerging discussion of the role of food in supporting varied types of inter-regional and global exchange.1 Water is an obvious although often overlooked provision, and it occupies a central place in this and other chapters. “Present” in the empty vessels carried in Abraham’s luggage, potable water is likewise almost taken for granted as a component of food cultures or as an ingredient in cooking.2 It takes the critical scarcity of potable water during maritime, and desert, travel to highlight its presence and importance, and this chapter explores topics as diverse as the transportation of potable water, the varied materialities of water and the relative “thirstiness” of different staple foods. Nevertheless, passengers aimed to arrive not simply alive and hydrated, but in good health, and food staples constitute the second category of necessity discussed here. Throughout this chapter the discussion returns again and again to the fact that there is nothing “simple” about these necessities. If hydration and nutrition are universal human needs, the analysis of Abraham’s supplies underlines the culturally learned character of the responses to 1 2

See notably Jane Hooper, Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600 1800 (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2017). For a refreshing departure from this trend see Om Prakash who consistently discusses water in every section on food and drinks in Part Three of his Cultural History of India (New Delhi: New Age International, 2004).

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these and the correspondingly wide variety of liquids and foodstuffs resorted to, even within the relatively small area of the western Indian Ocean. Food is always prepared and eaten in culturally determined ways; food preferences and the symbolic values attributed to certain foods are all learned. Like luxuries, staples are relative rather than absolute categories and they reveal themselves to be just as complex to define, constructed as much by culture, class and religion as they are determined by innate human needs or local biogeographies. Answering the apparently simple question of what core provisions travelers like Abraham packed opens a wider discussion of practices of travel and luggage-making, food geographies, food cultures and technologies, not forgetting medicinal foods, that illuminates a substantially neglected aspect of the material worlds of Indian Ocean merchants. Behind items as apparently mundane as empty bottles or coconuts lie complex bodies of travel knowledge and sophisticated technologies of provisioning. Hydration: Tanks and Other Technologies of Containment It is a paradox of maritime travel, not lost on mariners and passengers themselves, that ships are surrounded by seemingly unlimited water, all of it undrinkable. As the twelfth-century Chinese traveler Xu Jing advised: the taste of sea water is salty and bitter. One cannot drink it. All ships that are bound to cross the ocean need to be accommodated with water tanks (shuigui) and need to abundantly store sweet water with which the food is cooked and for drinking. For on the ocean the wind is not so important, yet it is the very availability of water which decides over life and death.3

The human body is surprisingly resilient and the average person can survive months without food before succumbing to starvation and days without sleep before collapsing. But in the average adult human, water makes up somewhere between 50% and 70% of body mass4 and we can 3

4

Cited from Xu Jing’s Xuanhe Fengshi Gaoli Tujing (Illustrated Record of an Embassy to Korea in the Xuanhe Reign period), composed in 1123, in Mathieu Torck, Avoiding the Dire Straits: An Inquiry into Food Provisions and Scurvy in the Maritime and Military History of China and Wider East Asia (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009), 216, translation by Mathieu Torck. Torck notes that the radical of the character gui suggests “a wooden vessel [container] installed aboard ship”; the term gui is more commonly used to describe wooden containers such as cabinets, wardrobes or cupboards (Sally Church, personal communication, 11 August 2017). This percentage varies surprisingly widely by individual, gender and age; see Claude A. Piantadosi, The Biology of Human Survival: Life and Death in Extreme Environments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 42.

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only endure perhaps a week to ten days without hydration, much less in very hot and dry conditions. Hydration with potable water was a primary biological need that cut across cultures, so it is little surprise that water seeps quietly through all genres of text associated with travel: subtle observations of where good water is found, its price in scarcity or, as here, descriptions of sea water itself. For all our interest in foodstuffs and food staples, the single most important provision on any long journey was potable water. Yet the logistics and technologies of water transportation (and treatment) were as diverse as traveling cultures themselves, and for the Indian Ocean have been surprisingly little studied. Daily hydration needs vary considerably between individuals, notably determined by body size, activity levels and weather. However, the average adult is estimated to have a daily water intake need of 3.7 litres for men and 2.7 litres for women to maintain healthy hydration levels.5 Physiologist Claude Piantadosi has suggested that for an adult to maintain stable hydration, “the absolute minimum water intake amounts to just more than one liter per day,” but that “this value is not particularly realistic, because it means one cannot sweat a drop, exercise a whit, or have a loose bowel movement without risking dehydration.”6 It is evident that crews would have had to consume much more than this daily amount when actively sailing. Estimates for the water consumption of oarsmen on Mediterranean galleys (one area where these issues have been extensively researched) suggests a daily consumption of around 8 litres.7 By contrast, immobile passengers may have coped on lower rations. Historians John Pryor and Elizabeth Jeffreys cite the 1318 Informationes pro Passagio Trasmarino of Marseilles that allocated passengers the equivalent of 4 litres per day.8 Even if we suppose that travelers at this period expected to subsist on less than their ideal daily ration of water, the volume of potable water circulating on ships making transoceanic crossings of the Indian Ocean was huge. Assuming for the sake of argument a daily intake of only 2 litres of water, one passenger on a five- to six-week crossing would have needed to transport or otherwise have access to 70 to 84 litres of potable water – double that if we follow medieval Mediterranean estimates. A useful modern measure for easy comparison is the standard office water dispenser, whose plastic tank usually carries between 15 and 20 litres (some 5 6 7 8

See M. Sawka, S. Cheuvront and R. Carter III, “Human Water Needs,” Nutrition Reviews 63, no. 6 (2005), 30 9. Piantadosi, Biology of Human Survival, 45. John H. Pryor and Elizabeth M. Jeffreys, The Age of the Dromon: The Byzantine Navy ca. 500 1204 (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 356 71. Ibid., 356 7.

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4–5 US gallons). Each passenger would have needed to transport or have access to the equivalent of just under three large dispenser tanks on a fast four-week journey, drinking only 2 litres of water a day; with a more realistic estimate of a six-week journey and 4 litres of water a day, one passenger would have needed the equivalent of eight large dispensers of potable water. Christine Chojnacki has observed that the loading of potable water in the last moments before departure became something of a trope in Indian romances and belongs within a wellestablished list of sailing preparatives.9 A letter of Abraham’s near contemporary, cAllan b. Hassun, similarly describes how before setting out from the port of Kollam in southern Malibarat “they provisioned us with water and firewood” (zawwadū -na bi-l-ma’ wa-l-hatab).10 Larger ˙ ˙ ships carried tons of potable water and yet discussions of premodern Indian Ocean trade rarely take account of this most humble and yet essential substance in the composition of cargoes and the lading of ships.11 The Indian Ocean emerges as a center of sophisticated water storage technologies. The shipboard water tanks discussed by Xu Jing were not exclusive to Chinese shipping, although no twelfth-century text from the western Indian Ocean is quite as explicit on the subject. Probably the single most important description of water storage technologies is found in the early seventeenth-century account of Pyrard De Laval. In a passage comparing different shipbuilding traditions, and prompted in part by the sight of an extremely large Sundanese vessel that had been shipwrecked in the Maldives, he noted that the largest ships came from the Arabian coast, Iran and the Mughal territories (western India) and were able to carry as many as 2,000 people by his estimate. Additionally, they did not store their water in barrels (pipes) or jars (vases) as Europeans did, but: on either side of the great mast, occupying the top to the bottom, they make two wooden cisterns, well jointed and watertight (citernes de bois, bien jointes et closes), so that the water is very well contained, and there are only two holes

9

10

11

Uddyotanasuri, Kuvalayama¯la¯, French translation by Christine Chojnacki as Kuvalayama¯la¯: Roman Jaina, de 779, composé par Uddyotanasuri (Marburg: Indica et Tibetica Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, 228, including a full list of preparatives. For the discussion of the tropic nature of this list see ibid., vol. 1, 206. S.D. Goitein, “Portrait of a Medieval India Trader: Three Letters from the Cairo Geniza,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 50, no. 3 (1987), 455 and 460 1. For model work in the Mediterranean see the work of John H. Pryor, notably Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649 1571 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and for the Byzantine navy Pryor and Jeffreys, Age of the Dromon.

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for drawing water as from a well (puits). These are able to hold much more water than our barrels (pipes), and do not take up as much space.12

De Laval’s account was paraphrased by Jan Qaisar in his innovative article “From Port to Port: Life on Indian Ships in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” a remarkable and too little cited exception to the erasure of the time at sea. His article is still the most comprehensive compilation of data on shipboard provisioning in the Indian Ocean and South Asia.13 Just as importantly, this passage prompted Qaisar to interrogate the current assumption that on South Asian ships potable water was mainly transported in large jars. Qaisar was able to identify and have translated two passages on sailing preparatives from the much earlier Sanskrit romance the Tilakamañjarı, composed by the Jain scholar Dhanpala at Dhar under the Paramara rulers of western India some time in the late tenth or early eleventh century. One passage confirms prevailing opinions stating that before departure “all the water vessels (patra) were filled with sweet water.”14 However, the text also mentions an additional task and a quite other storage technology, namely “completely plugging the holes at the joints of the planks in the little well (kū pika) of sweet water.”15 Dhanapala’s use of the diminutive kū pika, literally “little well,” exactly parallels De Laval’s much later description of the puits, “well,” built into western Indian Ocean vessels. The Paramara’s conquest of what are now parts of southern coastal Gujarat and Maharashtra had brought them into direct contact with the maritime culture of the western seaboard, thereby lending credence to such technical details. Similar tanks have been widely documented ethnographically in Gulf dhows, where they are known as fintas,16 but the term, and the technology, are undoubtedly far older as ˙ witnessed by the occurrence of the term in a twelfth-century fiqh collection from Oman.17 De Laval wrote at a time when the European entry into the 12

13

14

15 16

17

My translation from François Pyrard De Laval, Voyage, French edition and commentary by Xavier de Castro as Voyage de Pyrard de Laval aux Indes Orientales (1601 1611) (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, 1998), vol. 1, 244. A. Jan Qaisar, “From Port to Port: Life on Indian Ships in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in India and the Indian Ocean 1500 1800, edited by A. Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 336 and citing Albert Gray’s English translation of De Laval. Revised translation by Alastair Gornall from Dhanapala, Tilakamañjarı¯, Sanskrit edition by Bhavadattashastri (Bombay: Nirnaya Sagar Press, 1938), 131; for Qaisar’s version see “From Port to Port,” 336, un numbered footnote. Qaisar, “From Port to Port,” 336, footnote. Dionisius A. Agius, Seafaring in the Arabian Gulf and Oman: The People of the Dhow (London and New York: Kegan Paul, 2005), 142. A nineteenth century example, wooden with iron nails, is on exhibit at the al Fahidi Fort, Dubai Museum, UAE. Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn cAbdallah ibn Musa al Kindi, al Musannaf, Arabic edition (Muscat: Wizara al Turath al Qawmi wa l Thaqafa, 1403 AH/1983), vol. 18, 57.

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Indian Ocean was already effecting substantial changes to local shipbuilding technologies; nevertheless, he is very clear in contrasting two quite different technologies of containment with very particular geographical origins – barrels and jars versus large inbuilt water tanks. The Tilakamañjarı provides a brief but exceptionally important reference suggestive of the antiquity of this system. Together these references suggest that the northern area of the western Indian Ocean employed a common technology for transporting potable water, one that can be traced back at least to the late tenth or eleventh century, and therefore one that may well have existed on ships making the Malibarat to Aden crossing. The distinction may not, in fact, have been as geographically clear-cut as De Laval’s later account suggests. Water cisterns were also a feature of Mediterranean vessels, a technological tradition of containment quite distinct from the amphora that is otherwise so central to Classical studies. While many scholars reference the almost mythically oversized water tank of the third-century BCE “super-cargo” Syracusia designed by Archimedes,18 evidence for the wider prevalence of in-built water tanks – termed kalymbomatos or kolymbomatos and kolymbos – has been collated by Pryor and Jeffreys in their work on Byzantine galleys.19 As Daniel Sperber first realized, rabbinic sources of the third century now add to this growing body of evidence through their discussion of the fact that large Mediterranean ships carried water tanks termed in Hebrew bor. The Mishnah, the earliest comprehensive rabbinic compilation of halaka or Jewish law from the first quarter of the third century, contains a somewhat opaque discussion of the susceptibility to impurity of a range of containers, including ships’ tanks. In the opinion of Rabbi Meir, one of the tannaim or early rabbinic sages: A chest, a box, a cupboard, a straw basket, a reed basket, or the tank (bor) of an Alexandrian ship (safinah alexandrit), that have flat bottoms and can hold a minimum of forty se’ah20 in liquid measure, which is equivalent to two kor in dry measure, are pure. All other vessels, whether they can contain the minimum or cannot contain it, are susceptible to impurity.21

The term bor usually designates a pit dug in the ground, often for water collection,22 but in the present context is commonly translated “tank,” 18 19 20 21 22

For example Pryor, Geography, Technology and War, 83, n.221 Pryor and Jeffreys, Age of the Dromon, 366. Pryor and Jeffreys, Age of the Dromon, 363 8. The se’ah is a unit of measurement used in the Talmud and, originally, a dry measure. One se’ah is held to be equivalent to approximately 7.333 litres. Revised translation of Mishnah, Kelim 15.1 by Ofer Livnat; for another paraphrase see Daniel Sperber (ed.), Nautica Talmudica (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 1986), 36. Ofer Livnat, personal communication, 18 August 2017.

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and it was of some size, the equivalent of around 290 litres in capacity. The presence of this discussion in a foundational text such as the Mishnah guaranteed a substantial chain of later rabbinic commentary and repetition, most notably in the later twelfth century by Moses Maimonides whose commentaries and explications helpfully clarify the nature of these tanks. In his Judaeo-Arabic commentary on the Mishnah, the Kitab al-Siraj (The Book of the Lamp), written in the western Mediterranean during the 1160s, Maimonides explains that: in big ships they make from wood a tank (sihrı¯j) which they fill with water so that ˙ it is called the ship’s tank (bor sefina). the people on the ship can drink from it and And what he [Rabbi Meir] stipulated is that they are Alexandrian ships, because the ships in which they travel from the land of Israel to Alexandria are large ships because they pass in the middle of the Salty Sea (al bahr al ma¯lih), and they are ˙ ˙ from city to not like the little ships which travel the coasts of the land of Israel 23 city.

While the medieval West eventually adopted the wooden barrel and continued to rely on it well into the early twentieth century, Pryor posits that the shortage of timber in the Middle East prevented the wider adoption of this technology: “it is highly improbable that in timberstarved Egypt and North Africa wooden barrels would have been used.”24 In a timber-poor environment, a single large tank would have certainly required less wood for its construction than multiple barrels and likely had better dry weight to capacity ratios than ceramic jars, which tend to be very heavy. South Asia, of course, had no dearth of timber but did not develop the barrel, as Pyrard also observed. The explanation for this may be that, as discussed in the next chapter, ship-building traditions in the western Indian Ocean prioritized speed and manoeuvrability. Therefore, in South Asia water tanks would have represented a lighter alternative to barrels for the storage of large quantities of potable water during long journeys. The only disadvantage, noted De Laval, was that a far larger quantity of water risked being spoiled or lost in case of an

23

24

Moses Maimonides, Kita¯b al Sira¯j, Judaeo Arabic edition and Hebrew translation by Yosef Qafih, Mishna im Perush Rabbenu Moshe ben Maimon, Maqor ve Targum (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1968), 139 40. See also Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, English translation by Herbert Dan of Book 10 Sefer Taharah as The Code of Maimonides: The Book of Cleanness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 403, Keilim, Chapter 3.2. A further layer of commentary on this extract of the Mishnah was added in fifteenth century Italy by Rabbi Obadiah (Yareh) b. Abraham Bertinoro. Sperber cites his subsequent clarification that, “since the sea water is salty and is not fit to drink, in the large ships they fit a wooden tank and fill it with sweet drinking water” (Sperber (ed.), Nautica Talmudica, 36). Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War, 81.

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incident, whether this was contamination or, after the introduction of cannons on-board Indian Ocean vessels, a cannon shot.25 The Chinese reference and now Indian texts suggest that integrated tank technologies were far more widely diffused in the twelfth century than previously imagined. At present it is unclear whether these various technologies were related and, if so, when and how they interacted. Shipwreck evidence, when it emerges for the medieval western Indian Ocean, may eventually be able to confirm the presence of inbuilt water tanks in ships built there and refine our understanding of their capacity, construction and evolution. Empty Vessels and the Problem of Pre-metric Measures A contemporary Omani legal compendium, al-Kindi’s Musannaf, gives exceptional details about the fact that the water in the fintas (tank) belonged ˙ collectively to all travelers, with its distribution managed by an appointed 26 sahib al-ma’. Since large water tanks were not considered to be susceptible ˙to˙ ritual impurity, their water would have been acceptable to ritually observant Jewish travelers and likely constituted an essential shipboard resource for Abraham and his family. Empty vessels would have been essential for drawing, and storing, water from shipboard cisterns and it is surely significant that two sets of containers in Abraham’s luggage should be explicitly described as farigh, “empty”: “six empty bottles” (Line 21) and “5 empty waterskins” (Line 23). On land and at sea travelers were advised to carry at least one vessel for drawing water. In the same section al-Kindi also mentions passingly the importance of a bucket (dila’) for drawing seawater for ablutions during voyages, but a bucket would have been just as essential for drawing drinking water.27 Likewise, in the same century, al-Ghazali recommended in his guide to Sufi travelers that, following the example of the early Sufi pioneer Abu Talib al-Makki (d. 996), travelers carry a leather bucket or bottle (rakwa) and a length of rope for drawing water.28 Abraham’s empty vessels may have been carried to draw his family’s water ration from the ship’s onboard tank. But they may also have been destined to transport additional supplies of potable water. Assurances of ritual purity aside, the quality of potable water in shipboard tanks was by all accounts poor, and better-off travelers may well have preferred to take 25 26 28

De Laval, Voyage, French ed. as Voyage de Pyrard de Laval, vol. 1, 244. al Kindi, al Musannaf, vol. 18, 57, 58. 27 Ibid., vol. 18, 55. Abu Hamid al Ghazali, Ihya¯’ cUlum al Dı¯n, English translation of Book XVII by Lionel Librande as Al Ghazali on Conduct in Travel: Kita¯b A¯da¯b al Safar. Book XVII of the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Great Shelford: Islamic Texts Society, 2016), 42 3, also translated as “long handled bottle.”

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their own water supplies in order to guarantee its cleanliness and to supplement basic rations. The Anıs al-Hujjaj, a later seventeenthcentury account of a pilgrimage undertaken from Surat in 1669–70 by a certain Mulla Safi al-Din, noted that water from the ship’s fintas was ˙ rationed out to passengers but was often distasteful and he advised them 29 to carry personal supplies in earthen pots. When Abraham’s Indian factor Bomma sailed back to Mangalore from Aden in 1135 Madmun charged his master 1 dinar for purchases of “water and things for the cabin” (ma’ wa hawa’ij balıj). This dinar may have represented a flat fee ˙ for the consumption of water from the ship’s tank, or perhaps also the cost of provisioning with his own personal supply.30 Carrying one’s own water supplies obviously guaranteed against severe dehydration, if not death, but above all it allowed passengers to provision with potable water of a quality of their choosing. The question of the quality of different waters runs across Eurasian sources as a fundamental part of dietetics and medicine, but also travel and geography too, and we find countless practical observations of water quality that reflect the hard realities of travel. The numbers of empty vessels Abraham transported suggest that most were destined to store personal water supplies; one leather waterskin would have been enough for drawing water from a communal tank, or seawater if it was needed. The elephants in the room in this discussion are, of course, the “technologies of containment” themselves and the systems of measure in operation, without which we can have little idea of the quantities of water involved and the ratio of personal supplies to communal water. However much textual sources show a discreet but sustained interest in the locations on land where potable water was to be obtained, as we have seen they are largely silent about the technologies for its storage and preservation at sea. Zoë Sofia, picking up on the work of historian and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford in the 1930s, has underlined how the history of technology had preferred “aggressive tools and dynamic machines” to the passive, “quietly receptive and transformative

29

30

Cited in Qaisar, “From Port to Port,” 337; this important Persian text still awaits a critical edition and translation. For ethnographic accounts of the same problem and personal supplies see Agius, Seafaring, 142. For Bomma’s purchases see S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 346, Line 4 (IB II, 21 4) and for the Judaeo Arabic S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, Madmun Nagid of Yemen and the India Trade: India Book II, Cairo Geniza Documents (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010), 182. As the letter mentions correspondence for the people of Mangalore, I take this port to be its final destination.

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‘feminine’ elements of container technologies.”31 Whether or not an underlying gender bias is to blame for the state of research on the medieval Indian Ocean, we certainly know more about commodities than their containers, and even less about the material culture of domestic containment.32 As the dearth of data on dry weight to capacity ratios for Indian Ocean storage vessels suggests, unlike their colleagues in the Mediterranean, archaeologists working in these regions generally do not estimate the capacities of the containers they document, robbing us of what the Polish historian Witold Kula stresses is one of the most reliable real-life sources for pre-metric metrologies and the understanding of their variation over time.33 Neglected too are ways that existing vessels might relate to the dimensions and carrying capacity of the average human body as well as to different postural cultures of carrying.34 Superficially at least, the discussions in Jewish halaka provide some hard data on tank capacities. However, 40 se’ah was a traditional volumetric benchmark for liquids within rabbinic Judaism, and, while it may well have been related at one stage to actual container capacities, by the later twelfth century we must consider it to be a largely symbolic measure. As Kula astutely observed, “to convert oldtime measures into the units of the metric system is often, in fact, not a feasible task, and the results of such attempts, however painstaking, are often of little practical use.”35 For Kula it was the cultural dimensions of weights and measures that spoke most accurately and usefully. Similar problems occur with Abraham’s empty qinnınas (bottles) and jahlas (waterskins) when we attempt to understand the quantities of ˙ potable water he planned to load. Evidence from other India Book documents indicates that Abraham’s six qinnınas were glass bottles from the manufacturing center of Lakhaba, generally identified with the site of Kawm am-Saila outside Aden.36 Unfortunately, the glass sherds collected there are of later date and small size, which does not allow us to reconstruct even average dimensions for twelfth-century bottles. However, two large and intact glass bottles were recovered from a Mediterranean Fatimid context at the port of Caesarea; of low-quality 31 32

33 34

35 36

Zoë Sofia, “Container Technologies,” Hypatia 15, no. 2 (2000), 185. For a discussion of this problem, mainly with regard to the Mediterranean and the use of “bags” and “bundles,” see S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 93), vol. 1, 336. Witold Kula, Measures and Men, translated from the Polish by Richard Szreter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 95. See introductory sections of ibid., and for a contemporary design perspective Alvin R. Tilley, The Measure of Man and Woman: Human Factors in Design, 2nd rev. edn (London: John Wiley and Sons, 2002). Kula, Measures and Men, 99. See references in Appendix, English translation nn.4 and 31.

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green glass, as were very probably those produced at Lakhaba, they appear to have been a relatively common vessel type.37 Both, given the composition of the hoard, are deemed to have been domestic containers and the largest of these has a capacity of 19 litres (roughly 5 US gallons), the other a little less than half that at 8 litres.38 We have no proof that Yemeni glass bottles held similar capacities, although it is worth noting that 19 kilograms is a weight that most adults can lift and carry over at least short distances. Nevertheless, assuming some correlation, six empty bottles of the larger size would have provided Abraham and his companions with well over 110 litres of water, the smaller bottles just under 50 – a significant personal provision of potable water sufficient for one or two people depending on vessel size and daily ration. Abraham’s “5 empty waterskins” (Line 23) pose similar if not bigger problems since, as leather containers, they biodegrade in all but the driest or most anaerobic of conditions leaving little physical evidence. Like any container, waterskin capacities are determined by a huge set of variables, notably the species and size of the animal providing the skin, whether the vessel is intended for domestic or commercial use, the carrying capacity of the human or animal that was to transport it, and the presence or not of other lifting technologies. Recent ethnographic data from the Sahara suggests that waterskins carried on camel-back in this area hold on average 25 litres,39 but this tells us little about domestic waterskins or skins carried on the human body. One India Book document brings us tantalizingly close to the capacity of the waterskins in Abraham’s luggage: a letter to Abraham in India asks him to buy a large washbasin “which holds two waterskins (jahlatayn) of water, [that is] measuring two siqayas.” A siqaya is a unit˙ of measurement used for liquids, notably for water and wine, and the implication here is that one waterskin contained one siqaya of water.40 The problem is that like all premodern metrics the siqaya is nowhere clearly defined and we are left to make more general assumptions about its capacity based on the context of consumption. A waterskin for domestic use is likely to have been substantially smaller 37

38 39 40

Ya’el D. Arnon, Ayla Lester and Rachel Pollak, “The Fatimid Hoard of Metalwork, Glass, and Ceramics from TPS: Preliminary Report,” in Caesarea Reports and Studies: Excavations 1995 2007 within the Old City and the Ancient Harbor, edited by Kenneth G. Holum, Jennifer A. Stabler and Eduard G. Reinhardt (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008), 112 and figs. 6 11 and 6 12. Ibid. Michael Asher, “Camel Expeditions,” in Royal Geographical Society Expedition Handbook, edited by Shane Winser (London: Profile Books, 2004), 359. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 560, Lines 7 8 (IB III, 1) and n.45 repeating Goitein’s observation from the first publication of the document that he did not know the capacity (S.D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973], Letter 39, 195).

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than a commercial skin or those used in caravan travel since it would have been filled and transported by a human, probably a female domestic slave. Training and physiology undoubtedly play a huge part in an individual’s lifting capacities but, if we think back to the modern office water dispenser, it is quite evident that men and women alike find a 5 US gallon (18.9 litre) water bottle weighing just over 19 kilograms bulky and heavy to lift even when it is rigid and (often) designed with handles; thus a domestic waterskin for pouring into a larger basin may have held substantially less, perhaps half that capacity. Based on this assumption, Abraham may have been able to provision with a further 50 litres of water, more if these were in fact “travel size” skins. These are not satisfactory answers by any means but I hope they highlight the urgent need for the more thorough investigation of technologies of containment in the Indian Ocean. Water in Many Forms – The Coconut The problems of preserving and transporting potable water point to the importance of carrying alternative liquids and the many forms of “water.” As the contemporary Manasollasa states: “some consider [the water] from the coconut (narikela) to be the tenth” type of water, characterized as natural (varksa, literally “from trees”), enlivening (jıvana), the best ˙ (uttama), sweet (svadu), stimulating (vṛsya) and charming ˙ (manohara).41 Abraham’s provisions included a basket of coconuts (zanbıl narjıl) (Lines 6–7) – possibly another gunny-full if the letters ra originally wrote ranaj42 – and in the present context it is as a possible source of potable water that I wish to consider these. The early history of the use of young coconuts as sources of potable water on maritime journeys is lost in time. But certainly by the early first millennium CE coconuts were such important components of Indian Ocean food cultures and foodways that Mediterranean and Middle Eastern travelers could not fail to encounter them, and come to rely on them. The use of coconut water as a substitute for drinking water is discussed most explicitly in Abu Zayd Sirafi’s tenth-century supplement to the Notices of China and India (Akhbar al-Sın wa-l-Hind) which discusses a certain “pious people” of India who settled islands that form in 41

42

I am grateful to Alastair Gornall for this revised translation from the Sanskrit edition by G.K. Shrigondekar; see Somes´vara III, Ma¯nasolla¯sa, Sanskrit edition by G.K. Shrigondekar as Ma¯nasolla¯sa of King Somes´vara (Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1939), vol. 2, 3.14, verse 1615; for the only published English translation see Somes´vara III, Ma¯nas¯olla¯sa, English translation by P. Arundhati as Royal Life in Ma¯nas¯olla¯sa (New Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan, 1994), 130. Other Indic texts, for example of Ayurvedic medicine, offer different compilations of water types and this was a very fluid taxonomy. See Appendix, English translation, n.9.

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the sea, “planting coconut palms on them and providing sources of freshwater (wa yastanabitū n bi-ha al-miyah),”43 literally “cultivating water on them.” “If ships put into these islands,” he continues, “they can enjoy the benefits of the palms.”44 The islands in question were the Maldives, important stopping points on journeys around southern India, and the “pious people” are the Buddhist monks who had long-established monasteries in the islands. Coconuts were widely dispersed by this period and other Indian Ocean islands offered similar supplies. The first, ninthcentury, portion of the Akhbar in fact mentions coconuts and other foodstuffs obtained through barter at the Nicobar islands.45 Unsurprisingly, any physical evidence of coconut consumption during maritime voyages has been lost. Food detritus was simply thrown overboard or would biodegrade in most wrecks, and, as with so many staples, it was probably such an obvious provision that it is rarely described beyond the instances gathered here. Although remains of coconut shells have been recovered from a number of later shipwrecks it is unclear whether these were present as cargo or as a provision, or indeed as both.46 Given this problem we have to turn to important evidence of coconut consumption from the Roman and Islamic periods of occupation at the northern Red Sea port of Qusayr al-Qadim (earlier called Myos Hormos), where numerous fragments of coconut shell and fibrous husk have been identified. Certainly for the Roman remains, the archaeobotanist Marijke van der Veen concluded that, as coconuts do not appear to have been used in Roman cooking, “the fragments of the fruits found at Myos Hormos may represent remnants of what was consumed on the journey back from India, rather than intentional imports.”47 By the Islamic period coconuts were being imported to the Middle East on a commercial basis, making the evidence less clear-cut. However, their role in provisioning seems highly reasonable given the contemporary textual evidence for this usage. The coconut remains from the Islamic period deposits at Qusayr are particularly important as nearly all 43

44 46

47

Akhba¯r al Sı¯n wa l Hind, Arabic edition and English translation by Tim Mackintosh Smith as Accounts of China and India in Two Arabic Travel Books, edited by Philip F. Kennedy and Shawkat M. Toorawa (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 119. The essential role of coconuts in shipboard provisioning is reinforced in a later, more detailed description of the self same economy in the early seventeenth century account of Pyrard De Laval, who remarks that the coconut tree provided “even the supplies of food and drink” for a ship’s return journey (my translation; in French, “jusqu’aux provisions de boire ou de manger”) see De Laval, Voyage, French edn as Voyage de Pyrard de Laval, vol. 2, 884. Akhba¯r, Arabic edn and Eng. trans. as Accounts of China and India, 119. 45 Ibid., 33. See Torck, Avoiding the Dire Straits, 140 citing the 1975 Chinese excavation report for reference to a late fourteenth century wreck off the coast of Quanzhou which included small fragments of coconut. Marijke van der Veen, Consumption, Trade and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains from the Roman and Islamic Ports at Quseir al Qadim, Egypt (Frankfurt am Main: Africa Magna Verlag, 2011), 49.

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show traces of double drilled holes, evidence that their water or milk (depending on the age of the coconut) had been drained off.48 As ready-filled, perfectly sealed and sterile water containers, coconuts were a perfect solution to the often brackish water found at coastal sites as well as the sometimes questionable quality of tank water on-board ships. The coconut was a botanical water purifier that thrived in salty coastal soils. While Abraham does not specify whether the coconuts he packed were young, green coconuts and thus suitable for drinking, or ripe coconuts better suited to eating, or a mix of both, either way they constituted an important provision. The basket in Abraham’s list contributes important new textual evidence for the use of coconuts as shipboard provisions in the twelfth century. Basket sizes are even less well attested in contemporary sources than bottles or waterskins but genizah documents for the area suggest that they could be sizeable; one letter mentions a qawsara basket of dates sent to ˙ Abraham from Aden weighing 115 pounds or roughly 52 kilograms.49 So the zanbıl of coconuts on Abraham’s list may have been sizeable. Coconut water would also have provided an effective, natural rehydration solution. While coconut water cannot compare to modern, scientifically designed sports drinks or rehydration solutions, it contains enough sugars as well as potassium and sodium to have offered better rehydration than water alone. Medical studies in countries such as Pakistan or Indonesia where industrially produced rehydration therapies may be costly, or indeed unavailable, have concluded that “ingestion of fresh young coconut water, a sterilized beverage, could be used for rehydration for mild diarrhoea.”50 West Asian medical traditions emphasized the coconut’s invigorating – read aphrodisiac – qualities but its practical efficacy may have been the stuff of popular or folk medicine. Rice – A Thirsty Food Modern medical understandings of human physiology place potable water at the apex of any hierarchy of biological needs. Yet in medieval 48 49

50

Ibid., 188. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 325, Lines 3 4; Friedman’s footnote indicates that this was a particular type of Yemeni basket specifically for dates (n.22, IB II, 16 19). See also ibid., 566, Lines 16 17, for an obviously smaller Indian basket (zanbı¯l hindı¯) contain ing 19 pounds of copper and other scrap metal (IB III, 2). See M.N. Khan, M.U. Rehman and K.W. Khan, “A Study of Chemical Composition of Cocos nucifera L. (Coconut) Water and Its Usefulness as Rehydration Fluid,” Pakistan Journal of Botany 35, no. 5 (2003), 925 30. The better absorption of coconut water as compared to plain water during exercise was also demonstrated in Orlando Laitano et al., “Improved Exercise Capacity in the Heat Followed by Coconut Water Consumption,” Motriz: Revista de Educacao Fisica 20, no. 1 (2014), 107 11.

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Middle Eastern thinking about the body, water was only a passive transporter of more active substances. Distinguished as the only one of the four elements “that is part of all that is ingested,” in the words of Ibn Sina (d. 1037), “water assists in the liquefaction of food.”51 Foodstuffs were Abraham’s chief focus too, and yet, as the discussion of the coconut illustrates, provisioning was heavily conditioned by local biogeographies and travel cultures, and the very nature of the journey. What Abraham packed for the journey back to Aden was certainly not what he had packed when he sailed from there for Malibarat; it was different again from what he would have provisioned for short coastal voyages in Malibarat, and these were in turn very different provisioning assemblages from those composed in the Mediterranean. Humans’ innate conservatism coupled with firmly held beliefs in the importance of familiar foods to health and bodily balance (discussed further in Chapter 8) fundamentally shaped provisioning practices, and provisioning broadly followed home food cultures. By that I mean that wheat-eaters, for example, first planned to provision with wheat products, only later turning to local staples when their first choice was no longer available. When Goitein lamented the fact that for the Mediterranean, “except bread . . . neither accounts nor letters specify the nature and cost of the rations taken by a traveler with him on a sea voyage,”52 he had in fact identified the single most important travel provision in the medieval Mediterranean, certainly on shorter, coastal voyages: bread. Fresh bread was available at every port of call, stale bread could always be softened in water, and frequent stops offered travelers the chance to supplement this basic diet with fresh food and more rounded meals. Another important and more durable provision was kack, in many ways the ancestor of the modern ship’s biscuit, and probably the most frequently mentioned foodstuff developed specifically for, and in the context of, travel. Known since at least Roman times, kack was a type of twice-baked biscuit made from wheat flour that could be eaten after being rehydrated in a little water. Both bread and kack have a relatively high calorific value, and both are baked to reduce their water content and thus increase their longevity.53

51

52 53

Abu cAli al Husain Ibn cAbdallah Ibn Sina, Qanun fı¯ l Tibb, English translation of Book 1 by Mones Abu Asab, Hakima Amri and Marc S. Micozzi as Avicenna’s Medicine: A New Translation of the 11th Century Canon with Practical Applications for Integrative Health Care (Rochester, VT and Toronto: Healing Arts Press, 2013), 150. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, 316. Recipes for “luxury” versions are better recorded; see al Muzaffar ibn Nasr Ibn Sayyar al Warraq, Kita¯b al Ta¯bikh, English translation, introduction and commentary by Nawal Nasrallah as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayya¯r al Warra¯q’s Tenth century Baghdadi Cookbook (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 123 4.

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Mediterranean provisioning cultures had long relied on wheat and, like the other bread-eating Mediterranean travelers encountered by Goitein, Abraham would have been able to rely on bread and hard biscuit for his journey east from Ifriqiya even as far as the Yemen.54 A note excavated at Qusayr, written barely a century after Abraham sailed this route, preserves a request from three stranded travelers to send a wrap or cloak, two waterskins of water and a little kack, evidence if it were needed of this biscuit’s importance.55 But the western Indian Ocean was a complex food zone, a place where several very different staples, originating across Eurasia and Africa, met and often overlapped. As we have seen, Egyptian hard wheat supplied the Red Sea as far as Aden and even Dhofar on the Arabian coast, extending Mediterranean food and provisioning cultures well beyond wheat’s natural range; however, underneath and around it were other staples, other foodways, and new travel practices. Dates and date products became essential provisions in the Gulf and around the Arabian coast. In southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa, African millets replaced wheat as staple grains and, as Kathleen Morrison has shown, millets constituted an important if often overlooked staple in Peninsular India too. If we work from the principle that landed food cultures were translated to maritime environments wherever possible, it is probable that early Indian crews and travelers originally provisioned with millets and perhaps a range of legumes; however, as the “cult of rice” supplanted millets across South Asia, rice would have become the carbohydrate of first choice in maritime provisioning, at least among elites and aspiring elites.56 Well-connected merchants like Abraham were evidently able to marshal a wide range of carbohydrates, including wheat and perhaps even local finger millet, in their provisions, but these supplies were dwarfed by the larger quantities of rice he transported: “one large gunny of rice . . . four small gunnies and two baskets of rice” (Lines 3–6). Rice was intended to be the core carbohydrate during this crossing. Certainly for the period after 1500 and the advent of truly global foodways there is no doubt that at sea, as on land, rice was the choice staple carbohydrate across much of the Indian Ocean area.57 Simão Botelho noted that the rations paid to sailors in Goa and “on all the coast of India 54 55 56

57

See Chapter 5, p. 134 5. Li Guo, Commerce, Culture, and Community in a Red Sea Port in the Thirteenth Century: The Arabic Documents from Quseir (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 154, Lines 4 10. On the “cult of rice” see Kathleen D. Morrison, “From Millet to Rice (and Back Again?): Cuisine, Cultivation, and Health in Southern India,” in A Companion to South Asia in the Past, edited by G. Robbins Schug, S.R. Walimbe and K.A.R. Kennedy (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2016), 358 73. Rice plays a starring role in Jane Hooper’s study of Madagascar’s place in Indian Ocean provisioning; see Hooper, Feeding Globalization.

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from Diu to Kollam” was of two medidas of rice per diem and one “peixe serra” (sır fish) per month, per person.58 For Qaisar, “the staple articles of victuals generally consisted of rice, ghee [clarified butter], dal (pulses), salted fish and butter.”59 Before this period, however, sources on provisioning in South Asia are even more terse than those for the Middle East, and Mathieu Torck has identified a similar silence in the Chinese sources.60 Texts such as the Kuvalayamala, and the extensive earlier Buddhist jataka literature, omit any mention of foodstuffs among the otherwise apparently comprehensive list of preparatives before sailing, perhaps because foodstuffs were provisioned individually. One important passage is nevertheless found in a story in an early Jain Prakrit text, the Nayadhammakahao, which records the transport of rice for the personal use of seafaring merchants (sam.jatta-nava-van.iyaga) alongside other essentials like oil, clarified butter, potable water, medicines, weapons and clothes.61 Another passage comes from the tenth-century collection of stories known as the The Book of the Wonders of India (Kitab cAja’ib al-Hind) which describes how the Banias on-board an Indian ship would put out daily a plate of rice with clarified butter (sahfa uruzz bi-samn) as ˙ a food offering “for the ship’s angels” (li-mala’ika˙al-markab), an˙ offering of their own main food staple.62 Earlier than either of these sources and more tangible by far are finds of rice grains and husks in the Roman levels of the Red Sea ports of Berenike and Myos Hormos (medieval Qusayr) that have been explained as the remains of food rations brought there by Indian traders. At the latter site some husks were recovered from an area that also yielded Indian pottery and epigraphic evidence for the presence of Indian ships and traders.63 This evidence, sparse as it is, supports 58

59

60

61

62 63

Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, Subsidios para a historia da India Portugueza. I. O livro dos pesos, medidas e moedas por Antonio Nunes. II. O tombo do estado da India, por Simão Botelho. III. Lembranças das cousas da India em 1525 (Lisbon: Typ. da Academia Real das Sciencias, 1868), 235 56. Qaisar, “From Port to Port,” 338. There is no comprehensive survey of this question at present but references to provisioning in rice and rice rations can be found across sources from the early modern period onwards. Mathieu Torck, “The Issue of Food Provision and Scurvy in East and West: A Comparative Enquiry into Medieval Knowledge of Provisioning, Medicine and Seafaring History,” in Trade and Transfer across the East Asian “Mediterranean,” edited by Angela Schottenhammer (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2005), 278. Cited in S. Muthukumaran, “Between Archaeology and Text: The Origins of Rice Consumption and Cultivation in the Middle East and the Mediterranean,” Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 24, no. 1 (2014), DOI: doi.org/10.5334/pia.465 (quoting from Jna¯ta¯ Dharma Katha¯nga Sutra, edited by A. Muni [Delhi: Padma Prakashan, 2053VS/ 1996], Sureshkumar Muthukumaran, personal communication, 19 October 2016). See Kita¯b cAja¯’ib al Hind, English translation by G.S.P. Freeman Grenville as The Book of the Wonders of India (London: East West, 1981), 16. Van der Veen, Trade and Innovation, 47.

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Kathleen Morrison’s statement that between 300 BCE and 1000 CE rice took on a “cult” status as the staple grain of the Indian elite, firmly occupying the central place that it still enjoys in Indian elite cuisines and ritual practices, but also becoming a core provision in maritime travel.64 Abraham’s luggage list is thus a unique and critical document for the study of provisioning in the western Indian Ocean before 1500. Even if it concerns the provisioning of a long-term sojourner of North African origin and Jewish faith, it adds substantially to a frankly negligible number of references. Rice was, of course, also well established as the most desirable grain across the Far East and Southeast Asia and rice features too as a key carbohydrate in maritime provisioning elsewhere across the Indian Ocean. Thus Ibn Battuta’s account of the shipboard provisions he was given at Tawalisi, probably a port in the area of Tonkin in coastal south China, lists: two elephant loads of rice, two female buffaloes, ten sheep, four pint jars of syrup (arta¯l julla¯b)65 and four martabans filled with ginger, pepper, lemons and man ˙ all of them salted, these being among the things prepared for the sea.66 goes,

While the livestock – for milk and meat respectively – are more indicative of Ibn Battuta’s high status than of common provisioning, in effect replacing fish as a protein source, we can recognize Sidney Mintz’s paradigmatic “core-carbohydrate-and-fringe,” based around rice with a fringe of preserved fruits and vegetables, in effect salt pickles. Just as wheat in Europe and the Mediterranean continued as the main staple food even in mobility, so too rice, Asia’s preferred grain, continued to be consumed in travel. This continuity may appear unremarkable at first, yet rice was in many ways an altogether impractical choice of travel provision, far more complex to prepare than ready-to-eat foods such as bread or ships biscuits. Unlike the Middle East where rice was often boiled down into a porridge or ground into a flour to make rice bread, in South Asia rice was more generally eaten as individually intact boiled grains and, at least in the sources after 1500, it is clearly boiled rice that is described. The problem boiled rice posed as a maritime provision is neatly summed up again by Pyrard De Laval who lamented that during his return journey to Europe 64 65 66

Morrison, “From Millet to Rice.” Originally rosewater syrup (from the Persian gul [rose] and a¯b [water]), it came to designate any flavored syrup. Abu cAbdallah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edition and French translation by Charles Defrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti as Voyages d’Ibn Battûta (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1969), vol. 4, 252 3.

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from India on-board a Portuguese ship, “the main ration is rice, which needs to be cooked with water, which uses up a lot of it.”67 South Asian cooking instructions advise boiling rice in plentiful amounts of water – three parts water to one part rice is the Manasollasa’s recommendation – a considerable volume of precious potable water on a sea journey.68 Experimental archaeology may provide a partial answer here since Eric Staples, who helped build and then sail a replica ninth-century sewn wooden ship named the Jewel of Muscat from Oman to Singapore, reports that during this voyage they boiled their rice in a 50–50 mix of fresh water and seawater, thus substantially economizing on potable water and seasoning their rice at the same time.69 Yet even if De Laval and others before him adopted this strategy, rice remained a thirsty foodstuff. Rice’s “thirstiness” during its preparation continues a trait already evident in its very cultivation. The work of both Kathleen Morrison and Monica Smith on food preferences in premodern South Asia has underlined the way that the “thirstiness” of rice made it a complex and demanding cultivar to grow in anywhere but the wettest environments, yet in spite of this, a preference for rice above other food grains led to the spread of its cultivation across Asia even when substantial infrastructure projects and new irrigation technologies were needed to do so.70 The impracticality of rice as a provision perfectly matches its impracticality as a cultivar across many of the regions where it is grown, underlining the importance of food preference in determining what were considered staple foods. But rice was not only thirsty; whether served alone or as part of a more complex menu, rice required a larger assemblage for its preparation than a meal of bread or rehydrated hard biscuit. The boiled form in which it was most commonly eaten requires a complex assemblage of other things beyond water for its successful preparation: a cooking vessel, kindling and fuel, a fire source, and a brazier or so-called firebox to cook on. This neediness may not have been particularly inconvenient on shorter coastal voyages where nightly stops allowed access to fresh water, fuel and a solid ground for a hearth; in the Red Sea too, nightly stops were an occasion to bake fresh bread; however, on longer transoceanic crossings all these elements of the “rice assemblage” needed to be present and ready. The seventeenth-century Anıs al-Hujjaj specifically mentions pilgrims 67

68 69 70

My translation from the French: “le principal vivre est en riz, qu’il faut cuire avec de l’eau, ce qui en emporte beaucoup,” De Laval, Voyage, French edn as Voyage de Pyrard de Laval, vol. 2, 781. Somes´vara III, Ma¯nasolla¯sa, Eng. trans. as Royal Life, 114. Personal communication, 5 November 2016. Monica L. Smith, “The Archaeology of Food Preference,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 3 (2006), 480 93.

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using a chū lha danı, literally a “hearth container,” that is to say a type of portable brazier or firebox, on-board the ship that took them from Surat to Jedda. This is a rare reference to a practice that otherwise appears to have been so common that it only begins to be mentioned with any regularity at around this time, often in fact by Europeans apparently surprised by the absence of any galley kitchen on-board ships.71 The need to boil rice may well explain why water and wood emerge as such key supplies in Indian provisioning at the expense of other foodstuffs. In two south Indian sources at least – the eighth-century Kuvalayamala and cAllan b. Hassun’s letter of the 1120s – firewood is mentioned alongside water as an essential provision.72 However much it is grounded in literary tropes, the Kuvalayamala’s reference to “carrying piles of wood”73 as one of the preparatives for setting sail is an especially important reference. Some of this wood was undoubtedly “plank” for the running maintenance of the ship during its journey, and we have ample archaeological and ethnographic evidence for this practice in other regions and at other periods, some may have served as dunnage, packing material for the main cargo,74 but some at least would have been kindling and fuel for cooking. In this context, the India trader cAllan b. Hassun was more explicit about the use to which the wood provisioned at Kollam was to be put; he termed it hatab, the collective noun for firewood, ˙ ˙ thereby making clear that this was cooking fuel, not dunnage or plank for ship repairs. At least by the late sixteenth century a specific post connected to the distribution of fuel to passengers appears to have developed on larger Indian ships. The A’ın-i Akbarı reports that on large ships the nakhuda khashab distributed hayma, Persian for firewood or other fuels (perhaps charcoal), and straw (kah) for kindling or perhaps dunnage.75 Firewood is an important if forgotten commodity, mentioned for example by Ibn al-Tuwayr in relation to the Fatimid Office of the Navy which maintained a fleet of government ships on the Nile specifically for the transport of wheat 71 72

73 74

75

Cited in Qaisar, “From Port to Port,” 339. Compare Antonio Nunez’s 1554 accounts for the fortress of Diu in western India where several non naval personnel received monthly rations of fish, rice and firewood, Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, Subsidios, 43. My translation from the French edition: “Emporter des tas de bois,” Kuvalayama¯la¯, French trans. as Kuvalayama¯la¯: Roman Jaina de 779, vol. 2, 228. Dunnage is “light material, as brushwood, mats, and the like, stowed among and beneath the cargo of a vessel to keep it from injury by chafing or wet; any lighter or less valuable articles of the cargo used for the same purpose”; see “dunnage, n.” OED Online. See discussion of this passage in Appendix, English translation, n.36.

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and firewood (hatab).76 Abraham too traveled prepared for the cook˙ ˙ ing of his rice and bread. Line 20 of the luggage list notes a fatiya chest of khashab, a term I interpret as firewood,77 raising the possibility that, shipboard supplies notwithstanding, travelers loaded their own fuel supplies, just as they took their own drinking water. Perhaps somewhere among Abraham’s luggage was the brazier so essential to shipboard cooking. Practical Measures With rice too, the ugly question of medieval Indian Ocean metrologies raises its head – how “large” was a “large gunny,” how big a basket of rice? Was a gunny or a basket even what we understand those things to be today? The term Abraham used was jū niya, a loanword from the Sanskrit gon.ı and ancestor of the early modern “gunny,”78 a coarse woven textile bag or sack. As Witold Kula predicted, an exercise in estimating the capacity of Abraham’s large gunny of rice based on the recorded weights for two jū niyas of cardamom he sent to Aden for Madmun reveals a “gunny” so heavy – around two bahars or 240 kilograms79 – and so voluminous too that it would have been impossible for a single man, and difficult even for two, to move without lifting equipment. Interestingly, work on camel loads in northern India suggests that, depending on the animal and the difficulty of the route, camels were loaded with between 148 and 247 kilograms.80 Madmun’s gunny of cardamom therefore corresponds almost exactly to a large (Indian) camel load (although it finds no direct correlation with the southern Indian ox load). That gunnies of this size did exist, probably as a composite bale, is confirmed by later evidence from the port of Aden to the effect that large bales of spices were often too big to fit through the door of the customs building and had 76

77 78 79

80

Ibn al Tuwayr, Nuzhat al Muqlatayn fı¯ Akhba¯r al Dawlatayn, Arabic edition by Ayman Fu’ad Sayyid (Stuttgart and Beirut: F. Steiner, 1412/1992), 139. Other large cities of the period faced the same logistical challenges. See discussion of this interpretation in Appendix, English translation, n.36. See discussion in Appendix, English translation, n.3. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 343, Lines 30 4 (IB II, 21 4). Goitein estimated the baha¯r of genizah documents to comprise 300 lb or about 136 kg (ibid., xxviii and 173, n.31). The Arabic baha¯r is held to derive from Sanskrit bhara, “burden, load, weight,” the same root loanword of Persian ba¯r, “package” or “bale.” Present in various Sanskrit dictionaries but see, for example, M. Monier Williams, A Sanskrit English Dictionary (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1899), 742 and for the Persian F.J. Steingass, A Comprehensive Persian English Dictionary (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892), 141. Jean Deloche, Transport and Communications in India prior to Steam Locomotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 94), vol. 1, 238.

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to be taken apart.81 In other words a commercial gunny may have been a form of Gellian distributed object. We need therefore to draw a clear distinction between commercial packing norms as evidenced by Madmun’s gunny and the packing of personal luggage: Madmun’s jū niyas of cardamom tell us little about Abraham’s gunnies of rice. As we have already seen with waterskins, domestic and commercial containers may have operated according to entirely separate capacities and dimensions, the first adapted to non-specialist human handling by domestic servants or family members, the second calibrated for animal carriage and handling by professional porters and port infrastructures. Ibn al-Mujawir’s observation of the difference between dabash, luggage which was carried off the ship by passengers when they docked, and commercial goods unloaded days later points to the different degrees of portability of mobile things. Against this background we can read some of the data on professional porterage as indicative of the very upper end of human lifting capacities. Some of the best data for South Asia was collated by Jean Deloche in his two-volume Transport and Communications in India prior to Steam Locomotion. Taking into account both local lifting traditions and technologies as well as environmental factors, Deloche suggests that in south India the average loads carried on the human head over long distances were in the region of 25 to 33 kilograms, the higher amount having been recorded among coolies working in the Mangalore area.82 However, over shorter distances and among professional porters the weight might double or even triple. Colonial period labor reports for Bombay docks stipulate a maximum allowed load of just over 101 kilograms, while rice was packed in 1½ cwt bags, equivalent to 76 kilograms;83 33 to 70 kilograms gives us perhaps some broad measure of the maximum weight of Abraham’s large gunny of rice. The capacity of a “small gunny” is impossible to guess, but if we postulate that a small gunny was a quarter of a large one, then these four small gunnies would have carried a further 33 to 70 kilograms. At a conservative and again manifestly unsatisfactory estimate, Abraham may have been transporting somewhere in the region of 66 to 140 kilograms of rice, not forgetting a further two basketfuls. Together with bread and wheat flour, and possibly a further small sack of ragi or finger millet, there were staple carbohydrates enough here to feed

81 82 83

Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les Sultans Rasulides du Yémen (626 858/1229 1454) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), 183. Deloche, Transport and Communications in India, vol. 1, 210. J.H. Whitley, Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India (London: HMSO, 1931), vol. 3, 399, 2 cwt or two hundredweight, equivalent to 224 lb.

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a family of three and their factor Bomma too, if he was on-board, for a five- to six-week crossing to the Yemen. Necessities: An Unstable Assemblage From the eighteenth century until very recently, at least in Europe, “le nécessaire” designated a physical thing, a container, usually a bag, designed to hold all that was necessary for a particular activity such as travel.84 Abraham’s luggage list underlines the extent to which, in a world where luggage included provisions and where containers purposely designed for travel were scarce, defining “le nécessaire” as both container and contents is far more complex. Status, culture, the very mode and purpose of travel, as of course the route taken, all impacted on its definition. Al-Ghazali advised his Sufi traveler to pack nothing more than the “nécessaire de toilette” recommended by the Prophet – a mirror, a kohl jar, scissors, a dental stick, a comb and, in one more practical version of the hadith, a rakwa bottle for water – the Sufi should otherwise trust in God to provide more worldly provisions.85 Merchants took a more practical approach; their aim was not to test God’s benevolence but to be largely self-reliant in order to arrive healthy and ready to continue their journey or their business. If it is difficult to argue against the inclusion here of potable water and water vessels, yet some travelers might only carry a small number of containers to access water from the ship’s tank while others might also carry substantial personal supplies in their own containers, as Abraham appears to have done. If coconuts provided alternative sources of hydration, we know little about their relationship to other natural waters. Were they a choice source, or less highly regarded? And if rice was an essential carbohydrate for those sailing from South Asia, in the context of Jewish travel and ritual observance hard wheat may have been considered an equally essential thing. Whether animal protein was essential depended on individual food culture, itself determined to some degree by faith, and social status. As Ibn Battuta’s list of provisions from Tiwalisi reminds us, livestock for meat and perhaps fresh milk was sometimes carried on Indian Ocean voyages, as indeed was poultry, although preserved fish would have been a more widely available and easily transported source of

84

85

Orvar Löfgren, “Containing the Past, the Present and the Future: Packing a Suitcase,” Narodna Umjetnost. Croatian Journal of Ethnology and Folklore Research 54, no. 1 (2016), 63. al Ghazali, Ihya¯’, Eng. trans. of Book XVII as Al Ghazali on Conduct in Travel, 42 and 48 9.

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protein.86 In Aden in the 1220s goats arriving from India were exempted from port taxes, a suggestion perhaps that they qualified as left over “provisions.”87 From a nutritional/biological angle animal protein would have been essential only on the longest of sea voyages although it must have been deemed essential to elite Muslims. Similarly, while salted fruits and vegetables were essential accompaniments to rice around the Indian Ocean these provisions certainly did not play the essential scurvypreventing role they later took on after the Age of Exploration.88 The shorter times of Indian Ocean voyaging and the dominance of coastal sailing wherever possible meant that crews and passengers only very rarely found themselves without access to fresh produce for extended periods, and thus at risk of developing vitamin or mineral deficiencies. Ultimately a nutritional/biological approach allows us to focus on those provisions that sustained basic physiological function – water for hydration, with cereals and grains as the main source of carbohydrate – but we need far more archaeological and textual data to be able to achieve a more refined understanding of cultures of provisioning. The discussions these lists generate should at least ensure that these and other assemblages are no longer overlooked as simple technicalities of travel but are seen as evidence of complex technologies and knowledges, and of travel as a skilled practice. The fact that written manuals do not survive should not detract from the importance of what were, at heart, embodied knowledges learned through “doing” or at best oral communication. The rihla ˙ literature and more informal merchant manuals such as the Akhbar prove surprisingly rich sources of information once we know how to listen to them.

86

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Historical references and archaeological evidence have yet to be collated, although the Akhba¯r notes that sheep and goats were loaded at Muscat along with water for the journey to Kollam (Arabic edn and Eng. trans. as Accounts of China and India, 31) and the practice is well attested in the medieval Mediterranean too; by contrast, modern ethnographic data is plentiful see Agius, Seafaring, 138. Yusuf ibn Yacqub Ibn al Mujawir, Ta¯rı¯kh al Mustabsir, English translation by G. Rex Smith as A Traveller in Thirteenth century Arabia: Ibn al Mujawir’s Tarikh al Mustabsir (London: Hakluyt Society, 2008), 160. See Jonathan Lamb, Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

7

“Things for the Cabin”: Inhabiting the Ocean

The Timurid ambassador cAbd al-Razzaq Samarqandi, making his first oceanic crossing from Qalhat in Oman to Calicut in 1442, described the ship he traveled in as “a rarity of God’s command, a moving house (khana) whose inhabitants stay put.”1 His observation stands as a useful reminder that ships were inhabited places. Notwithstanding the general silence of the textual sources, we know that daily life continued at sea: people drank and ate on-board ship, and fundamental diurnal rhythms of sleeping and waking persisted. This chapter examines how this paradoxical immobility in mobility and the rhythms of daily life were supported; it looks substantially beyond the core provisions of potable water and rice to the “things for the cabin,” the ancillary assemblages Abraham Ben Yiju had packed for his journey, as clues to the inhabitation of the ocean. The phrase “things for the cabin” is not Abraham’s but comes from an account he received itemizing expenses incurred by his factor Bomma as the latter prepared to return to Malibarat from Aden in the late summer of 1135. Last in an eclectic list of taxes, lading fees, charges for commodities and miscellaneous household items destined for Malibarat, Abraham’s business friend Madmun did not forget to claim a final dinar needed for “water and things for the cabin” (ma’ wa hawa’ij balıj).2 This item reminds us of the things ˙ 1

2

Persian in Kamal al Din cAbd al Razzaq al Samarqandi, Matla¯ c i Sacdayn va Majma¯ c i Bahrayn, Persian edition by Muhammad Shafi ci (Lahore: [s.n.], 1944), vol. 2 (parts 2 3), 779; partial English translation by Wheeler M. Thackston as “Mission to Calicut and Vijayanagar,” in A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art, edited by Wheeler M. Thackston (Cambridge, MA: The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1989), 303. S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 346, Line 4 (IB II, 21 4) and S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, Madmun Nagid of Yemen and the India Trade: India Book II, Cairo Geniza Documents (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010), 182.

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Fig. 5 Representation of a ship from the Asssemblies or Maqa¯ma¯t of al Hariri, copied in Iraq in 634 AH/1236 37 with illustrations by Yahya ibn Mahmud ibn Yahya ibn Abu l Hasan ibn Kouvarriha al Wasiti.

other than water that were deemed necessary for life on-board ship during a long transoceanic journey. While Goitein and Friedman prefer the English translation “water and cabin equipment,”3 3

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 346, Line 4.

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dictionary definitions of haja (pl. hawa’ij) and its very use in the ˙ ˙ India Book documents suggest something altogether less technical, an assemblage of diverse things resistant to Madmun’s otherwise precise itemization – in short, “stuff” for the cabin. While these things are bundled together under a single word in Madmun’s account, the longer list of Abraham’s luggage proves once more to be a unique and important source, allowing us to unpack some of the hawa’ij that passengers assembled. ˙ The Seductive Suggestibility of the Hariri Ship Any discussion of “things for the cabin” must first locate that cabin and its things on-board the ship, and it is with cabins that I begin. Problems of place are everywhere in the India Book documents, on land and at sea. However detailed and factual they seem, these documents only allude to the spatial settings in which they were written and to the future spaces in which the things they list or discuss were destined to find their place and use. It is all too easy to let our imaginations fill these gaps, hard as I try not to, as I read Abraham’s list and examine the items that served on-board ship my mind furnishes a material context, a physical form or backdrop, which is not actually there. Images and also texts seem particularly able to induce these easy illusions of physical context, more so than single objects. The task of establishing where our provisions and luggage were stored, used and consumed is therefore all the more important – and difficult. Medievalists are used to wringing data out of unpromising sources, but the western Indian Ocean presents an almost deafening silence on the inhabitation of the ocean before the early modern period. The documentary genizah is full of references to markabs, “ships,” less often to Red Sea jallabs, but they tell us little about these vessels beyond the fact that they were built in the sewn-plank tradition, some in Aden.4 No document identified so far provides details about the dimensions of ships, or mentions the size of a crew or their roles, or the layouts and locations of cabins. One set of ship representations has played a disproportionate role in setting ideas of what medieval western Indian Ocean vessels looked like. This is a small group of related but distinct representations of ships made in the first half of the thirteenth century, in southern Iraq, as illustrations to manuscripts of the Assemblies or Maqamat of al-Hariri. Figure 5 shows 4

See markab in the Index to Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 881. On shipbuilding at Aden see Roxani E. Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 158 62.

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the illustration that has been most widely reproduced and I choose to call this ship the “Hariri ship,” while remaining aware that a variety of representations in fact survive. The widespread and unguarded use of reproductions of the Hariri ship has undoubtedly helped to lull us into complacency. Since the 1880s, when some of the Maqamat illustrations were first added, anachronistically it should be said, to Van der Lith and Devic’s edition of a manuscript of the The Book of the Wonders of India (Kitab cAja’ib al-Hind), the Hariri ships have been reproduced in a large number of publications about the premodern Indian Ocean world and have subtly implanted ideas about what ships looked like.5 But tempting as it is to imagine Abraham and his children aboard one of the Hariri ships or something very like it, happily gazing out of their cabin window, if ship terminology alone is any indication, a huge variety of vessel types sailed the western Indian Ocean at this period.6 As with any object, lexicographical analysis has severe limitations and only very rarely can named vessel types be matched to detailed textual descriptions or visual representations, let alone to surviving ship types, or to medieval wrecks. Unlike the rich yield of wrecks from the shallower waters of the South China Sea,7 notably the Belitung ship which I will discuss shortly, all along the western Indian seaboard the advancing coast and huge volumes of sediment washed far out to sea appear to have buried the many vessels that undoubtedly sank off the Indian coast. Often the only physical traces left are the so-called Indo-Arab stone anchors that have worked their way up through the sediment to testify to this lost world of shipping.8 In the Gulf of Aden and Red Sea area too, identified shipwrecks so far mainly date after 1500, although some 5

6

7

8

Kita¯b cAja¯’ib al Hind, Arabic edition by P.A. Van der Lith and French translation by L. Marcel Devic as Livre des merveilles de l’Inde par le Capitaine Bozorg fils de Chahriyâr de Râmhormoz (Leiden: Brill, 1883 6). For the relationship of this text to a compilation of stories gathered in Fatimid Egypt and titled al Sahı¯h min Akhba¯r al Biha¯r see discussion and references in Chapter 2, pp. 44 5. For the problems posed see Dionisius A. Agius, Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Leiden: Brill, 2008). For an attempt at a technical reading of this most famous image see “3.6.4 The Hariri Ship,” in Sean McGrail, Boats of the World: From the Stone Age to Medieval Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 73 5. For a useful compilation of known wrecks to 2003 see Geoff Wade, The Pre modern East Asian Maritime Realm: An Overview of European language Studies, Working Paper Series 16 (Singapore: Asia Research Institute, 2003), 16 33. There is a huge bibliography for this but see, for example, Sila Tripati, Ali Manikfan and Musthafa Mohamed, “An Indo Arabian Type of Stone Anchor from Kannur, Kerala, West Coast of India,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 34, no. 1 (2005), 131 7; for a useful typology A.S. Gaur, Sundaresh, Sila Tripati, P. Gudigar, K.H. Vora and S.N. Bandodker, “A Group of 20 Stone Anchors from the Waters of Dwarka, on the Gujarat Coast, India,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 30, no. 1 (2001), 95 108.

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important medieval timbers and rigging have survived on land through later reuse.9 For the moment then, we can only work with textual sources, with comparative shipwreck evidence from other parts of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, and (with due caution) with the Hariri ships. Abraham transported “one undecorated cabin door” (Line 30) together with a number of planks (alwah) also designated as specifically ˙ for this cabin (Line 33), and his luggage therefore adds important new data, and further questions, to this debate. Why would one carry such things in one’s luggage, and what does their presence tell us about ships and travel at this period? A Cabin Door and the Places of Life at Sea Balıj, sometimes written billıj, is one of a number of terms distinctive of the maritime patois of the western Indian Ocean. Although often misread by modern authors, copyists and editors as buleeh, malıkh, even balanj, the term has a long history in the Indian Ocean and recurs with some consistency across a variety of Arabic, Judaeo-Arabic and later Persian language sources from the late tenth through to the late sixteenth century. In all these sources the term consistently designates some form of separate shipboard space for the accommodation of passengers, their luggage and goods, including female slaves.10 The latest but undoubtedly most explicit definition of a balıj comes from the section on the Admiralty (Mır bahrı) in the late sixteenthcentury Mughal administrative manual the A’ın-i Akbarı. Compiled shortly after the conquests of Gujarat and Bengal and their ports, the multiple glosses in this section, together with the author cAllami’s repeated efforts to indicate the pronunciation of a large number of terms, underscore the extent to which the Mughal administration had just encountered a substantially new maritime world and one which presented the author and his landed Persianate readers with a substantially unfamiliar vocabulary. In a section describing the remuneration of various crew members on large ships, cAllami specifies that at the port of Satgaon in Bengal nakhudas received 400 rupees and four balıj for their own trade. He then explains that: 9

10

See Luca Belfioretti and Tom Vosmer, “Al Balıd Ship Timbers: Preliminary Overview and Comparisons,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 40 (2010), 111 18 and Lucy Blue, “Sewn Boat Timbers from the Medieval Islamic Port of Quseir al Qadim on the Red Sea Coast of Egypt,” in Connected by the Sea: Proceedings of the Tenth International Symposium on Boat and Ship Archaeology, Denmark 2003, edited by L.K. Blue, F. Hocker and A. Englert (Oxford: Oxbow, 2006), 277 83. See extended discussion in Appendix, English translation, n.49.

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ships are divided up as dwelling places for people and the storage of goods and necessaries, and each compartment (bakhsh) is known by that name [balı¯j] (va jaha¯z ra¯ bi jihat i buda¯n i mardom va ba¯r amū dan i ka¯la¯11 lakht garda¯nand va har bakhsh ra¯ bi a¯n na¯m khunand).12

The text in both the English translation and the Persian edition in fact writes malıkh, not balıj, as the term for this sort of compartment; however, this is undoubtedly a misreading. The word malıkh is unknown in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and indeed the Indic languages and it certainly never occurs as a term in the maritime patois of the Indian Ocean world. It seems clear that this represents a best attempt by editors and translators as foreign to the Indian Ocean world as cAllami himself to decipher an unfamiliar, perhaps already miscopied, term. The particularly ornate letter forms characteristic of the shikasta style used for later Persian texts certainly cannot have helped. As so often with the Arabic script, the difference between malıkh and balıj is largely a matter of a few icjam, less technically “dots,” and, carelessly copied or quickly read, balıj easily becomes malıkh. Indeed a lack of clarity in the source manuscripts led to an altogether different reading of this term in Francis Gladwin’s first English translation of the A’in which reads buleeh.13 On the basis of these inconsistencies and the well-documented earlier use of the term in the western Indian Ocean, I suggest the revised reading balıj. The A’ın therefore supplies the clearest definition yet of a balıj as well as detailing the assignment of these spaces, in part at least, as a form of remuneration in kind to crew members. Although Indian Ocean ship technology had developed hugely by the time of the A’ın-i Akbarı, the general function of the balıj, if not its actual construction, appears to have remained remarkably consistent over time since the first documented uses of the term in the late tenth-century compilation of seafaring stories the Book of the Wonders of India (Kitab c Aja’ib al-Hind).14 In the earliest manuscript of the Kitab cAja’ib al-Hind, 11

12

13

14

F.J. Steingass gives “silk cloths, and in general any kind of household furniture; things, necessaries; goods”: A Comprehensive Persian English Dictionary (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1892, repr. New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1981), 1008. Author’s revised translation from Abu l Fazl cAllami, A¯’ı¯n i Akbarı¯, English translation by H. Blochmann as The A¯’ı¯n ¯ı Akbarı¯, 3 vols. (Bibliotheca Indica 61 [1927 49], repr. Delhi: Low Price Publications, 1989), vol. 1, 291. For the Persian see Abu l Fazl cAllami, A¯’ı¯n i Akbarı¯, Persian edition by H. Blochmann (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1872 77), vol. 2, 203. Abu l Fazl cAllami, A¯’ı¯n i Akbarı¯, English translation by Francis Gladwin as Ayeen Akbery: or, The Institutes of the Emperor Akber (Calcutta: [s.n.], 1783 86), vol. 2, 292. The initial ba¯’ was read correctly, as were the medial la¯m and long ya¯’; however, the final letter is read here as a ha¯’. For its relationship to ˙a contemporary Fatimid compilation of stories see Chapter 2, pp. 44 5.

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preserved in Istanbul, the term balıj appears five times across three different stories: on two occasions this balıj is a space where female slaves were transported; in the third it is where female passengers and their infants traveled.15 The first story is set on a ship bound for Barus in Sumatra and mentions in passing that a female slave was shut in the “big balıj” (al-balıj al-kabır) which was located down in the ship’s hold – at least the storyteller’s father had to go down (the root of the verb is N-Z-L) to check on her. In another story, located on a ship traveling from Oman to Basra, an attractive female slave from Sind was the object of unwanted attention from one of the sailors but remained safe as long as he could not reach her in the balıj; during a storm she came out to cling to the rigging (shirac, literally “sail”) with the other passengers, was raped by him and fell overboard. In the final story, a merchant’s wife and baby are simply described as traveling in a balıj. It is useful to correlate these references to descriptions of cabin spaces in contemporary Sanskrit sources. Under the Sanskrit designations gṛha and mandira – broadly “house” or “living space,” and “dwelling,” “abode” or “house”16 respectively – cabins of various sorts also feature in an eleventh-century source, the The Wishing Tree of Practical Knowledge (Yuktikalpataru). Attributed to Bhoja (r. c. 1010–55), the Paramara king of western India who then controlled substantial coastal tracts of what is now southern Gujarat and Maharashtra, whatever the veracity of this attribution, the Yuktikalpataru is a text firmly anchored in the coastal politics of medieval western India and some sections prove particularly useful for maritime history.17 Like all texts of its kind, the Yuktikalpataru is overly concerned with classification and requires considerable interpretation; nevertheless, as first identified by Mamata Chaudhuri, it includes a significant discussion of ships. The Yuktikalpataru begins by classifying ships into those “with cabins” (sagṛha) and those “without cabins” (nigṛha); it then subdivides the sagṛha ships according to the 15

16

17

Kita¯b cAja¯’ib al Hind, Arabic edn and French trans. as Livre des merveilles, 33, 94, 141 2. Interestingly, these stories, and the term balı¯j, do not feature in the related Fatimid compilation, al Awsi’s Sahı¯h. Arthur A. Macdonell’s A Practical Sanskrit Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1929), 119, gives “mandira, n. [gladdening, pleasant], dwelling, abode, house; mansion, palace; temple” and 64, griha “[that which contains], house, abode: often pl. premises.” See the partial publication of the sections on ships in Mamata Chaudhuri, “Ship building in the Yuktikalpataru and Samarangana Sutradhara,” Indian Journal of History of Science 11, no. 2 (1976), 137 47. Unless otherwise footnoted, all translations of the Yuktikalpataru used in the main discussions have been revised by Alastair Gornall following the edition by Pandit Isvara Chandra Sastri; see Bhoja, Yuktikalpataru, Sanskrit edition by Pandit Isvara Chandra Sastri (Calcutta: Sidheswar Machine Press, 1917).

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position of their cabins, termed mandiras in this part of the text. Both terms – gṛha and mandira – point unequivocally to the dwelling function of these spaces. I will return to the Yuktikalpataru’s cabins shortly but in the first instance it is important to underline the fact that cabins appear to represent a primary taxonomic category. It is against this background that the term balıj reappears a century later, this time across a number of genizah documents relating to travel between the Red Sea ports and South Asia. Of particular note, in that it gives some indication of the size of such compartments and their occupation by male passengers, is a letter from around 1141 in which the India trader Samuel b. Abraham relayed the news that three other merchants had shared a balıj during their journey down the Red Sea from Dahlak to Aden.18 Perhaps this was a “big balıj.” It is unclear whether Bomma also planned to share his balıj on the route from Aden to Mangalore but the entry in Madmun’s accounts leaves no doubt that a cabin had been procured. The continued use of the term in Yemeni Arabic is confirmed by a later fifteenth-century source which describes how merchants on-board a ship (markab) in the Gulf of Aden shot arrows at pursuers from their balalıj (pl. of balıj).19 There seems no doubt that ships in the western Indian Ocean and Red Sea were regularly subdivided in some way; these demarcated spaces were commonly termed balıj or billıj in Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic, gṛha and mandira in Sanskrit. The Judaeo-Arabic and Arabic sources tell us little about where such cabins were situated or the materials from which they were made. The Hariri ship representations offer a seductive answer as the rows of portholes with passengers peeking out appear to confirm that cabins, with windows, were located within the hull of the ship and below a solid upper weather-deck (Fig. 5). Some substantiation for this spatial configuration can be found in the earlier Yuktikalpataru whose first category of ship with cabin is the sarvamandira, ships having a cabin “extending from one end to the other . . . for the transport of royal treasure, horses and women.”20 In other words, these ships had a full weather-deck and lower deck that effectively created a separate space within the hull. It is unclear whether this space was formally subdivided or not, but whatever the configuration the salient point is that these precious cargoes would have been concealed and protected below deck. The ships described must be sea-going vessels 18

19

20

Unpublished letter sent to Abu Zikri Kohen in Cairo and discussed in Margariti, Aden, 166 (IB V, 8, Lines 11 12). Quite exceptionally the Genizah preserves a second letter written by a member of this party, Nahray b. cAllan, who did not mention the cabin; see S.D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), Letter 40, 197 201 (IB VI, 39). Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les Sultans Rasulides du Yémen (626 858/1229 1454) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), 668 citing the anon ymous Ta’rı¯kh al Dawla al Rasuliyya. Chaudhuri, “Ship building,” 144.

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as, with the exception of the Narmada river, the territory controlled by the Paramaras included no substantial navigable rivers. Later literary tropes comparing travel by ship to time spent in a grave support the currency of this spatial organization. In an oft-quoted passage about the experience of disembarking at Aden, the Iranian traveler Ibn alMujawir likened leaving the ship to stepping out of the grave: “when a man disembarks it is as if he stepped out of the grave and the customs house is like the place of gathering [on Judgement Day]” (wa khurū j al-insan min al-bahr ˙ ka-khurū jihi min al-qabr wa al-furda ka-al-mahshar).21 The grave in the ˙ ˙ Islamic conception was a dark, cramped and fearful place and the idea here is that passengers were “resurrected” when they finally disembarked, if only to face the judgment of Aden’s customs officials. We are left to infer that these passengers had endured cramped, dark and probably malodorous travel conditions that could only have been encountered below deck, in cabins of some sort. It is good to remember that Ibn al-Mujawir actually sailed in and out of Aden, on one occasion from Daybul in Sind, but this is also, to some degree, a common literary trope that is also found in accounts of Mediterranean travel.22 Like all such tropes it may also hold a grain of truth; a later comment by the Timurid ambassador al-Samarqandi about the overwhelming stench of the ship he boarded at Hormuz implies likewise that he traveled in a poorly ventilated place, most likely below deck.23 Windowless cabins below deck have also been documented on Gulf dhows through to the twentieth century where they were known, amongst other appellations, as dabū sas, and were often assigned to female passengers or to the sick.24 Abraham’s list includes one iron lamp (siraj hadıd) (Line 37), a necessary ˙ item even in daytime if traveling in an enclosed windowless space,25 but it is 21

22 23 24

25

Yusuf ibn Yacqub Ibn al Mujawir, Ta¯rı¯kh al Mustabsir, English translation by G. Rex Smith as A Traveller in Thirteenth century Arabia: Ibn al Mujawir’s Tarikh al Mustabsir (London: Hakluyt Society, 2008), 128. See Houari Touati, Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages, English translation by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 249. al Samarqandi, Matla¯ c i Sacdayn, partial English trans. as “Mission to Calicut and Vijayanagar,” 300. T.M. Johnstone and J. Muir, “Some Nautical Terms in the Kuwaiti Dialect of Arabic,” BSOAS 27 (1964), 308 and fig. 20; the same term was used by Ibn Majid, likely for a similar space, Ahmad Ibn Majid al Najdi, Kita¯b al Fawa¯’id fı¯ Usul al Bahr wa l Qawa¯’id, English translation and introduction by G.R. Tibbetts as Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese, Oriental Translation Fund, N.S. (London: Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1971), 252 and 51. As Goitein indicates, the term sira¯j specifically designates a single small oil lamp and this could have been lit with either clarified butter or a vegetable oil, see S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society; the Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 93), vol. 4, 135 6. While in India Abraham had also purchased two glass lamps from Lakhaba; see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 613, Line 50 and 610 discussion in n.20 (IB III, 11).

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no wonder that deck-top travel was preferred, for the access it gave to fresh air and the fact that confinement in close spaces below deck only aggravates motion sickness. That said, the Yuktikalpataru’s classification of ships “with cabins” (sagṛha) points to a wider range of possible configurations. Some mandiras were positioned in either the center (madhyamandira) or the front (agramandira) of the ship.26 These passages are less easy to interpret but suggest either that additional cabins were created on top of the main weather-deck or possibly that cabin spaces were created on-board undecked or partially decked ships, in effect creating partial decking. The first interpretation brings to mind the deck-top pavilions represented in several Hariri ships and which have often been overlooked when maritime historians discuss the otherwise uncanny resemblance of these represented vessels to surviving dhows. Two representations, of which see Figure 5, show a freestanding pavilion on top of the ship’s weather-deck and positioned in front of the central mast – an agramandira perhaps. In one illustration in St. Petersburg this pavilion is occupied by the figure of the captain,27 but in the other the captain steers his ship from a seat at the rear of the vessel while a diminutive figure is shown within the front pavilion (Fig. 5). A third illustration, in Istanbul, depicts a central triple arched pavilion – a madhyamandira perhaps – built above the weather-deck and from which three passengers look out.28 Deck-top cabins would have offered the perfect compromise between privacy, or even seclusion, and fresh air. The Hariri ships may be more hybrid in design than they are commonly credited. But we should also not discount the second spatial configuration I contemplated, namely “living spaces” built at the stern or prow of substantially undecked vessels. The western Indian Ocean had a long tradition of undecked vessels, and the earliest wreck of an Arab dhow identified so far, the so-called Belitung wreck, which sank off the Indonesian coast on its return journey from the Chinese ports, has been shown to have been constructed without a top deck.29 Goods were covered with hides and matting and passengers and their luggage traveled on top of these, even for a lengthy 26 27

28

29

Chaudhuri, “Ship building,” 144. Undated manuscript but considered to be possibly the earliest extant illustrated Maqa¯ma¯t manuscript, St. Petersburg Academy of Science S.23. Widely reproduced, notably in Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, Plate 1. Istanbul, Esad Efendi, 2961, dated c. 1242 58, reproduced in Oleg Grabar, The Illustrations of the Maqamat (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), microfiche Sheet 7, G6. Compare also a very rough sketch of a ship with central deck house represented on a scrap of paper excavated at Qusayr al Qadim; see David Nicolle, “Shipping in Islamic Art: Seventh through Tenth Centuries A.D.,” American Neptune 49, no.3 (1989), 179 80, fig. 28. Tom Vosmer et al., “The Jewel of Muscat Project: Reconstructing an Early Ninth century CE Shipwreck,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 41 (2011), 411 24.

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journey between the Gulf and China such as the Belitung ship was undertaking. The absence of full weather-decks has often been read by European observers as a sign of a certain technological backwardness, yet this feature makes sense in environments where speed was uppermost, or in environments such as the Red Sea and Arabian Peninsula where timber was scarce. If shipmasters and travelers privileged speed over comfort – and as we have seen, the sailing seasons between the Yemen and southern India were famously short – decks and hard internal subdivisions would have weighed vessels down unnecessarily. Even in timber-rich areas such as the west coast of India, shipwrights were aware of the trade-off between weight and speed. The Yuktikalpataru enumerates the “good qualities (gun.a) of ships” as: “lightness (laghuta), solidity (dṛdhata), mobility (gamita), watertightness ˙ (acchidrata), [literally, “being without holes”] and balance (samata).”30 Elsewhere its author notes that a ship “having a cabin (mandira) less than half of its length” – in other words a partially decked ship – “becomes swift in speed.”31 A number of ship representations from the Middle East, earlier by far than the Hariri ships, may support this interpretation.32 Twin representations of the constellation al-Safına (The Boat or Argo Navis in Latin) are found in one of the earliest complete illustrated Islamic manuscripts known to date: a copy of al-Sufi’s Book of Pictures of the Fixed Stars, Illustrated (Kitab Suwar al-Kawakib al-Thabitah) dated 400 AH/1009–10 and likely produced in Iraq (Fig. 6). Although only simple line drawings, each representation of al-Safina nevertheless occupies a full double page, the only constellation to be accorded this privilege. The mirror images show what maritime historian David Nicolle first proposed to be among the earliest representations of a distinctively Indian Ocean vessel with stern rudder and twin quarter rudders.33 Broader stylistic analysis has pointed to an “Orientalizing” influence across the cycle of images and it would seem that the ship type too was taken, not from Classical Mediterranean models, but from an existing regional idiom born of close familiarity with Gulf and Indian Ocean

30 31 32

33

Revised translation by Alastair Gornall; see Chaudhuri, “Ship building,” 145 for another version. Chaudhuri, “Ship building,” 144. Representations of ships on medieval memorial stones from along the western coast of India overwhelmingly depict oared warships and are in any case too few to provide useful data, but see Jean Deloche, “Études sur la Circulation en Inde: VII. Konkan Warships of the XIth XVth Centuries as Represented on Memorial Stones,” Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extrême Orient 76 (1987), 165 84. Nicolle, “Shipping in Islamic Art,” 171, fig. 9. Opinion confirmed by Eric Staples, personal communication, 18 July 2017.

Fig. 6 Double-page representation of the constellation al-Safı¯na (Argo Navis) from al-Sufi’s The Book of the Fixed Stars, Illustrated (Kita¯b Suwar al-Kawa¯kib al-Tha¯bitah), copied in 400 AH /1009–10.

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shipping.34 It is significant then that this representation should include structures of some sort at the stern and prow, interpreted by Nicolle as deckhouses. A later copy of the same text produced in northern Iraq, in Mardin, in 1134–35 continues this model and depicts even more clearly a sewn boat with stern rudder and covered areas at stern and prow, interpreted by Nicolle as “deck-houses of apparently flimsy material such as matting.”35 Clearly the use of the English “cabin” imparts a solidity that may not always have existed at this period; matting or cloth may have been widely used. By contrast, a third representation, in a manuscript believed to have been produced in Egypt in 1130–31, although described by him as “further removed from reality,” depicts triple arched openings at the prow which suggest that this area had been actively partitioned off and provided with formal doorways.36 Like any illustration, these images need to be understood as part of representational traditions and they belong to a well-established cycle of images. Nevertheless, all show a strong dialogue with contemporary drawing styles and imaginings of contemporary ships, or perhaps even memories of ships seen; this was a live, evolving representational tradition. Significantly, none of these vessels is drawn with portholes and we are reminded – the Hariri ship’s portholes notwithstanding – that any opening in the hull of a vessel represents a potential ingress point for water. More importantly, these representations appear to show undecked ships with both permanent and more ephemeral construction at the fore and aft. These areas were not as pronounced or durably constructed as in Mediterranean ships but a team of leading boat historians have argued that some form of deck at the front and rear of larger ships would have been a necessity for steering and other activities.37 A similar spatial organization appears to be suggested too in the later, early fourteenth-century, representation of Noah’s Ark from Rashid al-Din’s Universal History, the Jami c al-Tawarıkh (Fig. 7), a work produced in land-locked Tabriz under the Il-Khanids but which nevertheless represents a recognizably Indian Ocean ship. The iconography of the ship with its blackened bitumencovered hull, quarter rudders with tillers, and what appears to be a square sail suggests acquaintance with, or at least access to models of, 34

35 36

37

See Emmy Wellesz, “An Early al Sufi Manuscript in the Bodleian Library in Oxford: A Study in Islamic Constellation Images,” Ars Orientalis 3 (1959), 1 26, who never theless does not discuss the sources of the ship representation. Nicolle, “Shipping in Islamic Art,” 173, fig. 14, line drawing after Topkapi Library Ms. Fatih 3422, fols. 198r and 198v. Ibid., 175, fig. 15a and b from Topkapi Library Ms. Ahmad III 3498, fols. 130v and 131v; also illustrated in Agius, Classic Ships, 205, ill. 53, mainly discussed for its stern rudder and twin quarter rudders. Tom Vosmer et al., “Jewel of Muscat Project,” 411 24.

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contemporary western Indian Ocean shipping.38 Although it is difficult to disentangle which came first – the need for partial decks or the need for formally separated spaces within the hull – the two are intimately connected and these spatial features are clearly visible in the first al-Sufi representations and their descendants across the Middle East. A merchant who “went down” to check on his slave or a slave girl who left her cabin to cling to the rigging did not necessarily inhabit a fully decked ship in which cabins were positioned below deck. Although rarely illustrated outside the history of science and art historical literature, the stark inked lines and uninhabited shapes of these constellation images suggest other possible configurations of space in which a cabin door and planks for a cabin might have found their place. As Mordechai A. Friedman noted, the “undecorated cabin door” and planks (alwah) in Abraham’s luggage list only make sense as luggage if ˙ Abraham intended to have a wooden compartment constructed on-board ship for the duration of his journey.39 Such a compartment might have been built on top of a full weather-deck, or below it, or used on a substantially undecked vessel to partition off part of the prow or stern. In the context of a substantial journey such as that between Malibarat and Aden, the labor involved would have been negligible and ships were, in any case, floating carpentry workshops. In the better-preserved shipwrecks of the medieval Mediterranean, carpenters’ tools are a nearly ubiquitous find.40 Travelers of lesser means may have opted for cheaper methods and Goitein, following L. Marcel Devic’s suggestion of a derivation of the term balıj from the Malay bıliq, posited that balıjs on ships in the western Indian Ocean might be made of nothing more substantial than matting, as was the case in Southeast Asia.41 The constellation images appear to support this too. That wood represented an elite solution is confirmed by the Yuktikalpataru, which recommends two kinds (dvidha) of cabin for royal ships: “wooden (kasthaja), conducive to ˙˙ prosperity and happiness, and metallic (dhatuja), for pleasure.” Whether of wood or matting, it is above all the impermanence of cabins that I would like to underline here. If wood was a more substantial material, this was nevertheless something that could easily be dismantled and reused, or reconfigured. 38 39

40

41

I am grateful to Eric Staples for his analysis, personal communication, 18 July 2017. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 577, n.28, also noting the suggestion in Carol Meyer, Glass from Quseir al Qadim and the Indian Ocean Trade (Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1992), 115. F.M. Hocker, “Tools,” in George F. Bass, S. Matthews, J.R. Steffy and F.H. van Doorninck Jr., Serçe Limanı: An Eleventh century Shipwreck: The Ship and Its Anchorage, Crew, and Passengers (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), vol. 1, 297; and an extensive list of the shipwrecks where such material has been found, ibid., 321, n.1. Goitein, Letters, Letter 40, 197, n.2.

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The infinite adaptability of shipboard space is well-attested at later periods and in other parts of the world. Not only were all ships in a state of constant repair and maintenance, their parts replaced as and when they failed, in certain times and places they were also in a state of permanent reconfiguration. In a study of what she terms “the ephemeral slave ship,” Jane Webster has underlined the manner in which Atlantic vessels were constantly reconfigured, above and below decks, during the course of their journeys between West Africa, plantations in the New World and Europe, with the consequent complications this poses for maritime archaeologists seeking to identify slaving vessels.42 William Hasty has noted similar but functionally different practices in contemporary pirate ships where captured craft were stripped of internal divisions in order to make the vessels as light as possible.43 Hasty’s invitation to interpret the ship as “a space defined by process, as a site wherein form and function were subject to continual negotiation, re-imagined and reshaped by social, political and practical imperatives,”44 opens interpretive possibilities well beyond the early modern maritime world in which he advocates this approach. The transportation of merchant passengers in the twelfth century was an operation very different from the modern transportation of slave cargoes but these analyses underline the fundamental instability of ships as objects and the comparative ease with which apparently solid architectural features would be erected and dismantled. Much later, in the early seventeenth century, Pyrard De Laval remarked that even large ships from the northern sector of the western Indian Ocean – ships from Iran, the Arabian coast and western India (the Mughal territories) – did not have as many decks (ponts) as European vessels, having only one, upper weather-deck (tillac) with no (permanent) internal subdivisions.45 Given c Allami’s almost coeval discussion of the allocation of balıjs in large Mughal ships, one can conclude that such compartments were indeed temporary, even insubstantial, constructions. No other references to cabins in the Indian Ocean mention travelers taking their own doors and planks, but none of these other references comes from a luggage list and we have little idea what luggage the various travelers using these balıjs carried, or the adaptations they effected. Abraham certainly did pack 42 43 44 45

Jane Webster, “Slave Ships and Marine Archaeology: An Overview,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 12, no. 1 (2008), 7 8. William Hasty, “Metamorphosis Afloat: Pirate Ships, Politics and Process, c.1680 1730,” Mobilities 9, no. 3 (2014), 359 61. Ibid., 351. Pyrard De Laval, Voyage, French edition and commentary by Xavier de Castro as Voyage de Pyrard de Laval aux Indes Orientales (1601 1611) (Paris: Éditions Chandeigne, 1998), vol. 1, 244.

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these items and he recorded their intended use very explicitly. As we have seen consistently throughout the analysis of his luggage, there is a logical explanation for everything Abraham chose to pack, and I see no reason to doubt him now. While I cannot categorically prove that ships like those represented in the later Hariri manuscripts did not cross between Malibarat and Aden, I think it is important to be aware of, and beware, their powerful suggestibility. Until we have more and better preserved medieval wrecks we must remain awake to the possibility of other physical configurations of shipboard space. Roxani Margariti has underlined how the patterns of circulation of resources and manpower around the western Indian Ocean contributed to the development of distinct circuits each with its own hybrid shipbuilding tradition.46 The Maqamat ships may well represent a certain type of ship associated with circuits running between the Gulf and western India, since the cycle of images was developed in southern Iraq and the ship illustrations accompany stories set in the Sea of Oman, but this does not make it a template for all shipping in the western Indian Ocean. The Safety of the Cabin Wherever it was located, and whatever its disadvantages, in the crowded conditions of most premodern sea travel a cabin offered privacy and safety. In an account of his crossing from Aydhab to Jedda in the summer of 1183, Ibn Jubayr described a fleet of ships so overcrowded and carelessly maneuvered that he likened their handling to that of cages full of chickens.47 Passenger welfare was not the crew’s concern and the maxim of Aydhab’s ship owners reportedly ran: “Ours to produce the ships (alalwah); the pilgrims to protect their lives (al-arwah) [literally, ‘souls’].”48 ˙ ˙ Sailings along the pilgrimage route may have been particularly overcrowded, but this cannot have been a problem unique to this crossing. In this environment, a cabin limited the need for physical interactions with other travelers and the crew; it also offered luggage and provisions a measure of protection from pilfering, water-damage or being swept overboard. Guarding and securing one’s luggage is a leitmotif of the travel literature and the “bamboo fatiya chest of locks” (fatiya khayzuran aqfal) (Line 11) that Abraham transported reminds us of this. Locks were also 46 47 48

Discussion in Margariti, Aden, 153 4. Muhammad ibn Ahmad Ibn Jubayr, Rihla, English translation by Ronald J.C. Broadhurst as The Travels of Ibn Jubayr (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 65. Ibid.

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one of the items Abraham sent back to Aden for his colleagues and they have been documented extensively at the medieval port of Qusayr.49 On this particular voyage, however, perhaps the paramount reason for partitioning off a cabin would have been the presence of Abraham’s daughter, Sitt al-Dar. It is easy to read the current literature on ships in the early Indian Ocean and to see a purely male world. However, societies which enforced the separation of women and men continued to do so at sea and the absence of women from many sources, particularly the accounts of male travelers, may in fact be better interpreted as positive evidence for the efficacy of female seclusion on-board the ships of the period rather than as evidence for the absence of women. A number of sources indicate that freedwomen as well as slaves did travel by sea. One early piece of evidence is a woman’s will, believed to have been dictated on-board a ship off Jedda in Dhū al-Hijja 102 AH/June 721,50 and it is surely no coincidence that the three earliest mentions of balıjs in the Indian Ocean are specifically linked to traveling women, whether slaves or freedwomen. The most extensive data, however, comes from the Islamic legal literature where injunctions that women should be visually and physically separated from men onboard ship are plentiful. Several legal authorities such as the Shafici jurist alMawardi, writing in the first half of the eleventh century, stipulated that “if they [ship owners] carry both men and women, a partition should be installed between them,” and women given separate toilet facilities.51 The difficulties of maintaining a decent separation between the sexes was one of the reasons the twelfth-century Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd al-Jadd objected to women sailing on the hajj, an indication if it were needed that cabins were not standard fittings on Mediterranean and Red Sea ships.52 This was not an exclusively Muslim practice. Jews in the medieval Middle East maintained the segregation of women from non-male relatives and the custom of covering in public places,53 and so did Indian elites; as the Yuktikalpataru indicates, on ships royal women traveled out of sight. 49

50

51

52 53

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 313, nn.7 and 8; also Frederik T. Hiebert, “Commercial Organization of the Egyptian Port of Quseir al Qadim: Evidence from the Analysis of the Wooden Objects,” Archéologie Islamique 2 (1991), 127 59. Alia Hanafi, “An Arabic Will Written in a Ship,” in Proceedings of the Twenty fifth International Congress of Papyrology, Ann Arbor, 29 July 4 August, 2007, edited by Traianos Gagos and A. Hyatt (Ann Arbor: Scholarly Publications Office, The University of Michigan Library, 2010), 299 306. Hassan S. Khalilieh, “Women at Sea: Modesty, Privacy and Sexual Misconduct of Passengers and Sailors aboard Islamic Ships,” Al Qantara 27 (2006), 141, n.11 citing al Ahka¯m al Sultaniyya of al Mawardi (d. 450/1058). Ibid. See Yedida Stillman, “‘Cover Her Face’: Jewish Women and Veiling in Islamic Civilization,” in Israel and Ishmael: Studies in Muslim Jewish Relations, edited by Tudor Parfitt (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000); also Mordechai A. Friedman, “Jewish Law as Witness to Sexual Mores among Jews in Islamic Countries during the Middle Ages: Veils and Temporary Marriage,” Pe‘amim 45 (1990), 91 9 (in Hebrew).

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We should not be surprised that many of the literary and epistolary conventions that operated for the preservation of female modesty have also helped to erase women from the historical record; women of high status were not mentioned publicly by name, and writing about such women was also seen as inappropriate. Abraham’s peer group followed Middle Eastern cultural practices and Abraham’s wife and daughter are never referred to directly in the correspondence, although profuse greetings are always sent to male children and fellow merchants. If we know anything about Ashu, it is because as a deed of manumission this document operated according to altogether different discursive norms. Even Abraham’s daughter’s “name,” Sitt al-Dar, is not her personal name but a moniker meaning “the Lady of the House.” It is noticeable that when they do occur, references to women on-board vessels often concern transported female slaves or concubines rather than highstatus female passengers. Europeans had fewer qualms and the narrative of the Italian merchant Niccolò De’Conti, recounting his travels in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, freely informs its readers that when he returned to Egypt from India he traveled, not only with four servants and the four children born during his Indian Ocean trading, but with his Indian wife too.54 Ashu appears to have died before the family returned to Aden, but Sitt al-Dar was most definitely present onboard this ship. Sitt al-Dar’s dowry list, drawn up in Egypt in 1156, includes a niqab or face veil, together with other items (taqnı ca) understood to be veils, clear indications that she covered in public;55 it seems likely then that Abraham intended his daughter to travel in the balıj in seclusion throughout the journey. Whether he traveled with his family in the cabin for the whole journey or in the open air during good weather is impossible to say – indeed he may have had the luxury of both. Furnishing the Cabin How then was life lived in this cabin and aboard this ship on the five- to six-week crossing to Aden? The A’ın-i Akbarı’s description of the balıj as both a place for people to dwell in and the storage of a wide range of generic “stuff” (kala) – “in general any kind of household furniture;

54

55

Poggio Bracciolini, De Varietate Fortunæ Livre IV, French edition and translation by Michèle Guéret Laferté as De l’Inde: les voyages en Asie de Niccolò De’Conti (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), 133. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 784, Lines 6, 7 and 16 (IB III, 54).

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things, necessaries; goods,” as Steingass defined it56 – suggests something of conditions in Abraham’s cabin, but what luggage was unpacked or used directly and what remained stowed away until arrival in Aden? What we decide to interpret as active items of luggage depends in part on how we understand India traders to have traveled. Modern travel, particularly the limits on weights and dimensions imposed by commercial air travel, has radically changed our idea of what constitutes an acceptable quantity of luggage; we also expect to carry our own bags. Before such limitations and in social milieus where porters were an expected part of travel planning, luggage trains could be large. Many travelers sought to minimize the disruption of what al-Ghazali termed their “custom and habit,”57 in effect by carrying their household with them. It is the Frenchman Pyrard De Laval who, once again, cuts to the core of regional practice. It was the custom of Malabari and Maldivian merchants, and those of “other places,” he observed, to “carry everything [my italics] when they go by sea, both their personal luggage (petit bagage) and beds (lits) for sleeping, because they never want to sleep on another’s bed if at all possible.”58 In medieval Europe the traveling household is well documented and recognized, but we know substantially less about the travel practices of merchants and traders in the Middle East and South Asia, and the variety of practices that surely existed. Nevertheless, if Middle Eastern contracts of carriage and South Asian sources are to be trusted, the baggage of welloff travelers would have been as substantial as that of their European peers. In the discussion that follows I have chosen to interpret as “active” those items of luggage that were not bulk listed, thus everything other than the six baskets of worked brass and iron, the basket and two chests of glassware, and the four chests of textiles. Once these are stripped away there remain, besides foodstuffs, furniture components and a diverse and surprisingly substantial assemblage of table and kitchenwares, traveling loose or ready to hand for the more challenging environment of eating at sea. Since the adaptation of foodstuffs to maritime travel has been discussed in the previous chapter, and passingly in Chapter 4, “Making a Meal of It,” the concluding discussion focuses on furniture and kitchenwares, broadly defined, in the maritime environment.

56 57

58

See discussion above pp. 193 4. Abu Hamid al Ghazali, Ihya¯’ cUlum al Dı¯n, English translation of Book XVII as Al Ghazali on Conduct in Travel: Kita¯b a¯da¯b al safar. Book XVII of the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Great Shelford: Islamic Texts Society, 2016), 23. My translation from the French; see Pyrard De Laval, Voyage, ed. as Voyage de Pyrard de Laval, vol. 1, 413.

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Postural Cultures at Sea Al-Samarqandi’s characterization of his ship as “a moving house (khana) whose inhabitants stay put” is a useful reminder of the fact that at sea the physicality of inhabitation was subtly altered. With overcrowding the norm, immobility was central to safe passage by sea and the eleventhcentury Ibadi jurist al-Kindi, writing in Oman and thus in an explicitly Indian Ocean context, stipulated that passengers should remain seated so as not to annoy others or damage cargo.59 It is no accident that the Persian term for a passenger on a ship, kashtı nishastan, should mean literally “one who sits on a ship.” Abraham’s list of luggage offers important new data for this discussion too since it includes recognizable elements of furniture, which point in turn to specific postures of travel. He carried “4 legs for a bed” (4 arjul lisarır), “3 planks for beds” (3 alwah li-sirwar) (Lines 28 and 33) together ˙ with a lawh kursı, a plank for a chair or stool, listed on Line 34. Given the ˙ organization of this passage it is very probable that the four currently unidentified items termed CIDAN listed before the kursı were also components of some wooden item of furniture.60 It is clear that not all Middle Eastern travelers transported furniture and the presence here of components for beds and chairs indicates a particular culture of travel. For the most part, bales and chests appear to have been adapted to serve as physical supports when travelers rested. A rare description of shipboard postures is recorded in an eleventh-century letter from the Mediterranean. In it Jacob b. Salman describes how he “opened up his rug and spread it out and slept as if he were at home, with his bag under his head.”61 Just as merchants sat and slept on top of their goods when traveling in undecked ships, travelers on land commonly slept on top of their bales and chests – at least this is shown in one of the later scenes from the Maqamat.62 Unsewn garments such as thawbs and fū tas served as blankets or bedding and the shamla wrap or cloak requested˙ by the three travelers stranded on the Red Sea coast was surely destined for this use.63 S.D. Goitein also documented the practice of using long benches or chests (dakka or dikka) topped by mattresses for sleeping at home and there is no reason to think that this same adaptation was not used on the

59 60 61

62 63

Abu Bakr Ahmad ibn cAbdallah ibn Musa al Kindi, al Musannaf, Arabic edition (Muscat: Wizara al Turath al Qawmi wa l Thaqafa, 1403 AH/1983), vol. 18, 53 4. See Appendix, English translation, n.53. Cited in Moshe Gil, “Shipping in the Mediterranean in the Eleventh Century A.D. as Reflected in Documents from the Cairo Geniza,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 67, no. 4 (2008), 247 92. Maqa¯ma¯t of al Hariri, copied and illustrated in Iraq in 634 AH/1236 37, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Arabe 5847, fol. 9v. Discussed Chapter 6, p. 180, n.55.

Fig. 7 Noah’s Ark, from the Ja¯mi c al-Tawarı¯kh (Universal History) of Rashid al-Din, copied at Tabriz, Iran, in 714 AH/ 1314–15.

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move.64 Possession of a cabin may have allowed for a more purposeful, less ad hoc, organization of space and certainly the use of a greater number of textiles or more precious items since these were protected from the elements and from pilfering. We know too little about sitting and sleeping practices in the western Indian Ocean at this period to do more than speculate. However, as with food cultures, we may assume that passengers expected to inhabit ships as they lived on land, with a corresponding transfer of their postural culture, and the material culture that supported it, to this new environment. The numerous dining mats Abraham imported into India suggest that by postural culture he was, at least on occasion, a floor-sitter and as such he may well have traveled in his cabin seated on his many mats or some of the twenty carpets itemized in his luggage (Line 37). The fact that these carpets are not specified as wrapped or contained in any way suggests perhaps that they were ready for immediate use on-board ship. Yet Abraham also packed a lawh kursı, a plank for a chair or stool (Line 34), ˙ a clear suggestion that some form of low sitting support was deemed necessary, that there was someone in his party who sat this way. His detailed itemization of wooden components for more formal, constructed, beds or day beds, sarır in the Judaeo-Arabic, also points to a clear interest in constructed, wooden furniture. This presence resonates with earlier Indian references to the use of furniture on-board ships – the Yuktikalpataru recommended that royal ships be outfitted with bedsteads (s´ayya) and seats (asana),65 while the preparation of mattresses features among the final sailing preparatives listed in Indian romances.66 If the use of tables was, as we have seen in Chapter 4, the subject of heated debate in the Middle East, the use of long, low but nevertheless raised beds both for sleeping and for sitting or reclining in daytime appears to have been far less controversial. Joseph Sadan suggests that wooden sarırs on legs were in use across the Arabian Peninsula from an early period and used by the Prophet himself.67 It is not altogether clear how the components Abraham carried would have been assembled, nor how many “beds” they made, but their very presence is useful in stimulating much needed debate and further research. With rope and four struts – perhaps the four unidentified cIDAN from Line 34 – the four legs could have been made into a charpoi-style rope bed.68 With the three remaining planks stretched between chests another three beds might have been set up 64 66

67 68

See Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, 114. 65 Chaudhuri, “Ship building,” 145. My translation from the French: “prendres les paillasses,” Kuvalayama¯la¯ of Uddyotanasuri, French translation by Christine Chojnacki as Kuvalayama¯la¯: Roman Jaina de 779, composé par Uddyotanasuri (Marburg: Indica et Tibetica Verlag, 2008), vol. 2, 228. Joseph Sadan, Le mobilier au Proche Orient médiéval (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 49. Ibid., 42 51; transportable versions, known as safarı¯, are also documented (ibid., 50).

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in the cabin. We know that Abraham traveled back to Aden with his two surviving children and, if this reassembly of the components is accepted, there would have been beds enough in the cabin, with the option of a fourth bed up on deck. Corroborating evidence for shipboard practices in this area is even more sparse than for food cultures but one can point to the Jamic alTawarıkh’s illustration of Noah’s Ark, showing Noah reclining on a day bed set up on the forward deck, for a clue to the fact that male passengers made the most of this location (Fig. 7). The use of the prow area correlates with what we know to have been the best position for fresh air on-board ships at this period and Noah’s use of a day bed to recline here offers a tantalizingly suggestive context in which to imagine the placement of Abraham’s own sarır during his journey. Noah is almost certainly depicted in a culturally and socially specific posture of travel; whether this accurately represents how elite travelers commonly “sat” on a ship is unclear and will require further decoding as part of a much broader study.69 What we can say with more certainty is that there were components enough in Abraham’s luggage to have provided a variety of sleeping and sitting options, in the cabin and on deck, throughout the journey and that the very use of furniture reflects a certain culture of travel. Cooking and Eating at Sea For a variety of reasons Indian Ocean vessels were not outfitted with formal ships galleys; passengers planned to cook for themselves and packed accordingly. As we have seen, firewood was commonly provisioned alongside water, and Abraham’s luggage included a chest of firewood (Line 20)70 as well as a significant number of tablewares left loose in the luggage and which I interpret as the assemblage that was to be used on-board ship. In contrast to the diversity of tablewares recorded in Abraham’s correspondence, the luggage list points to a focused and utilitarian selection of key vessel forms and, above all, materials. By far the most prominent vessel in Abraham’s luggage is the wooden qas ca bowl, with no less than sixteen – new ones, old ones, small ones, big ˙ – itemized across Lines 25 to 26, 28 to 29 and 32. No other object in ones the luggage list is differentiated quite as carefully on the basis of size or age, thereby underlining the extent to which wooden bowls were essential during maritime travel. The association between wooden vessels and mobility is surely ancient: less likely to break than glasswares, ceramics or stone vessels and impossible to dent like metalwares, whilst remaining in this case, as Friedman suggested, an elite tableware.71 The range of sizes noted down suggests that these qascas served multiple uses, for eating ˙ 69

70

Sadan’s chapter on beds in Mobilier (“Les lits,” 25 56) remains an important starting point but see also Georgina Herrmann (ed.), The Furniture of Western Asia, Ancient and Traditional (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1996). Discussed in Appendix, English translation, n.36. 71 Ibid., n.43.

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wet and solid foods, for drinking, serving and perhaps for food preparation too. Given the focus of Lines 28 through 34 on wood of all sorts, I read mihlab (Line 31) as a further type of wooden bowl and it is ˙ probable that the unidentified MWJH on Line 32 was also some form of wooden object.72 Alongside these bowls traveled the essential components of southern Indian dining, namely three copper talams (Line 37), the flat platters so essential to the serving and eating of rice. Four ladles, one specified as “large,” but all of unknown material (Lines 24–5), could be used for cooking and serving. Other copper tablewares complemented this assemblage: a tajn for cooking, a table jug (zır khiwan) for drinks and a basin and˙ ewer set (tast wa ibrıq) for hand ˙ ˙ washing (Line 36). But suitability for maritime travel was not simply a matter of sturdiness; other material qualities made other utensils important components of travel assemblages. The “two stone tajins in hay and two ˙ stone pots” listed on Lines 17 and 18 describe the soapstone or schist vessels widely favored across the Middle East and in the Yemen.73 Other items described simply as packed in straw or hay (Lines 12 and 13) can probably also be identified as stone vessels. Although comparatively fragile, hence their careful packing, stone utensils offered a number of advantages to consumers. Such vessels were widely appreciated for the fact that they did not leave a metallic taint on the food they contained.74 However, a far more valuable quality in this environment was their ability to retain heat. Soapstone or schist vessels retain heat long after they have been taken off a heat source and were thus valuable for keeping foods warm in situations where cooking was complicated to organize, as on-board a ship, or where cooking was not allowed, as during the Jewish Sabbath. Both situations would have applied during Abraham’s journey. The meal carrier (hamil) listed on Line 12 and specified to be ˙ “packed in straw” represents a common household item in larger urban centers such as Fustat or Cairo, used to transport hot food from street vendors or, as here, to store cooked food.75 As we have seen in 72 73 74

75

See discussion in Appendix, English translation, nn.51 and 52. See Appendix, English translation, n.24. On the ranking of cooking vessels by material and association with particular styles of cooking or foods see Alison Gascoigne, “Cooking Pots and Choices in the Medieval Middle East,” in Pottery and Social Dynamics in the Mediterranean and Beyond in Medieval and Post medieval Times, edited by John Bintliff and Marta Caroscio (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013), 1 10. Nineteenth century Yemeni pots and other vessels and objects collected from the Jewish community are published in Ester Muchawsky Schnapper, The Yemenites: Two Thousand Years of Jewish Culture (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2000), 42 3, 52 3 and 172 5. See 42 3 for a discussion of stone’s perceived advantages.

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Chapter 5, stone vessels were also particularly versatile in the domestic environment of ritually observant Jews since they were not deemed susceptible to impurity, unlike wood, and would have been extremely easy to clean. The two stone tajin pans (Line 17) and two stone pots ˙ (burmatayn hajar) (Lines 17–18) represent key vessel types for frying ˙ and boiling a variety of foodstuffs, perhaps rice.76 In a number of cases, particular vessels or utensils can be more directly associated with packed foodstuffs. The coconut scraper, mihakk li-l-narjın, ˙ itemized on Line 39 was essential for processing coconuts and should be understood in relation to the basket of coconuts listed among provisions on Lines 6–7. Used to scrape out the flesh of mature coconuts after the milk had been drained, these remain essential utensils in any well-equipped south Indian kitchen.77 Other items may be more specifically associated with flour and the preparation of bread, a discrete sub-assemblage dedicated to this important foodstuff. Although ready-prepared bread is present here (Lines 10 and 24) and stale bread could still be eaten moistened with water, there is also flour (Line 7) for making fresh bread. One wooden bowl, the mihlab listed in Line 31, may have been specifically reserved for bread dough˙ since it is mentioned as such in the Baghdadi Cookbook.78 The large tabaq in Line 24 may also have been associated with wheat in ˙ some way, either for serving bread or for baking thin bread (ruqaq).79 There are also, of course, glaring absences here and it is difficult to know whether expected things are absent simply because of the material condition of this section of the document – the final lines of the luggage list have the largest number of lacunae, since Abraham’s pen was running out of ink and his writing becoming increasingly spidery – or were truly not present. The absence even of key kitchen implements, items we know to have been used in Abraham’s home, is noticeable – for example sieves which were important for picking out small stones and other contaminants in wheat, rice or millets – and suggests perhaps that on-board food preparation was kept to a minimum. With ready-prepared flour and rice there would have been no need for querns and sieves. The bottle of nabıdh, if it was the Yemeni nabıdh deemed acceptable for ritual use, obviated the need for soaking and then straining raisins for “wine.” The accompaniments, pickles and fish preserves, are all processed foods that require no cutting, and hands would have been all that was needed for eating. 76 77 78 79

Alison Gascoigne points to ethnographic evidence for the use of soapstone pots for rice in Afghanistan; see “Cooking Pots and Choices,” 6. See Appendix, English translation, n.61. See discussion of this proposed reading in Appendix, English translation, n.51. Appendix, English translation, n.41.

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Less easy to ignore is the absence from this assemblage of a metal brazier or other small, portable stove on which to cook – what is commonly called a firebox in maritime contexts. As discussed in the previous chapter, the fatiya chest of firewood (Line 20) suggests a preparedness to cook in this way that is borne out by a number of textual references to ships provisioning with firewood. I know of no surviving examples of medieval portable braziers from South Asia, although they were clearly commonplace, but examples are known from the Fatimid Middle East where they were commonly called kanū n.80 A good impression of what such an apparatus would have looked like can be found in the many representations of braziers and hearths found in the late fifteenth-century Ni cmatnama, a cookery book produced for Sultan Ghiyath al-Din of Malwa in central India around 1495–1505.81 The illustrations show a variety of single and double braziers, some made of metal, probably iron, and clearly transportable since they are represented in a variety of outdoor settings; others are apparently made of brick or clay but may have been temporary constructions. As today across India, the ends of branches and twigs were placed in the mouth of the brazier and simply pushed further in as they burned. We do not know whether passengers shared access to a single ship’s firebox, used by the crew for their own meals, or whether, as attested much later on larger Red Sea vessels, each traveler brought their own small brazier for their own food preparation. Either way, someone would have cooked somewhere on-board. As travelers journeyed, it was, of course, always possible to open up chests and baskets to access further items. Inside the various baskets and chests of glasswares, “china” and worked brass were further utensils and tablewares for a far more elaborate table setting, and perhaps more complex food preparation. Whether or not this ever happened on-board ship would have depended on weather conditions, each individual’s health and many other factors besides. No sources mention large shipboard dinners and the few sources we have on merchant life in this region point overwhelmingly to ports as the focal point of such activities – but the truth is that neither is particularly comprehensive. While some 80

81

Ya’el D. Arnon, Ayla Lester and Rachel Pollak, “The Fatimid Hoard of Metalwork, Glass, and Ceramics from TPS: Preliminary Report,” in Caesarea Reports and Studies. Excavations 1995 2007 within the Old City and the Ancient Harbor, edited by Kenneth G. Holum, Jennifer A. Stabler and Eduard G. Reinhardt (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2008), 109; see also comments on the term in al Muzaffar ibn Nasr Ibn Sayyar al Warraq, Kita¯b al Ta¯bikh, English translation, introduction and commentary by Nawal Nasrallah as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayya¯r al Warra¯q’s Tenth century Baghdadi Cookbook (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 684. See illustrations to Nasir Shah, Ni cmatna¯ma, English translation and facsimile of the Persian manuscript by Norah M. Titley as The Ni‘matna¯ma Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu: The Sultan’s Book of Delights (London and New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005).

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containers such as those of glasswares and “china” can be “unpacked” thanks to the rest of Abraham’s correspondence, the brass and iron items remain frustratingly locked away. Perhaps in here somewhere was the brazier so essential to shipboard life in the Indian Ocean world. Fishing at Sea One further shipboard activity is suggested by the fatiya of fishermen’s gear listed on Line 9. Crews and passengers regularly extended their rations by foraging along their route. Examples for the premodern Indian Ocean are rare when compared to the more numerous accounts of the European voyages of exploration, but we know of islands in the Red Sea where wild sheep and goats were hunted by passing ships,82 and Ibn Battuta observed crews collecting and cooking seabirds and their eggs from islands off the coast of Oman.83 Elsewhere in his account Ibn Battuta describes being shown a particular pool at the port of Ras Dawair on the Red Sea where a type of fish (al-burı) could simply be scooped out with one’s cloak.84 The Ibadi jurist al-Kindi even includes an opinion on who might claim any fish that landed on deck, a clear pointer to the importance of this additional food source.85 The open ocean route from Malibarat to Aden offered few foraging stops along the way; however, shipboard fishing, a form of organized foraging, was certainly possible, both on the transoceanic section of the crossing and especially on the final coastal leg. The Dhofar area of southern Oman, particularly the port of Mirbat, emerges from the genizah documents as a crucial node in western Indian sailing and from there travelers might sail down along the coast to Aden or even travel directly to Aydhab or the Dahlak archipelago, apparently bypassing Aden (and its taxes) altogether.86 Maritime archaeology in the Mediterranean has been able to furnish substantial evidence for shipboard fishing and the role of freshly caught fish in provisioning; indeed, the idea is almost axiomatic. Yet while the same logic no doubt also applies to the Indian Ocean area, the sources and evidence have not yet been consistently gathered or reviewed. Once again we are in the realm of daily practices that often went unrecorded, and while the abundance of well-excavated shipwrecks in the Mediterranean provides us with plentiful archaeological data, the relative neglect of the 82 83

84 86

Ibn al Mujawir, Ta¯rı¯kh, Eng. trans. as Traveller in Thirteenth century Arabia, 245. Abu cAbdallah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edition and French translation by Charles Defrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti as Voyages d’Ibn Battûta (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1969), vol. 2, 216 17. Ibid., vol. 2, 161. 85 al Kindi, al Musannaf, vol. 18, 58. For this route see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 295 (IB II, 4) and 207 (IB I, 14).

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Indian Ocean and its very different patterns of archaeological deposition leave us with a patchy record at best. Modern ethnographic accounts of fishing on Arabian dhows certainly substantiate this fact,87 but the best historical data at present comes from the five lead net weights and a wooden fishing hook recovered from the Belitung wreck off Java.88 At present, textual evidence is richer than archaeological remains. Probably one of the most complete descriptions for the Indian Ocean is given by the Alexandrian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, who described how the seal [dugong ?], the dolphin, and the turtle we eat at sea if we chance to catch them . . . The flesh of the turtle, like mutton, is dark coloured; that of the dolphin is like pork, but dark coloured and rank; and that of the seal is, like pork, white and free from smell.89

Turtles, and to some degree dolphins, are pelagic or open-ocean species and could have been caught throughout the journey, likely in nets or with harpoons; Cosmas’s reference to seals is more perplexing as they are only found in the cold waters of the southern Indian Ocean and one might wonder whether he in fact described dugong, which were then common around the shores of the western Indian Ocean and continue to be hunted for their meat across their remaining natural range. The early twelfth-century Chinese text the Pingzhou Tabletalk similarly describes fishing on ships traveling between China and south India. Citing the authority of traders, this describes how sailors on-board large jia-ling ships, very probably ships from the land of the Kling or Telingana on the northern Coromandel coast, took advantage of calm conditions at sea to “catch fish with a hook as large as a man’s arm, on which they fasten a chicken or duck as bait,”90 and if the fish caught was not itself edible the smaller fish from its stomach would be eaten instead.91 As he sailed along the coast of the Arabian Peninsula from Dhofar to Qalhat, Ibn Battuta 87 88

89

90

91

See Dionisius A. Agius, Seafaring in the Arabian Gulf and Oman: The People of the Dhow (London and New York: Kegan Paul, 2005), 138 and 141. Regina Krahl (ed.), Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; Singapore: National Heritage Board and Singapore Tourism Board, 2010), 233, nos. 34 and 35. These numbers pale in comparison to the number of fishing related finds found in the Serçe Limanı wreck off the Turkish coast, suggesting that this is only a small part of the original fishing material. Cosmas Indicopleustes, Kosma Aiguptiou Monachou Christianike Topographia, English translation by J.W. McCrindle as The Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1897), 363. Cited in Hirth and Rockhill’s introduction to Zhao Rugua, Chu fan chi, English transla tion by Friedrich Hirth and W.W. Rockhill as Chau Ju Kua: His Work on the Chinese and Arab Trade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Entitled Chu fan chï (New York: Paragon Book Reprint Corp., 1966), 32 3. Hirth and Rockhill’s introduction to Zhao Rugua, Chu fan chi, 33.

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also described how the crew fished for shır mahı, milk fish (Chanos chanos), which they grilled and shared with passengers.92 In all these sources, crew members appear to have been the active fishers, unless we read Cosmas’s “we” as an indication that he too fished while traveling, but passengers evidently shared in this catch. We may consider whether the presence of this chest of fishermen’s gear on Line 9, at the very start of the luggage list alongside key foods, is evidence that servants were sent to fish for their masters, or whether on calm days crew might be hired for the service. Fish and sea mammals would only have been a reliable source of food in fish-rich coastal waters at either end of the journey but their meat, and the activity of catching them, may have represented a respite from the relative monotony and inactivity of shipboard life as a passenger. Small Things Forgotten A multitude of smaller items in the luggage point to the daily activities other than sleeping, eating and perhaps fishing that punctuated life during a long voyage. The bottle of soap (sabū n) for washing clothes (Line 21) is a reminder that on a long journey˙simple activities like laundry still took place. As the Prophet’s “nécessaire de toilette” and al-Ghazali’s Sufi clothes line remind us, bodily hygiene was considered essential in travel. Medieval European shipwreck assemblages regularly yield nit combs – distinguishable by their very fine teeth93 – and although no Indian Ocean wrecks have yet yielded finds of combs or toiletry sets, combs were abundant in the Islamic layers of Qusayr.94 In the absence of a comb, Abraham’s soap points to this important aspect of medieval sea travel. AlKindi even specified that passengers could do their laundry on ships and that space should be made on deck for it to dry, so long as the captain agreed to it.95 Ships harbor rats and mice and with them lice, fleas and many other insects, all of which transmit a variety of diseases, and the topic of prevention and treatment was common in travel and medical literature.96 Abraham’s careful inclusion of “a trap for rats” (misyada li˙ l-firan) (Lines 19–20), remarkably the one countermeasure not 92 93

94 95 96

Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edn and French trans. as Voyages, vol. 2, 217 18. George F. Bass, “Personal Effects,” in Bass et al. (eds.), Serçe Limanı: An Eleventh century Shipwreck. The Ship and Its Anchorage, Crew, and Passengers (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004), vol. 1, 283. Hiebert, “Commercial Organization of the Egyptian Port of Quseir,” 149 50. al Kindi, al Musannaf, vol. 18, 55. See Gerrit Bos’s analysis comparing Qusta to other classical sources in Qusta Ibn Luqa, Risa¯la fı¯ Tadbı¯r Safar al Hajj, Arabic edition and English translation by Gerrit Bos as Qusta Ibn Luqa’s Medical Regime for the Pilgrims to Mecca: The Risala fi Tadbir Safar al Hajj (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 65 73. Discussed further in the next chapter.

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mentioned in the medical literature, reminds us that rodents were no less of a danger to food provisions, and baskets and sacks of wheat and rice would have been especially prone to attack. Sabbath at Sea Possession of a cabin also gave Jewish travelers space to observe the Sabbath and other Jewish holidays undisturbed by other passengers. The Jewish calendar is lunisolar not lunar, thus, unlike the Islamic hijri calendar, Jewish holidays remain anchored to seasonal time, and in the course of their return circuits between the Middle East and India Jewish traders would have learned to integrate these holidays into their travel schedules. Where possible, holidays were spent on land – on his way to India the merchant David Maimonides celebrated Passover at Qus,97 and the companions who shared a balıj en route to Aden had spent Pentecost at Aydhab98 – but the seasons and sailing times in the Indian Ocean were not as forgiving. While a number of rulings exist prohibiting setting sail or disembarking on the Sabbath and genizah documents bear this out,99 many holidays were undoubtedly spent at sea. Indeed, Sarah Arenson has suggested that it was actually easier for Jews to be religiously observant on sea voyages, where provisions had to be prepared in advance and were carried with one, than during travel by land where provisions were often purchased along the route and most often away from other Jewish communities.100 Sailings to southern India made with the so-called “great season” out of Aden – beginning in the last week of August101 – could not have avoided passing the Jewish New Year, the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles at sea. Abraham’s correspondence and other genizah documents now provide clear evidence for the advance planning of ritual foodstuffs for use during long-term sojourns and, as this luggage list shows, during travel too. On the six-week crossings between Aden and Malibarat it was also within their cabins that observant Jews such as Abraham would have observed the Sabbath and prepared for the main Sabbath meals. These patterns of travel and inhabitation of ships are not exclusively Jewish, merely a consequence of the detailed resolution of the India Book documents. As such they offer important reminders that the deep seasonal rhythms of the Indian Ocean were interwoven with a multiplicity of religious lunar and solar calendars too. 97 99 100 101

98 Goitein, Letters, Letter 42, 209 (IB VI, 4). Ibid., Letter 40, 197 201 (IB VI, 39). Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 737 with discussion of disembarkation on the Sabbath in n.16. Sarah Arenson, “Medieval Jewish Seafaring between East and West,” in Seafaring and the Jews, edited by Nadav Kashtan (London: F. Cass, 2001), 33. See references in Chapter 2, p. 52, n.61.

8

The Balanced Body: On Vinegar and Other Sour Foods

A prescription in Arabic for the treatment of haemorrhoids may seem a strange place to begin a discussion of the dangers to health inherent in Indian Ocean travel, and the medicinal foods that evolved to respond to them. But the document in question, one of many hundreds of such prescriptions preserved in the Cairo Genizah and part of its wonderfully chaotic ephemera, is also a rare pointer to the medical concerns and activity of India traders in India.1 Typically of ephemera and the majority of surviving prescriptions, this one names neither the patient nor the prescribing physician – it did not need to, since such prescriptions generally stayed with the patient on their route between the doctor’s, the druggist’s and home – and it is, for the same reasons, undated and unlocated. The clues to its Indian provenance lie elsewhere: first of all in the contents of the much-faded earlier text on its reverse, minutes in Hebrew of the session of a Jewish court that appears to mention material presented at Bharuch, then a major port in western India. But above all India is present here in the very materiality of the document: a now tattered rectangle of cloth which, as Mordechai A. Friedman acutely grasped, was a common writing support in India and was also used on occasion by India traders as an alternative to precious, imported Middle Eastern paper.2 The materiality of this clue, the fact that India is not 1

2

T S Ar.41.81. Summary only in S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 713 (IB III, 36); full translation in S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, Abraham Ben Yiju India Trader and Manufacturer: India Book III, Cairo Geniza Documents (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010), 281 2. Also Ephraim Lev and Leigh Chipman, Medical Prescriptions in the Cambridge Geniza Collections: Practical Medicine and Pharmacology in Medieval Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 108 10. This is one of two prescriptions on T S Ar.41.81, but the authors only edit and comment on this one text. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 713. Cloth is not always an exclusive signifier of Indian provenance (in the Middle East healing spells, for example, were specifically required to be written on cloth and later burned: Lev and Chipman, Medical Prescriptions, 108) but it does appear to be so in this case.

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explicitly mentioned in the text as the context in which the prescription was copied, probably explains why this aspect of its production has been largely overlooked by historians of Islamic medicine.3 “The Balanced Body” addresses the neglected area of medicine and dietetics in the premodern Indian Ocean environment, asking whether any of the foods in Abraham’s luggage list might be understood as “medicinal foods” and so as evidence for the self-prescription of ordinary travelers.

Travel beyond Medical Networks The prescription for haemorrhoids is one of three prescriptions on cloth ascribed to Abraham Ben Yiju and to India. As Friedman indicates in his biography of Abraham, it is possible that he had received a measure of medical training and it would not have been unusual for an educated scribe-merchant to write or perhaps copy medical prescriptions.4 Occupationally the Jewish communities of the Middle East were heavily represented in medicine, as physicians and as pharmacists, and this undoubtedly facilitated a wider circulation of specialist knowledge. Goitein had observed in the genizah letters widespread evidence for selfprescription, noting that “people often ordered for themselves medications not prescribed for them by a physician but known to them otherwise.”5 Widespread popular demand for medical knowledge is evidenced by the appearance in the ninth century of a textual genre specifically aimed at this market. Initiated, it seems, by al-Razi’s treatise He Who Has No Physician to Attend Him (Man la Yahduruhu al-Tabıb),6 it was followed by a raft of “layman’s guides,” amongst them the digest of Ibn Jazzar (c. 895–979) composed in tenth-century Fatimid Ifriqiya to serve 3

4

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6

The Indian provenance is not mentioned in Lev and Chipman, Medical Prescriptions, nor in the course of Gerrit Bos’s revised readings given in an extensive review article, “On Editing Medical Fragments from the Cairo Geniza,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 134 (2014), 717. See Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 68. Goitein included this particular prescription in his India Book as document III, 36; however, confusingly a further two cloth fragments, one of them carrying a remedy in Arabic for earache, were not included although they have been associated with Abraham (ibid., 68, nn.54 and 55). That Abraham also mastered the Arabic script is confirmed by a letter he wrote in Mangalore on behalf of Mahruz b. Jacob and which refers to “another one in Arabic characters of the same content as this letter” (ibid., 478, Lines 1 3 and Friedman’s discussion in n.31) (IB II, 55). S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 93), vol. 5, 112. Noted with other examples in Hormoz Ebrahimnejad, “Medicine in Islam and Islamic Medicine,” in The Oxford Handbook of the History of Medicine, edited by Mark Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 180 1. Laymen’s guides were written in other areas such as Shiah jurisprudence and the genre would merit further study.

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as a “teaching manual to the medical student, a thesaurus to the practitioner, and as a guide to the traveller, especially to far away rural places where scarcely a physician can be found.”7 It was this last usage that determined the work’s final title, Provisions for the Traveler and Sustenance for the Sedentary. Similar motivations are echoed in the Book of Medical Experiences (Sefer Hanisyonot) attributed to Abraham’s contemporary and co-religionist Abraham Ben Ezra (c. 1089–1167), namely the fact that “there are many people who cannot buy what they need, and also because qualified healers cannot be found in every place.”8 If only by necessity, in Malibarat Abraham was part of this “medicinally aware” community and this is seen in the medicinal substances included among his household orders during his time in India (see Tables 1 and 2, pp. 71–6, 82–4).9 Salient among them is sugar, which, besides its importance as an index of hospitality, was also a simple drug whose “cold” properties made it a key medicine in hot climates and for the treatment of fevers. But it was accompanied by less frequent dispatches of substances, in effect drugs, such as civet, kohl, costus, ladanum, litharge, purslane seeds, and others besides (Tables 1 and 2). Many unanswered questions surround the small corpus of prescriptions associated with Abraham. Nevertheless, their Indian context does not seem in doubt and their importance is clear: they are reminders that “interest and knowledgeability in medications”10 extended well beyond the medical professions and did not stop at Egypt’s Red Sea ports. Commercial travelers may have been more attuned than most to the need to care for their health during travel and foreign sojourns. Especially among the “middling sort” of India trader, those who were not great merchants with factors to travel on their behalf, whole families sometimes depended on the success of a single trading venture and the safe return of the family breadwinner. For commercial travelers such as these, the aim was to minimize the hardships of travel in order to arrive at the intended destination not simply alive but healthy and ready to trade. In the section on travel in his medical 7

8

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Cited in Sami K. Hamarneh, “Medicine and Pharmacy under the Fatimids,” Ilm 9, no. 2 (1985), 24 6. The Za¯d al Musa¯fir wa Qut al Ha¯dir is currently being edited by Gerrit Bos with Book 7 (Parts 1 6 and 7 30) already published by Brill. Abraham Ibn Ezra, Sefer Hanisyonot, English translation by J.O. Liebowitz and S. Marcus as The Sefer Hanisyonot: The Book of Medical Experiences Attributed to Abraham ibn Ezra. Medical Theory, Rational and Magical Therapy. A Study in Medievalism (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1984), 127. For a large commercial order passed by Khalaf b. Isaac in Aden with Egyptian druggists, see Albert Dietrich, Zum Drogenhandel im islamischen Ägypten: Eine Studie Über die arabische Handschrift Nr. 912 der Heidelberger Papyrus Sammlung (Heidelberg: Winter, 1954), published only in summary in Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 460 1 (IB II, 50) and in the Hebrew edition. Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 5, 112.

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encyclopedia, the Canon of Medicine (Qanū n fı-l-Tibb), one of the most widely circulated medical encyclopedias of the medieval period, the eleventh-century physician Ibn Sina (980–1037) advised that “a traveller has to do without so many things to which he is accustomed (while he is in his own home town) and has to face hardships and illness. He must, therefore, take care of the matters concerning his body so that he might be safe from many diseases.”11 In this respect much of the regimen of travel literature in the Islamic world – known technically as tadbır al-musafir, literally “traveler’s organization” – is very different from the travel advice given by al-Ghazali to his Sufis, or seen in practice among Houari Touati’s scholars, for whom the extreme physical hardships of travel brought them closer to God and were consequently actively courted.12 It breaks radically too with earlier, Classical traditions of therapeutic travel and particularly sea travel, which was courted for its mood-lifting and health-improving effects.13 Travel for knowledge, travel as therapy and travel for trade were profoundly different in objective, range and method. It is within this context and from this perspective that this chapter reads Abraham’s luggage list. Locating Medicines and Medicine In spite of this context, the enterprise does not initially seem promising. Read from a conventional medical perspective, Abraham’s luggage lists no simple or compound drugs explicitly. Although it is likely that drugs were carried back to Aden, packed away somewhere on-board amongst the many bundles and chests of hawa’ij, “stuff,”14 we are left to imagine ˙ 11

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English translation, with adaptations, from the new Jamia Hamdard edition and transla tion of Ibn Sina’s Qanun; see Abu cAli al Husain Ibn cAbdallah Ibn Sina, al Qanun fı¯ l Tibb, English translation from the critical Arabic edition led by Hakim Abdul Hameed as Al Qanun fi’l Tibb (New Delhi: Jamia Hamdard, 1993 ), vol. 1, 310. For examples see Houari Touati, Islam and Travel in the Middle Ages, English translation by Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 84 5; also dis couragement of unwise behavior in Abu Hamid al Ghazali, Ihya¯’ cUlum al Dı¯n, English translation of Book XVII with Introduction and Notes by Lionel Librande as Al Ghazali on Conduct in Travel: Kita¯b A¯da¯b al Safar. Book XVII of the Revival of the Religious Sciences (Great Shelford: Islamic Texts Society, 2016), 48. Compare Horden’s discussion of travel as regimen and therapeutic travel in the Classical world in Peregrine Horden, “Regimen and Travel in the Mediterranean,” in Mobility and Travel in the Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, edited by Renate Schlesier and Ulrike Zellmann (Münster: LIT, 2004), 117 32 (article largely repeated in “Travel Sickness: Medicine and Mobility in the Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Renaissance,” in Rethinking the Mediterranean, edited by William Vernon Harris [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005], 179 99). Although hawa¯’ij is also a well known term for mixtures of drugs (Ephraim Lev and ˙ A Practical Materia Medica of the Eastern Mediterranean according to the Cairo Zohar Amar, Genizah [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 571), as it occurs in the luggage list (Lines 15 16), the context suggests that here the term probably describes a mixed assortment of other “stuff.” See Appendix, English translation, n.27.

Fig. 8 Portable medicine chest. Dated to the later twelfth or first half of the thirteenth century and recovered in northern Afghanistan. Basket dimensions: height approx. 14 cm; diameter approx. 21 cm.

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something like the medicine basket from the eastern Iranian world now in the David Collection in Copenhagen (Fig. 8).15 This simple round basket, filled with nineteen glass vials and wooden or ivory boxes of medicinal powders and substances, is exactly the sort of portable medicine “chest” one might have hoped to find listed in the luggage. But the problem is perhaps less to do with Abraham’s packing and listing than with our own ontologies – the idea of “medicines” we are searching for. A lively and growing body of scholarly research is broadening definitions of what medicine was in the medieval Middle East, and by implication where we might expect to find it in the broader textual record and – why not? – in the archaeological record too. Particularly within the Hippocratic-Galenic system of humoral medicine inherited from the Classical world, drugs were only part of a much larger ecosystem that influenced well-being and what David Waines has elegantly termed “bodily equipoise.”16 The individual was under the permanent influence of six “non-natural” things: climate, season, air, water and food, sleep and exercise, not forgetting their very temperament. Drugs were therefore prescribed alongside lifestyle changes with all these factors in mind and according to the principle of opposing or contrary properties such as hot–cold, dry–wet, sweet–sour, to name but a few.17 As the pioneering work of David Waines in the field of medical-culinary interactions has shown, it is often impossible and indeed artificial to draw a line between medicine, dietetics and cuisine.18 Food played a major part in the 15

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18

Published in Kjeld Von Folsach, “What the Basket Contained: Some Datable Glass Bottles from the Eastern Islamic World,” in Fact and Artefacts: Art in the Islamic World. Festschrift for Jens Kröger, edited by Annette Hagedorn and Avinoam Shalem (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 3 11. Term used in David Waines, “Medicinal Nutriments as Home Remedies: A Case of Convergence between the Medieval Islamic Culinary and Medical Traditions,” Actas XVI Congreso UEAI 16 (1995), 552; see also Manuela Marín and David Waines, “The Balanced Way: Food for Pleasure and Health in Medieval Islam,” Manuscripts of ¯ fı¯ the Middle East 4 (1989), 123 32. Also the Introduction to cAli Ibn Ridwan, Risalah Daf c Maḍa¯rr al Abda¯n bi Arḍ Miṣr, Arabic edition by Adil S. Gamal and English transla tion by Michael W. Dols as Medieval Islamic Medicine: Ibn Riḍwa¯n’s Treatise “On the Prevention of Bodily Ills in Egypt” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). More recently see work by Paulina B. Lewicka, “Diet as Culture. On the Medical Context of Food Consumption in the Medieval Middle East,” History Compass 12, no. 7 (2014), 607 17. For a general introduction to the theoretical background see chapter 2 “Medical Theory” in the indispensable Peter E. Formann and Emilie Savage Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and entries on medical theory in many encyclopedias of medieval or Islamic medicine. Waines, “Medicinal Nutriments,” 551 8. Most recently see the important study of a thirteenth century dietetic text by Juliane Müller, Nahrungsmittel in der . arabischen Medizin: Das Kita¯b al Ag ḏiya wa l Ašriba des Na g˘¯ıb ad Dı¯n as Samarqandı¯ (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

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maintenance or re-establishment of “bodily equipoise” – little surprise then that many eminent physicians authored cookery books, or wrote on the prevention of harm in foods. Like the rabbinic purity system touched on in Chapter 5, humoral medicine offers an all-encompassing framework of action and meaning, its own material agency, and it might be similarly possible to write another Abraham’s Luggage focused on, and structured by, foodstuffs alone as understood dietetically in twelfth-century North Africa and Egypt, the places Abraham was born and trained.19 Unfortunately this body of texts is not yet thoroughly edited or translated and, as with the other possible readings of the luggage list touched on throughout this book, I leave this enterprise to the specialists, to my colleagues in the history of medicine and dietetics. Nevertheless, as a historian of material culture and of the Indian Ocean it seems to me to be both possible, and desirable, to contribute to this debate and to the data sets currently in play. In the field of Indian Ocean history, circulating foodstuffs and spice-condiments have tended to be interpreted first and foremost in their nutritional and cultural contexts, as “food” or “spices” with an assumed culinary use, while their medicinal function is largely passed over. Certainly commodity histories such as Sidney Mintz’s history of sugar and Sato Tsugitaka’s Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam have been more mindful of medicinal and dietetic angles.20 We now also have a first reading of cargo goods as medicinal substances, in the case of a thirteenth-century wreck from the Java Sea.21 Nevertheless, the principle is far from embedded among non-specialists. This chapter hopes to contribute to ongoing debates about the diffusion of humoral theory and the nature of practical medicine in the medieval Middle East; to do so it uses as its main 19

20

21

I am grateful to Monica Green and other L MEDMED members for suggesting texts produced in the Fatimid domains which might provide a more immediate context of analysis than Ibn Sina’s Qanun, among them Ishaq al Isra’ili’s Book on Dietetics (Ishaq ibn Sulayman al Isra’ili, Kita¯b al Aghdhiya, facsimile edition by F. Sezgin as Kita¯b al Aghdhiya/Book on Dietetics, 3 vols. [Frankfurt am Main: Institute for the History of Arabic Islamic Science, 1986]) and al Tamimi al Maqdisi’s treatise Ma¯ddat al Baqa¯’ bi Islah Fasa¯d al Hawa¯’ wa l Taharruz min Darar al Auba¯’, roughly translated Surviving Material about Treating Air Spoilage and Avoiding Harms of Epidemics (Arabic edition by Yahya Sh‘ar [Cairo: The Institute of Arabic Manuscripts, 1999]). This approach represents a substan tial undertaking and I was unfortunately not able to integrate this material here. See medicinal uses of sugar discussed in S.W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) and Sato Tsugitaka, Sugar in the Social Life of Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2015), chapter 5 “Sugar as Medicine.” See Amanda Respess and Lisa C. Niziolek, “Exchanges and Transformations in Gendered Medicine on the Maritime Silk Road: Evidence from the Thirteenth century Java Sea Wreck,” in Histories of Medicine and Healing in the Indian Ocean World: Medieval and Early Modern, edited by Anna Winterbottom and Facil Tesfaye (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), vol. 1, 63 97; also more numerous early modern studies in vol. 2.

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reference point Ibn Sina’s eleventh-century medical encyclopedia the Qanū n fı-l-Tibb, now available in a new revised Arabic edition and English translation from Jamia Hamdard in New Delhi. The discussion that follows works against the grain of much scholarship on the history of medicine which is organized, in large part, around scholars or schools, and their texts, if not around particular ailments. Longue durée studies of a particular simple or compound drug, or indeed medicinal food, are not the norm within the history of medicine and this approach is more often subsumed into larger commodity histories – for example of sugar, as just discussed. Here instead I attempt to follow a single medicinal foodstuff across multiple textual genres and the archaeological record, weaving, to some extent, a biography or commodity history. Fundamental to this method is a substantial, if diffuse and heterogeneous, body of literature aimed at mobile people in the form of preventive healthcare advice and pharmacological recommendations specific to travel. This literature has not, to the best of my knowledge, been comprehensively treated by scholars of Islamic medicine, although Peregrine Horden’s work on some of this material within the larger Mediterranean viaticum or “regimen of travel” genre has offered me an important starting point.22 In exceptional cases this literature takes the form of monographs focused on health advice for particular places or journeys, for example during travel to Mecca on the hajj,23 or for dwelling in Egypt.24 More frequently, however, this genre, such as it is, consists of shorter sections in larger medical encyclopedias on the health of travelers or various aspects of travel, and even in works of the “art of travel” genre associated with Arabic-language travel narratives.25 In early examples of the Abbasid period, such as al-Razi’s al-Hawı and alTabari’s Firdaws al-Hikma, travelers and soldiers are discussed together, as one group, while maritime travelers are mentioned sporadically as a special case.26 By the eleventh century and Ibn Sina’s Qanū n, soldiers have left the scene to make way for short sections on healthcare for travelers in different environments and climates, with sea travel now a special rubric – a sure measure, if it were needed, of the growing currency of this form of circulation.27 22 23

24 25 26

27

Horden, “Regimen and Travel.” Qusta Ibn Luqa, Risa¯la fı¯ Tadbı¯r Safar al Hajj, Arabic edition and English translation by Gerrit Bos as Medical Regime for the Pilgrims to Mecca: The Risala fi Tadbir Safar al Hajj (Leiden: Brill, 1992), authored for the Abbasid court by an Arab Melkite Christian. Ibn Ridwan, Risa¯lah, Arabic edn and Eng. trans. as Medieval Islamic Medicine. See Touati, Islam and Travel, 244 5 for a late fourteenth century manuscript. See Abi al Hasan ibn Sahl Rabban al Tabari’s Firdaws al Hikma fı¯ l Tibb, Arabic edition by M.Z. Siddiqi (Berlin, 1928), 109 11; and Abu Bakr Muhammad Ibn Zakariyya al Razi, Kita¯b al Ha¯wı¯ fı¯ l Tibb, Arabic edition (Hyderabad, 1952 74), vol. 18, I, 209 24. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edition, vol. 1, 316 17.

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I am not suggesting that Abraham was versed in texts of this genre, let alone that he carried such medical treatises to Malibarat. Rather, my working hypothesis is that portions of these written texts existed in a more dialogic relationship to the live travel practices of different social groups than is currently assumed. Where Peregrine Horden suggests in the Byzantine context that the regimen of travel literature needs to be understood within an “expansionist, ‘medicalising,’ context . . . the spatial aspect of a supply-led movement towards extreme specialisation in dietetics,”28 for me, the inter-relationships between these textual and material sources are evidence for the reverse process, a diffusion of specialist knowledge beyond the medical professions that eventually led to the reintegration of new information derived from travelers.29 I am aware that this opinion goes somewhat against the prevailing view that medical treatises represent a wholly theoretical medicine, entirely distinct from practical medical knowledge and that actual practice is best evidenced through surviving medical notebooks and “real” prescriptions.30 I would like to suggest that evidence for practical medicine also exists in material remains as well as in a variety of other textual genres, such as the luggage list, and that together these sources offer evidence of a widely circulating knowledge of how to stay well on the move.

Nausea and Vomiting Surprisingly, the maritime ailments uppermost in the minds of modern readers, nausea and vomiting – in effect “seasickness” – were not prevented or treated in the first instance. As Peregrine Horden has underlined, being sick, at least in the first few days, was considered a positive reaction, an empty stomach was “an advantage.”31 That said, in cases of excessive vomiting or if travelers wished to prevent it, Ibn Sina’s section on sea travel in his Qanū n fı-l-Tibb advises travelers to eat antiemetic fruits 28 29

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Horden, “Regimen and Travel,” 126. Nahyan Fancy informs me (personal communication, 6 September 2017) that he has identified examples in the thirteenth century Commentary on the Canon of Ibn al Nafis in which modifications are made to the regimen sections of medical encyclopedias or other treatises in response to information received from people who have traveled to, or are from, specific regions. See Christina Alvarez Millan, “Practice versus Theory: Tenth century Case Histories from the Islamic Middle East,” Social History of Medicine 13 (2000), 293 306; Efraim Lev and Amar Zohar, “Practice versus Theory: Medieval Materia Medica According to the Cairo Genizah,” Medical History 51 (2007), 507 26; and Ephraim Lev, “Mediators between Theoretical and Practical Medieval Knowledge: Medical Notebooks from the Cairo Genizah and Their Significance,” Medical History 57, no. 4 (2013), 487 515. Horden, “Regimen and Travel,” 125.

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such as quince, apples and pomegranates, while celery seeds or absinthe alleviated nausea.32 Other measures to prevent vomiting included taking such sour things (humū da¯t) as strengthen the cardiac orifice and prevent the ˙ ˙ towards the head. For example, lentils with vinegar, vapours from ascending sour grapes, a little mint, wild thyme and bread soaked in fragrant wine or in cold water in which thyme has been soaked. The inside surface of the nostrils should be smeared with white lead ointment.33

As Ibn Sina’s broad-ranging list of “sour things” shows, sourness was and remains closely related to, albeit not necessarily identical with, what we would now describe as “acid” qualities or “acidic” tastes. The modern English definition helpfully retains this ambiguity in its description of the adjective “sour” as designating something “having a tart or acid taste, such as that which is characteristic of unripe fruits and vinegar. Also said of taste. (Opposed to sweet, and distinguished from bitter.)”34 English translations of Islamic medical and dietetic texts sometimes use “sour” and “acid” interchangeably for Arabic hamid and related terms; this ˙ ˙ discussion retains “sour” while highlighting the complexity of this taste. In humoral theory, sour things were generally held to be cold and drying; vinegar at least is described as such and recommended for its ability to “tone up the stomach.”35 It may be this action therefore that recommended it, and other sour things, for “strengthen[ing] the cardiac orifice and prevent[ing] the vapours from ascending towards the head.” As Peregrine Horden has helped uncover, Ibn Sina’s regimen for maritime travel represents a very direct and even fossilized descendant of Greek medical texts. His remedies are directly modeled on the earlier work of al-Razi, who in turn cites the later fourth-century Synopses of Oribasius, probably via the seventh-century work of Paul of Aegina. While this lineage had been recognized previously, in “Regimen and Travel” Horden helpfully traces this textual transmission right back to the fourth century BCE and the works of Diocles of Carystus, for travel on foot, and Dieuches, for travel by sea.36 Such is the continuity that Ibn Sina’s text even retains traces of Greek discussions of the therapeutic benefits of sea travel, what Horden terms travel as regimen.37 Although 32

33 34 35 36 37

Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 1, 316. His recommenda tion of absinthe may go back to Classical precedents; for Pliny the Elder’s recommenda tion in his Natural History see John C. Rolfe, “Some References to Seasickness in the Greek and Latin Writers,” American Journal of Philology 25, no. 2 (1904), 196. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 1, 316 17. OED Online, “adj. sour,” 1a. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 2, 198. Horden, “Regimen and Travel,” 124 5 with further references. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 1, 267.

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Abraham’s luggage does list bread, vinegar, receptacles for water and a bottle of nabıdh, there is little here that tallies with the key medicinal foods – apples, quinces, pomegranates, lentils, sour grapes, mint, thyme – recommended in this textual tradition. Initially then the confrontation of medical text and historical document tends to confirm widely held suspicions that medical treatises are their own world, largely divorced from actual medical practice, let alone the practices of real travelers. Peregrine Horden has noted in this regard that the lack of travel cases in al-Razi’s Kitab al-Tajarib or Casebook “raises uncomfortable questions about the bearing of regimen on reality, and not just in the Islamic context.”38 Yet to focus on Ibn Sina’s sections on sea travel is to miss far more promising material included in the more generic advice on regimen and ways to maintain bodily equipoise across different climates, seasons and food cultures. In his advice to travelers to Egypt the physician Ibn Ridwan (d. 1068) pointed explicitly to the importance of food, noting that “if people become accustomed to specific foods and their bodies grow up with them, they fall ill when these foods are not available.”39 Abraham’s receipt of Mediterranean foodstuffs in Malibarat may be partially understood in this context, as a determined effort to maintain bodily equipoise in mobility, however impossible that ultimately proved. More than food, however, it was water that posed the greatest danger to the body’s balance, as Ibn Sina observed in his section on the “Protection of Travelers against the Injurious Effects of Various Waters”: “the traveler is more exposed to illness from the diversity of drinking water than of foods.”40 It is therefore to these sections on the management of water that I turn. Vinegar – A Thirst Quenching Drug A simple strategy in water provisioning, on land and at sea, was to minimize its consumption in the first place. The human body can adapt to functioning on lower levels of hydration for short time periods, although severe and prolonged dehydration compromises circulation, leading to clinical shock and eventually death.41 Ibn Sina’s regimen for travelers states clearly that they “should be prepared to face thirst”42 and even advises that travelers habituate their 38 39 40 41 42

Horden, “Regimen and Travel,” 127. Ibn Ridwan, Risa¯lah, Arabic ed. and Eng. trans. as Medieval Islamic Medicine, 116. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 1, 315. Claude A. Piantadosi, The Biology of Human Survival: Life and Death in Extreme Environments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 51 3. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 1, 311. For an earlier discussion of thirst and its treatment available in English translation and with plentiful

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bodies to this and other privations beforehand.43 Nevertheless, alongside this, since Classical times the regimen of travel genre had advocated various means for regulating thirst and limiting the body’s need for water. Ibn Sina’s regimen includes practical tips such as avoiding thirst-inducing foods such as fish, capers, salted foods and sweets, or minimizing talking, but he also recommends appropriate medications. Travelers should carry with them, he writes, “thirst-quenching drugs” (al-cadwiya al-musakkın li-l-catash), notably one remedy made of three dirham of purslane seed (bizr al-baqla al-hamqa’ or Portulaca oleracea) with vinegar.44 The question, of course, is whether medieval travelers actually carried such “thirst-quenching drugs” with them, either because physicians advised them to, or because this practice was an established travel knowledge long before it entered the medical literature. Abraham had received a quarter mikyal’s weight of bizr baql while in Malibarat, a term I suggest be understood as a colloquial abbreviation of bizr al-baqla al-hamqa’.45 His luggage also included five marınas of vinegar (Line 10). Although we do not know the capacity of a marına, the vessel type appears to have been in commercial use in the Red Sea area for the transportation of commodities such as lamp oil;46 a marına is thus likely to have been a substantial vessel for commercial transportation rather than a domestic container, suggesting in turn that Abraham transported vinegar in significant quantities. Abraham may have had access to the ingredients for such a drug even if we cannot definitively locate them together in his luggage. However, vinegar was also of itself a valuable simple drug and in the same section on regimen of travel Ibn Sina recommends vinegar’s use as a thirst quencher: “when water is not abundant, it should be taken with vinegar because in this way even a little water allays thirst.”47 In the later section on travel and water he elaborates further that “when water is in a little quantity, it should be taken with vinegar, especially in summer, because then more water is not needed.”48 We now understand the physiology behind Ibn Sina’s

43 45

46 47

notes and cross references see Qusta Ibn Luqa, Risa¯la, Arabic edn and Eng. trans. as Qusta Ibn Luqa’s Medical Regime, chapter 10. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 1, 310. 44 Ibid. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 346, Line 12 (IB II, 21 4). One may speculate that it was the chewing action (another well attested trigger) which stimulated salivation as much as any property of the seed itself. See longer discussion in Appendix, English translation, n.21. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 1, 311. 48 Ibid., 315.

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recommendation: sour substances stimulate salivation, moistening the mouth and so relieving feelings of thirst and reducing water consumption.49 Vinegar was, of course, widely used in cooking and for food preservation and, had the five marınas of vinegar been located in Abraham’s home, this more mundane, non-medical use would have been the most likely. However, in the context of a list of luggage assembled for maritime travel, during which fruits, vegetables and fish were typically transported ready-preserved, Abraham’s packing of five marınas of vinegar is, I propose, hard to explain unless it is as part of a strategy to manage precious water supplies. Given the scarcity of grape wines in South Asia this is very unlikely to have been a wine vinegar, but one of vinegar’s great advantages is that it can be produced from a huge variety of starter ingredients, including rice or coconut, making it an easily accessible simple drug and medicinal food.50 Strangely, Ibn Sina’s own entry on vinegar in his pharmacopoeia does not advocate vinegar’s use to treat thirst; furthermore, vinegar’s fundamental properties as understood within humoral theory, namely that it is dominantly cold and dry, or desiccating, seem entirely contrary to this usage.51 As Amar and Lev helpfully sum up: vinegar was “an important component in medications,” its principal uses being “in a preparation for treating attacks by poisonous creatures, in cathartic medicines, and for haemorrhoids.”52 A mixture of vinegar and honey known by the Persian term sakanjabın, and descended from the Classical oxymel, was also widely prescribed in the twelfth century by Maimonides and his contemporaries,53 and had been the subject of an earlier standalone treatise by Ibn Sina.54 Oxykraton, a mixture of vinegar and water, likewise had a long history within the Classical medical tradition but not, it seems, as a thirst-quencher.55 This element of Ibn Sina’s text in fact appears to have a very different genealogy, 49

50 51 52 54 55

Widely studied and acknowledged, but see, for example, S. Watanabe and C. Dawes, “The Effects of Different Foods and Concentrations of Citric Acid on the Flow Rate of Whole Saliva in Man,” Archives of Oral Biology 33 (1988), 1 5. See lists of starters in Laura Solieri and Paolo Giudici (eds.), Vinegars of the World (Milan: Springer Verlag Italia, 2009), 2 5. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 2, 197 8. Lev and Amar, Practical Materia Medica, 179. 53 Ibid. See M. Marin and D. Waines, “Ibn Sina on Sakanjabin,” Bulletin d’Études Orientales 47 (1995), 82 97; by this period the term described a variety of sweet and sour mixes. For a longue durée history of vinegar, largely western, though not Islamic, see Hubert A. Conner and Rudolph J. Allgeier, “Vinegar: Its History and Development,” in Advances in Applied Microbiology, vol. 20, edited by D. Perlman (New York: Academic Press, 1976), 81 133.

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one substantially interwoven with military knowledge, and one that only entered the Arabic medical corpus in the Abbasid period. As such it offers evidence for the permeability of the Arabic medical corpus to other textual traditions and, I would argue, live practices. Vinegar’s presence here in Abraham’s luggage should not come as a surprise. Vinegar has a well-attested and lengthy history of usage as a thirst quencher in the Roman and Byzantine armies and among the general populus, although it is not emphasized as such in the Classical medical tradition as it is textually preserved. According to Plutarch, during the Second Punic War in the third century BCE, Cato the Elder drank water but “in a raging thirst, he would call for vinegar.”56 Whatever the truth of this assertion, posca – water mixed with vinegar (acetum in the Latin) and sometimes various herbs – played a major part in Roman military rations.57 Posca was also part of the popular diet, and Suetonius mentions that this was a drink sold on the streets.58 This popular consumption apparently continued in the eastern Mediterranean into the Byzantine period, since during his visit to Constantinople in the tenth century Liutprand of Cremona noted that vinegar diluted with water was widely consumed there in the summer for refreshment.59 There is also good evidence for the use of vinegar by Arab armies during the first conquests, likely for the purpose of quenching thirst. In his retrospective account of the 712 campaign in Sind, written in the ninth century, al-Baladhuri recounts how the governor al-Hajjaj provisioned the expeditionary army which traveled overland from Shiraz to Makran and then Sind. Notably, he had: prepared clean cotton and soaked it in vinegar made of sour wine and then hung it up in the shade to dry. He said, “When ye get to as Sind, vinegar is scarce there, so put this cotton in water; then heat it up, and season with it.” Other authorities say that Muhammad [ibn Qasim], when he got to the 56

57

58 59

Plutarch, Cato the Elder, 1.10 cited in the broader discussion of Jonathan Roth, The Logistics of the Roman Army at War: 264 B.C. A.D. 235 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 37 9. Vegetius, De Re Militari (Concerning Military Affairs), 3.3, written in the fifth century; also Celsus, On Medicine, 2.27. For Classical and other references see Conner and Allgeier, “Vinegar.” On Roman military provisioning see Carol A. Déry, “Food and the Roman Army: Travel, Transport, and Transmission (with Particular Reference to the Province of Britannia),” in Food on the Move: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, 1996, edited by Harlan Walker (Totnes: Prospect Books, 1997), 84 96. Suetonius, Vitellius, 12.1. Cited in Gilbert Dagron, “The Urban Economy, Seventh Twelfth Centuries,” in The Economic History of Byzantium: From the Seventh through Fifteenth Century, edited by Angeliki E. Laiou (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2002), vol. 2, 448, n.320 giving specialist references.

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frontier, wrote to al Hajjaj, complaining of the scarcity of vinegar with them, and he sent him the cotton dipped in vinegar.60

Whether or not cotton was actually able to capture the essential acidity of wine vinegar, this anecdote suggests that it was believed to do so and this technology would have significantly lightened provision trains during military campaigns. A similar strategy seems to underlie the recommendation in the sea travel genre that lentils be cooked in vinegar and then dried for later consumption. Vinegar’s continued importance in military provisioning in the Islamic armies is confirmed by an anecdote from the opposite end of the newly expanding Arab polity: in Murcia, and only a year later, in 713, measures of vinegar feature alongside wheat in the yearly tribute that was to be paid to the area’s Arab commander.61 These historical attestations chime with al-Tabari’s later advice to soldiers in the regimen for travel section of his Firdaws al-Hikma: in the summer soldiers should drink water mixed with vinegar or wine (khamr), in this context we assume because of vinegar’s ability to limit consumption.62 Vinegar’s appearance in alTabari’s advice to soldiers from the ninth century cannot be accidental and suggests at least one route through which this popular Mediterranean practice spread more widely, if it had not done so already. The surprise perhaps is that vinegar has received so little attention. Although it is ubiquitous in recipe books and medical texts, and present too in the histories of alchemy, where acetic acid was an important chemical, and military technology, where vinegar was used to extinguish Greek fire,63 it is the subject of comparatively few dedicated surveys.64 The comparative scholarly neglect of vinegar in no way reflects earlier attitudes, and it seems clear that in packing vinegar Abraham followed centuries of common travel practice.

Vinegar for Putrid Waters Vinegar’s beneficial properties did not stop here. Its thirst quenching properties were closely allied with its ability to treat impotable water, 60

61 62 63 64

Cited in Abu al cAbbas Ahmad ibn Jabir al Baladhuri, Kita¯b Futuh al Bulda¯n, English translation by Philip K. Hitti and Francis Clark Murgotten as The Origins of the Islamic State (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1916 24), vol. 2, 216 17. Cited in Olivia Rennie Constable (ed.), Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1997), 37 8. al Tabari, Firdaws, 110. For example, A. Roland, “Secrecy, Technology, and War: Greek Fire and the Defense of Byzantium, 678 1204,” Technology and Culture 33, no. 4 (1992), 655 79. See Conner and Allegier, “Vinegar,” and chapter 2 in Solieri and Guidici (eds.), Vinegars of the World. It is telling that Lev and Amar, Practical Materia Medica include vinegar under the entry for “Grape vine” and not as a separate simple drug as it appears in pharmacopoeias.

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and in Arabic medical texts it features amongst a number of technologies and additives prescribed for the “correction” of water of different qualities. Water treatment is a complex area of medical knowledge in itself, encompassing a vast array of filtering, boiling and distilling technologies involving textiles, clays and other additives. As Gerrit Bos has indicated, water treatment takes up “a central place” in the regimen sections of Ibn Sina’s Qanū n as well as al-Razi’s earlier work, and surely merits a study all of its own.65 Vinegar’s use as a single agent for water treatment is mentioned passingly by Ibn Sina after a lengthy section describing more complex technologies; as if by way of afterthought he adds that “(it is worth remembering that) water can also be corrected by adding a little vinegar to it.”66 This is again not a use for vinegar mentioned in Ibn Sina’s own pharmacopoeia. However, since putrefaction was understood in humoral theory as a hot and moist state, in this instance one can understand that vinegar’s coldness and dryness would have been seen to rebalance or “correct” impotable water. Modern medical studies are re-examining the bactericidal properties of acetic acid, the key ingredient in vinegar, and confirm its effectiveness against a wide spectrum of bacteria.67 As with vinegar’s thirst-quenching properties, its use as a single agent for water treatment appears to derive less from the Classical medical tradition as textually preserved than from military practice. Again, it is in texts on military strategy and accounts of military campaigns that vinegar’s action is discussed most clearly. Thus the Byzantine military manual the Strategikon, composed by Emperor Maurice in the late sixth century, advises that “it helps to pour some vinegar into water which has started to turn bad.”68 Al-Tabari also advises soldiers to drink well-water mixed with vinegar (mamzawja bi-l-khall); well-water was considered particularly prone to putrefaction and in this context the advice appears to be directed at correcting impotable water.69 As with the management of thirst, vinegar offered an easily available agent for the treatment of putrid water, far simpler to obtain and employ than the complex drugs advised elsewhere in medical texts and which were tailored to specific types of water. Ibn Sina, for example, advises that “salty water should be taken with vinegar or oxymel (sakanjabın)”70 and 65 66 67 68

69 70

See Qusta Ibn Luqa, Risa¯la, Arabic edn and Eng. trans. as Qusta Ibn Luqa’s Medical Regime, 10. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 1, 283. For example, H. Ryssel et al., “The Antimicrobial Effect of Acetic Acid An Alternative to Common Local Antiseptics?” Burns 35, no. 5 (2009), 695 700. Maurikios, Strategikon, English translation by George T. Dennis as Maurice’s Strategikon: Handbook of Byzantine Military Strategy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 111. al Tabari, Firdaws, 110. Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 1, 315.

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with carob, myrtle and azarole added; or again, “and among the things which remove the impurities of different waters is onion because it is antidote for this purpose, especially when it is used with vinegar.”71 Garlic and lettuce had the same properties. Beyond urban centers, most travelers probably would not have had easy access to carob, azarole or myrtle; even garlic, it would appear, was difficult to obtain in coastal Malibarat since it was avoided as a food in both Jainism and Hinduism,72 but common vinegar was widely manufactured and, in extremis, easy to make oneself. Vinegar’s role in technologies of water treatment and regimens of travel during maritime voyaging deserves to be recognized. Contaminated water causes vomiting and diarrhoea, symptoms not only difficult to manage in the cramped conditions of a ship, but also likely to dehydrate the sufferer extremely rapidly. This cycle of dehydration and rehydration with further impotable water could easily be fatal. Abraham carried vinegar in significant quantities, it would have quenched his thirst more effectively when added to his water and treated any impotable water in the process. Abraham’s Humū da and Other Sour Foods ˙ ˙ A second foodstuff in Abraham’s luggage may perhaps best be understood within an overtly medicinal context and within the category of broadly available medicinal foods. Abraham carried four ratliya jars ˙ “filled with oil and humū da” (Lines 18–19). Friedman was unable to ˙ ˙ identify the noun humū da satisfactorily in Arabic dictionaries, although ˙ ˙ the adjective hummū da, “sour, acid,” is well known,73 and he suggested ˙ ˙ the translation “sour juice” on the basis of the trilitteral root – H-M-D – ˙ ˙ which clearly relates to culinary terms such as humad “pulp of citrus ˙ ˙ 74 fruits” or hummadiyyat “citron pulp stews.” One possibility is that it ˙ ˙ be read as an overtly medical term, the single form of the plural humū dat, ˙ chapter a term found in medical and dietetic texts and already cited in this from Ibn Sina’s work. Sour things (humū dat) were prescribed ˙ ˙ for the nausea of seasickness; elsewhere, in the section on the “Conditions of Water,” Ibn Sina writes that “if one is forced to take rain 71 72

73 74

Ibid., vol. 1, 316. K.T. Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 23. For a delivery of imported garlic to an India trader on the Indian coast see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 651, Line 7 (IB III, 21). See discussion in Appendix, English translation, n.33. al Muzaffar ibn Nasr Ibn Sayyar al Warraq, Kita¯b al Tabı¯kh, English translation, intro duction and commentary by Nawal Nasrallah as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayyar al Warraq’s Tenth century Baghdadi Cookbook (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 629, 278 82.

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water which is susceptible to putrefaction, some sour things (humū dat) ˙ ˙ should be taken to prevent its harmful effects.”75 In other words, sour foods consumed with putrid rainwater counterbalanced its effects. Finally, Ibn Sina notes that “it is also a good regimen to carry a sour rob [al-rubbū b alhamida] with oneself and mix it with various waters.”76 The term rubb ˙ ˙ describes a concentrated, cooked juice; with sugar added, for sweetness and preservation, a rubb became a sharab or syrup. Given these examples, perhaps we can revise the translation of this item in the luggage list to read four “pint jars filled with oil and a sour thing.” Although the term is rarely found in the singular, as humū da, this translation offers not only the closest ˙ it firmly within a medico-dietetic lexicon, form of the term but, in ˙locating it points more clearly to its final context of use. As with vinegar, the terms humū dat and al-rubbū b al-hamida designate ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ generic categories of substance – “sour things” or “sour foods” and sour rubbs, precise foodstuff or ingredients unspecified – designed to be more easily available than specialized simple drugs. Abraham’s correspondence bears testimony to the problems he sometimes faced obtaining specialist drugs or substances such as ladanum or arsenic,77 and these more generic categories seem tailored to those traveling, as Ibn Jazzar put it, “to far away rural places where scarcely a physician can be found.”78 Paulina Lewicka notes that “the therapeutic values of sour fruits, particularly quince, lemon, and citron, were . . . broadly recognized”79 and has been able to correlate spikes in the price of various sour fruits with epidemics in Mamluk Egypt. Even before this, however, it is worth noting that Ibn Ridwan concludes a long discussion of the particular foods and substances to be consumed in the “hot air” of Egyptian summers with the more generic advice that one should “cook [with] sour and acidic foods” (utbukh al-humadiyat wa-l-mukhallalat) ˙ ˙ ˙ such as juices of sour and unripe grapes, and also lemons, pomegranates 80 and tamarinds. Abraham’s correspondence leaves no clue as to which sour foodstuff was involved here but Goitein and Friedman’s intuition that this was some form of fresh food, a juice, may be correct. For mixing with water or against nausea, Abraham’s humū da would have found ˙ ˙ multiple uses at sea. 75 76 77 78 79 80

Ibn Sina, Qanun, Eng. trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 1, 163. Ibid., vol. 1, 316. Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 620, Lines 41 2 (IB III, 12); 626, Lines 50 1 (IB III, 15). Cited in Hamarneh, “Medicine and Pharmacy under the Fatimids.” Lewicka, “Diet as Culture,” 611, although she is reticent to state whether this belief comes from local folk wisdom or Greco Arabic medicine, or both. Ibn Ridwan, Risa¯lah, Eng. trans. as Medieval Islamic Medicine, 27, my revised translation of Dols’s “cook the acidic and the sour” (133).

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Here again the currency of the practice is evidenced by a heterogeneous range of sources. The clearest, though latest, comes from the seventeenth-century Anıs al-Hujjaj in which the Indian pilgrim Mulla Safi alDin advised travelers from western India that, if they did have to depend on drinking water from the ship’s tank (fintas) during the crossing to ˙ Jedda, “it could be made palatable by the addition of sour juice of some 81 fruits, or syrup of pomegranate.” Safi al-Din’s advice likely follows wellestablished practices and one is reminded of the four pint-jars of syrup (artal jullab)82 with which Ibn Battuta provisioned for his journey from ˙ coastal south China to the eastern ports, items which he noted were “among the things prepared for the sea.”83 In fact, some of the oldest evidence for the use of “sour concentrates” in the Indian Ocean area dates back to the early India trade of the Roman period. Of the many ostraka excavated at the Red Sea port of Berenike, one records the arrival of “5 monthly provisions of epim. kib.”84 Editing this text Roger Bagnall suggested that this provision be identified as epimenia kibyratika, provisions of Kibyratic quince-water, “a compound of water and quinceflavored honey in which Kibyra specialized,” and which was subsequently much favored by Byzantine physicians.85 For Bagnall the only weakness of this identification was the fact that “it is not immediately evident why anyone would need monthly rations of this substance,” leading him to suggest its use against scurvy.86 If later practice is any indication, as a sour preparation, this was certainly not the main perceived benefit of quince water. There is good evidence to suggest that by the medieval period citruses played an important role as “sour foods” in Indian Ocean provisioning. The abandonment of Roman infrastructure across Egypt’s Eastern Desert had exacerbated problems of water provisioning and water quality at the Red Sea ports, and at Qusayr there is compelling archaeological evidence, in the form of halved and juiced 81

82 83

84

85

Cited in A. Jan Qaisar, “From Port to Port: Life on Indian Ships in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in India and the Indian Ocean 1500 1800, edited by A. Das Gupta and M.N. Pearson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 337. The text has unfortunately not been fully edited and translated and I am not able to cite these terms in the original Persian. Originally rosewater syrup, from the Persian gul (rose) and a¯b (water), it came to designate any flavored syrup. Abu cAbdallah Muhammad Ibn Battuta, Rihla, Arabic edition and French translation by Charles Defrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti as Voyages d’Ibn Battûta (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1969), vol. 4, 252 3. R. Bagnall, Christina Helms and Arthur M.F.W. Verhoogt, Documents from Berenike. I. Greek Ostraka from the 1996 1998 Seasons (Brussels: Fondation Égyptologique Reine Élisabeth, 2000), 38, No. 4, Line 3. Notably Alexander of Tralles and Paul of Aegina; see ibid., 22. 86 Ibid.

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limes found in the Islamic layers of the site, that lime juice was consumed on site either fresh or perhaps cooked.87 Citruses offer some of the highest acidity of any fruit, making them very effective anti-bacterial agents.88 It is but a short step to suggest that citrus rubbs or fresh fruits might also have been loaded as provisions, for exactly this purpose. The presence of citruses at Qusayr cannot but evoke the waterskins of lım and lımū n carried by India traders in the previous century – Abraham himself packed “two waterskins of citrus (lımū n)” (Line 23) – and although it seems most probable that these refer to salted or otherwise preserved citruses, it is not impossible that India traders sometimes included fresh citruses for juicing in their provisions. Larger species with thick rinds, such as the pomelo, reportedly travel exceptionally well and grow easily on salty coastal soils. Fresh, ready-pressed juice would have been more practical to transport than whole citruses and one piece of much later evidence may support this inference, at the same time helping to explain why Abraham listed bottles of “oil and humū da,” a combination otherwise found nowhere else in the ˙ ˙ literature. At least in the early seventeenth century we have records from the Indian Ocean context of the British physician Sir Hugh Platt preserving the “efficacy” of squeezed and filtered citrus juice by storing it in small bottles, never larger than a pint, with olive oil used to seal the neck before corking.89 There is no evidence of a direct transmission of knowledge here; British captains and physicians appear to have learned of the efficacy of lemons and oranges from Spanish practices in Spain and South America, gradually transmitting and testing this knowledge over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nevertheless, the match in foodstuff, sealing method and even bottle size – a ratliya bottle contained, as its name ˙ suggests, broadly a ratl of liquid or approximately one pint – is remarkable. ˙ Sour Things Whatever their form and final use it is clear that sour things, humū dat, ˙ ˙ played a key role in maintaining balanced bodies at sea. Whether as 87

88

89

Marijke van der Veen, Consumption, Trade and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains from the Roman and Islamic Ports at Quseir al Qadim, Egypt (Frankfurt am Main: Africa Magna Verlag, 2011), 186. It is not impossible that, as Van der Veen suggests, some of the Qusayr limes originated in India (89). Modern lemons and limes are the most acidic of all fruit juices; see Kristina L. Penniston et al., “Quantitative Assessment of Citric Acid in Lemon Juice, Lime Juice, and Commercially Available Fruit Juice Products,” Journal of Endourology 22, no. 3 (2008), 567 70. Described in Jeremy Hugh Baron, “Sailors’ Scurvy before and after James Lind a Reassessment,” Nutrition Reviews 67, no. 6 (2009), 316 and 320, n.31.

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vinegar, fresh citrus juice or more refined rubbs and syrups, sour foods were thirst-quenching medications, treatments for bad water and antiemetics. Thus, while citruses and other acidic concentrates later became key to preventing scurvy, and Indian Ocean provisioning practices played a key role in highlighting that efficacy, it is unlikely that fresh citruses and sour fruit concentrates and syrups were transported to this end in the medieval period. Only after 1500s and the advent of truly global, longdistance voyaging did scurvy become a widespread and persistent problem.90 The scurvy-preventing powers of sour things were, in this sense, accidental. Abraham’s list of provisions contributes to these wider discussions in an area where material evidence for shipboard consumption is unlikely ever to emerge, but also encourages a sustained and medicinally minded analysis of the many food items we know to have transited via the Red Sea ports since the Roman period. Abraham’s luggage list and his wider correspondence have not exhausted medicinal angles of analysis yet and I wonder too whether a medicinal usage or role in water treatment might explain the fatiya chest of dadhı included in Line 8 of the list. As Nawal Nasrallah’s extensive discursus on the term has shown, the word described a wide variety of botanical substances. In the western Indian Ocean area the term has been interpreted by some as describing St. John’s Wort (hypericum);91 Goitein and Friedman on the other hand simply translate “lichen” without further explanation.92 Worldwide, lichen is often consumed as a famine food but why would it find a place in this well-stocked luggage? On the other hand, if this dadhı was hypericum, it is unclear, from Ibn Sina’s pharmacopoeia at least, how this drug would have been useful on a sea journey, and in such apparent volumes.93 In my revised translation I have not attempted to translate the term; it remains “one fatiya chest of dadhı.” Dadhı’s resistance to translation, and even more to explanation, seems a fitting place to leave the luggage list. This terse, teasing document has yielded more than I thought possible when I set out to write a “quick” article about it in the summer of 2011. It seems only right that the list should have the last word.

90 91 92 93

See now Jonathan Lamb, Scurvy: The Disease of Discovery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les Sultans Rasulides du Yémen (626 858/1229 1454) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010); see index p. 849. See Appendix, English translation, n.15. See Ibn Sina, Qanun, English trans. from the critical Arabic edn, vol. 2, 203.

9

From Malibarat to Misr and Beyond – Afterlives

From Malibarat to Misr1 After his return west, Abraham gradually fades from the India Book documents as correspondence from his brother Joseph in Sicily and the next generation of the Ben Yiju family comes to the fore. We do not know the underlying causes of this patterning, but it is difficult not to feel that India had been for Abraham a career high, a period of relative stability and prosperity that was never quite recovered. Of the many possible new homes Abraham had contemplated in the letter he wrote to his siblings from Aden in the September of 1149,2 in the event it was in the Yemen that he stayed, and continued to do business, at least until 1152. As Goitein and Friedman’s biography traces, surviving documents record a dispute with a trade partner, as well as customs dues paid at Aydhab.3 At least some of Abraham’s time appears to have been spent in the Yemeni interior at Dhu Jibla, the Sulayhid capital,4 and documents allude to him renting a house there. But as ever, controversy was not far behind. With no replies to the letter he had written after disembarking in Aden, and following the premature death there of his only surviving son Surur, Abraham engaged his last surviving child, Sitt al-Dar, to Madmun’s nephew, Khalaf b. Bundar, in whose family home she went to live. This strategy assured his daughter’s future in the case of Abraham’s death but it was not ideal as it meant that his wealth, while safe from seizure by Indian authorities should he have died in India,5 would now be passed on 1

2 3 5

For the full biography of Abraham’s final years see S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 69 83 in addition to the numerous commentaries and footnotes to the documents relating to this period. Ibid., 683, Lines 18 19 (IB III, 29). Ibid., 714 15 (IB III, 37) and 722 (IB III, 40a). 4 Ibid., 707 8 (IB III, 33). The problem is referred to directly in a letter from Madmun, ibid., 71, 362 3, Lines 20 2 and 1 (IB II, 28 9) but is a recurring issue in other sources on India and would merit further investigation.

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outside the family. In 1152 Abraham broke the engagement by suddenly leaving the Yemen for Egypt with his daughter and chattels. In September 1152 he wrote again to his brother Joseph in Sicily suggesting an alliance with the latter’s son Perahya, who subsequently made his way to Egypt.6 Although Abraham’s wealth was now assured to remain in the Ben Yiju family, his future son-in-law turned out not to be the budding businessman Abraham had hoped and, as Goitein and Friedman put it, “the Ben Yiju family’s involvement in international commerce was over.”7 Once in Fustat, Abraham Ben Yiju slips further from the sources, increasingly a passing mention in others’ correspondence rather than the center of his own exchanges. Abraham’s last surviving letter is the one written to his brother Joseph in September 1152, justifying the broken engagement and sudden departure from the Yemen, and planning the new alliance between Sitt al-Dar and her cousin.8 Yet Abraham’s changed circumstances are fresh and raw as he writes of huge financial losses totaling 1,640 dinars incurred in the Yemen and en route to Fustat. Thereafter he features in a complaint sent by Perahya, likely in early 1156, to the head of the Jewish community in Egypt about the way his future father-in-law was treating him9 and it can be no accident that it was only in August 1156, after Abraham’s death, that Sitt al-Dar finally married her cousin. The date and manner of Abraham’s death are not recorded, his passing left to be quietly inferred from the blessings to his memory included in his daughter’s marriage agreement.10 No other luggage lists survive to chart this journey but it is all too fitting that it should be another two pieces of documentary ephemera that best capture Abraham’s last years in Fustat. An undated sheet scrawled with notes and jottings fleshes out business and domestic matters: valuables deposited with Abu-l-Fakhr al-Amshati, a powerful family that was to support the Ben Yijus after Abraham’s death.11 More mundane matters too: household expenses for bread and oil and, tellingly, for three pairs of shoes for Bomma.12 Wherever Abraham’s factor lived, possibly with the family in Fustat, it would seem that the two were at the very least still in contact, another subtle return flow of India into the Middle East alongside Abraham’s half-Indian daughter. The second document is a small daftar notebook containing a calendar of sorts, a record in Abraham’s hand of the monthly expenses for lighting a family synagogue 6 7 10 12

Ibid., 80 3; see especially 719 21 (IB III, 39) on the departure from Yemen, and 727 34 (IB III, 41) on the engagement. 8 9 Ibid., 82. Ibid., 727 34 (IB III, 41). Ibid., 770 2 (IB III, 50). Ibid., 781, Line 2 (IB III, 54). 11 Discussed ibid., 95 101. Ibid., 735, n.2 (IB III, 42).

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over the period between September 1153 and September 1156, together with the names of those who had undertaken to cover the monthly expense. Among them we find Abraham’s brother-in-law Abu cAli, another hint, suggest Goitein and Friedman, that a number of Indian dependents from Abraham’s as yet poorly understood Indian extended family had apparently accompanied him back to Egypt.13 Sitt al-Dar and Perahya eventually moved to al-Mahalla in the Nile Delta where the latter served as a dayyan or judge and built a solid reputation as a scholar and man of letters, though never a businessman. Abraham’s papers likely passed into the care of his surviving daughter since they are complemented by a significant number of letters relating to her father-in-law Joseph and subsequent correspondence between Perahya and others that continue the family’s history, albeit patchily, into the later twelfth century. At an unspecified time thereafter this collection of papers, including the luggage list that interests us here, was deposited in the genizah in Fustat. There the list stayed until the later nineteenth century when it made its way to Cambridge University Library and its eventual cataloguing as T-S NS 324.114.

*************************** And Beyond – The Afterlives of Abraham Ben Yiju Abraham’s soft eclipse from the India Book is markedly at odds with the strong presence that emerges from his own documents. Unafraid of confrontation, focused on worldly success and outward show, Abraham Ben Yiju was not, one senses, a man who would have gone quietly. And in many ways he has not. Abraham’s extraordinary story – extraordinary more for the fact that it has reached us with such sharp resolution than for any innate exceptionality – certainly captured Goitein’s imagination, and he included three documents of Abraham’s in the 1973 collection Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders.14 After Goitein, it is particularly through Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land that Abraham has lived on amongst a broader general public as well as among students of literature and history. Abraham’s “afterlife,” as I term it, has been remarkably rich for a genizah figure lacking the intellectual stature of a Moses Maimonides or the political significance of other figures more commonly held to 13

14

Ibid., 639, n.17 and 774, n.3. Goitein expressed doubts at various points about the existence of this wider Indian family; Friedman by contrast suggests that a private synagogue was permitted in Fustat and may also have offered a measure of privacy for this Indian Jewish extended family. S.D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), Letters 38 (IB III, 10), 39 (IB III, 1) and 41 (IB III, 29).

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represent the Jewish community of the period. In an increasingly transnational world, with India an ever more visible economic and cultural presence, there seems to be something about Abraham’s story that captures the imagination. In 2008 historian Stewart Gordon gave Abraham a place alongside figures such as the Mughal emperor Babur and Ibn Battuta in an introduction to Asian world history; and in 2013 he joined the elevated company of Maimonides and the community leader Solomon Ben Judah as one of “Three Lives” examined in the BBC Radio Three series Life in Fragments: Stories from the Cairo Genizah.15 Scholarship is always positioned, performative and interventionist, and Abraham’s Luggage itself participates in and mediates this afterlife, extending Abraham’s biography through the study of his material world and, in the process, keeping him alive. Before I move on to consider how this study might contribute to “large” micro-histories, I want first to return to the materiality and ongoing biography of T-S NS 324.114, the piece of paper at the heart of this book. Historical scholarship typically consigns the materiality of primary sources to the background: it is a starting point for the scholar but rarely prominent in the final scholarly product, and genizah studies are no exception. There are many reasons for this erasure, not least the added cost of printing and binding color photographic reproductions as well as, in this case, the easy availability of photographic reproductions in digital media, notably through the Friedberg Genizah Project website. But as my opening analysis of the luggage list demonstrated, the texts of the documentary genizah cannot be dissociated from what Brenda Danet calls “the physical stuff of texts – the surfaces on which they are inscribed, the materials used to do the inscribing and the aesthetic aspects of their creation and manipulation.”16 Consideration of these aspects reveals new data about the document’s creation, as well as impacting on the understanding of its subsequent social reception and agency. As much as the contents of the two texts on T-S NS 324.114 – Joseph’s memorandum and Abraham’s list – it is their physical relationship and their different handwriting which clarify the sequence of their composition. Handwriting alone enabled Goitein to identify Abraham as the writer of the luggage list. Analysis of the Middle Eastern paper on which these two 15

16

Stewart Gordon, When Asia Was the World (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2008), 75 95; Daniel Davies, “Three Lives,” produced by Michele Banal and Miranda Hinkley, 14 mins. First broadcast on 30 May 2013. Brenda Danet, “Books, Letters, Documents: The Changing Aesthetics of Texts in Late Print Culture,” Journal of Material Culture 2, no. 1 (1997), 5 6; see also the excellent reflection on the potential of the “physical stuff” of texts for what she terms “visualized histories” in Elizabeth Edwards, “Entangled Documents: Visualized Histories,” in Susan Meiselas: In History, edited by Kristen Lubben (Göttingen: Steidl, 2008), 330 41.

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texts are written and the inks used, should it be undertaken, would contribute further to our understanding of their creation. Yet it is surely no accident that when T-S NS 324.114 was finally catalogued and mounted in Cambridge it was oriented to give primacy to Joseph b. Abraham’s memorandum, a known documentary type whose layout controls the page, tangibly consigning the luggage list to a secondary position. “Simple” decisions such as these need to be made – I am not questioning this – but it is clear that they have often unintended consequences on the subsequent reception and agency of the documents catalogued. Multi-directional, multi-phase documents like T-S NS 324.114 resist cataloguing and fit awkwardly within established directional categories; what constituted the recto, verso, top and bottom of this piece of paper changed over time. The documents from the Cairo Genizah also respond to material analysis far beyond these standard, codicologically informed, categories. The writing, circulation and reception of these documents already evidence complex recursive relationships between persons and the material things that are documents. As I have suggested, writing – “properly” on imported Middle Eastern paper and with “proper” ink – was fundamental to Abraham in embodying his Middle Eastern self to his business correspondents, and likely to his own self-definition too. But documents such as the luggage list also continue to extend the biological or physical person of their human maker into the present; Abraham’s afterlife has not stopped.17 The same materiality that in the twelfth century enabled documents to “make present” the absent merchant through the person of his business associate make Abraham present, albeit in different ways, to contemporary researchers and non-specialists, myself included. Figures 1 and 2 in Chapter 1 allow those unable to meet Abraham “in the flesh” to nevertheless follow the somersaulting lines and directional changes of the original luggage list. Read this way it is difficult not to grasp how a simple piece of paper can embody a long dead merchant, how Abraham has an afterlife through this object, even as a reproduction, and thus why the materiality of documents matters so much. T-S NS 324.114 can, of course, be consulted directly in Cambridge University Library;18 however, photographic reproductions (analogue 17 18

Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122. Between 7 June and 9 October 2017 T S NS 324.114 even shed its Melinex shroud to go on display at the Musée des Civilizations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée in Marseilles, see Elizabeth Lambourn, “Les documents de la Geniza du Caire,” in Aventuriers des mers: VIIe VIIIe siècle de Sindbad à Marco Polo. Méditerranée Océan Indien, edited by Nala Aloudat, Agnés Carayon and Vincent Giovannoni (Vanves: Éditions Hazan, 2016), 192 3.

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and now digital) play an ever more important part in mediating Abraham to contemporary audiences. As Alfred Gell underlined, “images of something (a prototype) are parts of that thing”;19 and their potential for ever more rapid and infinite circulation or manipulation amplifies the complexity of object biographies, and through that the afterlives of the makers and owners of these things. Abraham’s Luggage is part of this process. In many ways, of course, Abraham can never be present now as he was in the twelfth century. Photographic reproductions cannot substitute for the immediate physicality of engagement with an original object, but even that original object is now all but impossible to handle. Modern technologies of conservation have transformed, and muted, Abraham’s life in the present: the protective Melinex pocket nevertheless robs it of many of its most potent sensory, non-textual qualities, not unlike the effect of the reproductions used here. Although I have seen the original document, I also have never felt the texture of its paper or its weight, smelt it or listened to it fold. I have not seen it outside its Melinex sheath and I must trust conservators who tell me that the material does not alter colors. This pocket is in fact part of a larger sheet of genizah fragments – a sepia-tinted “patchwork quilt” of paper – and the whole is mounted in a large black folder of other “quilted” documents. Acknowledging this, I have formatted the photographic reproductions of Abraham’s luggage list in a way that subtly evokes its present archived life. In Figures 1 and 2 the edges of T-S NS 324.114’s Melinex pocket and its accession number have not been cropped, leaving it visibly “upside-down” within the pages of this book. Paradoxically, the weight of the present book, though not its dimensions, also replicates something of this physical awkwardness of handling these large folders.

*************************** Homes Abraham Ben Yiju and his family were not “important” in the sense that we conventionally understand historical figures to be politically, economically or even intellectually influential. How then do their life stories, and particularly understandings of their domestic culture broadly defined, contribute to larger “important or ‘macrohistorical’ inquiries”?20 Abraham’s luggage list is likely to remain a unique document for the Indian Ocean area; the key to the final assessment of its particularity or paradigmatic value depends on the future development of archaeology in 19 20

Gell, Art and Agency, 223. Emma Rothschild, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth century History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 7.

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coastal southern India. In the meantime, Abraham’s Luggage may certainly spur new interpretations of already excavated material and museum collections, and further erode the idea that “trade commodity” satisfactorily explains any object or substance. That the list format can generate a book leaves hope, too, for all the data on the premodern Indian Ocean that still sits neglected in this format: lists of places, manufactured things and natural things are ubiquitous in a whole range of literary, geographical and documentary sources from across this vast area. But one of the main values of this material, to my mind, is the way it contributes to new understandings of the places of trade, and thus the place of trade, in the medieval Middle East and South Asia. For the India traders, domestic materiality was deeply entangled with the business of business; in Malibarat, beyond the core centers of Jewish settlement of the Middle East, business friends supported each other in making and supplying their homes abroad, attempting to maintain, in effect, a Mediterranean society in Malibarat. Exchange circuits previously seen as marginal to the bigger, more important business of Jewish trade in fact consolidated business relationships and trust; they also maintained group identity, in part through the maintenance of the most fundamental Jewish rituals in what was, I have argued, a ritually hostile environment. At the same time, with houses playing a central role in the accommodation, and inevitably therefore the business dealings, of sojourning merchants, business friends effectively helped to make their own hospitality networks, fostering their business at the same time. The huge numbers of shopping orders that crossed the western Indian Ocean, as well as those between Aden and Egypt, contribute dynamic new data and ideas to the study of domestic materialities in the Indian Ocean world, but they also have implications for existing debates among scholars of the Islamic Middle East, and of the genizah in particular. Thus far the India Book documents have been largely peripheral to work on Jewish institutions of trade and legal systems in the Islamic Mediterranean. Later by a century than the core of the genizah and small in number by comparison, from a Mediterranean perspective the India Book corpus presents evidence for nothing more than a late, and brief, eastwards extension of Mediterranean Jewish trade networks built on already established institutions of trade. This book hopes to have demonstrated that the India Book documents, and Abraham Ben Yiju’s life in particular, offer a place to explore questions of embeddedness and exceptionalism in another environment altogether, and in quite remarkable detail. The very isolation of Malibarat is, in this regard, hugely useful, a stressor able to disrupt and thus reveal the otherwise invisible material habitus of the Jewish mercantile community of the Middle East. As this discussion shows, the India Book material can offer important new perspectives on these institutions,

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highlighting the flexibility of suhba – reciprocal agency – in its translation ˙ ˙ beyond the Mediterranean. The subtle translation of suhba’s system of reciprocal services to the larger Indian Ocean world –˙ I˙ include Egypt and the Red Sea here – is unexpected and revelatory of the complexities that await discovery as we expand our understanding of systems of exchange and circulation in the premodern Indian Ocean. This new focus highlights the extent to which discussions of premodern mobility have often been distracted by the monumentality of public infrastructures of hospitality, whether it be the caravanserai, the khan or the funduq, at the expense of less visible, even ephemeral, places. In South Asia too, the absence of large, visible infrastructure probably explains why questions of hospitality and travel logistics hardly feature as topics of historical inquiry, and then only once the caravanserai was introduced along “Islamic” models by the first large and stable Muslim-ruled polities. Jean Deloche’s Transport and Communications in India prior to Steam Locomotion only begins to sketch some of the fascinating material awaiting examination, and the field is ripe for new research. A better understanding of this soft infrastructure is all the more important if, as Paulina Lewicka has posited, the development of professional, paying establishments that might properly be termed “inns” is established to have been a largely European and Chinese development of the fourteenth century.21 Better understandings of when and why certain types of infrastructure developed in different parts of Afro-Eurasia is fundamental to mapping premodern mobilities and connectivities. Material relevant to Jewish networks of “home hospitality” among extended family or business colleagues has remained largely outside these discussions, but India Book material now forces it center stage. As I have sought to show, in South Asia domestic hospitality brought its own particular benefits and problems, and the problematic place of Middle Easterners outside the caste system appears to have placed an undue emphasis on home making. Above all, as in Abraham’s case, I have argued that by necessitating female labor to “housekeep,” this system encouraged local marriages and the cascade of cultural consequences that flow from this: children, new hybrid home cultures, new linguistic hybrids – to name but a few. Travel as Skilled Practice Part II, by contrast, foregrounds a hitherto neglected area of premodern circulation in the Indian Ocean area: the travel knowledges and 21

Paulina Lewicka, Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 371.

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technologies that underpinned specifically maritime mobility. Although many conclusions are tentative and the lack of medieval archaeology, on land and at sea, is a constant brake on analysis and interpretation, Abraham’s list of luggage emerges as a rich source of information, one of the surviving documents most directly connected to these bodies of knowledge. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 have uncovered the range and sophistication of travel practices in this area. The emergence of this data is timely as scholars working on the western Indian Ocean after 1500 – notably the work of Jane Hooper22 – bring new data and categories of analysis to these questions. In time we may develop, not only a better understanding of the ocean of knowledge into which Europeans sailed, but a more balanced measure of the interactions and borrowings that also took place in this realm. For the moment, however, there is much that we still do not know about the communication of this knowledge even amongst the India traders, what anthropologist Tim Ingold has termed their “enskilment” in travel. For Ingold, the process of enskilment is profoundly embedded within specific environments and social relations; skills become embodied knowledge through “systems of apprenticeship [my italics], constituted by the relationships between more or less experienced practitioners in hands-on contexts of activity.”23 With little overt discussion of journeying in the India Book documents themselves, at present these contexts and networks of social relations remain a somewhat unfocused background – even if we can assume that, broadly speaking, apprenticeship in trade provided exactly such “hands-on contexts of activity.” We do not know who inducted Abraham into the India trade but we do know that in turn he mentored young traders while in Malibarat. Anthropologists have commonly explored and theorized enskilment not via texts but primarily through the observation of living practices, sometimes applying these ideas retrospectively to surviving archaeological artifacts or historic environments, and one might justifiably have asked at the outset whether a medieval list of luggage offered a place in which an embodied knowledge such as enskilment in travel could be studied at all. In the medieval Mediterranean, archaeological artifacts rather than texts have offered the obvious starting point for discussions of travel knowledge, with shipwrecks providing especially important assemblages for understanding maritime voyaging.24 Abraham’s Luggage demonstrates 22 23 24

Jane Hooper, Feeding Globalization: Madagascar and the Provisioning Trade, 1600 1800 (Athens: University of Ohio Press, 2017). Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (New York: Routledge, 2000), 37. See for example the rich data on shipboard life, and thus travel skills, in the eleventh century eastern Mediterranean gleaned from the Serçe Limanı shipwreck, see George F. Bass et al., Serçe Limanı: An Eleventh century Shipwreck. The Ship and Its Anchorage, Crew, and Passengers (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004).

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that, from very different primary sources, it is nevertheless possible to begin to flesh out Indian Ocean travel knowledges: the critical importance of knowing what to pack, in what quantities, and how to pack it. There is no doubt in my mind that learning to provision and to pack was a fundamental part of initiation into trade but only part of a far larger body of practical knowledge. These and other travel skills emerge from the background most sharply in moments of crisis: when provisions run out or are spoiled, or when a sailing is missed or a correspondence so badly mistimed that it involves months of wait; when a group of travelers leaves their caravan in the desert; when there is a problem with paperwork, or when a travel companion behaves badly. More usually in the corpus of India Book correspondence, what we can now recognize as travel knowledges are most often mentioned obliquely, in matter-of-fact discussions about who traveled with which companion, with which trusted nakhudas and on what ships; in mentions of a ship’s cabin rented, “things” (hawa’ij) bought for it or provisions prepared. ˙ The similarity between Aydhab and the Arabic word cadhab, meaning variously “pain, torment, suffering, agony, torture, punishment,” was not lost on those who transited through the Red Sea and, as Mordechai A. Friedman rightly concluded, the frequent shipping and travel attested in the India Book documents is probably more an indication of the extraordinary profits to be made in the India trade than an indication of the safety of the route, or indeed the ease of travel along it.25 Nevertheless, the paucity of crises discussed in these documents highlights the high level of travel skills among India traders: few commercial or personal consignments arrived spoiled, and when they did the fact is most definitely mentioned;26 the major cause of death recorded among India traders is death by drowning as a result of shipwreck, not by dehydration, exposure or malnourishment. The Luggage List as Macrohistory All these questions sit within a far larger, macrohistorical context, that of the eastwards shift of the centers of the Islamic world from the tenth century onwards. The demographic patterns of modern South and Southeast Asia, we should not forget, were laid at this period. If Muslims finally became the largest new faith community in South Asia it was because the Middle East was itself largely Islamized by this period, a weighting naturally reflected in 25 26

Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 164. For example a waterskin of lemon and mango that arrived in Aden spoiled; see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 569 and n.7 (IB III, 3).

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the composition of sojourners and trade communities. The prevalence of polygyny within Islam and the paternal “transmission” of religious identity to offspring certainly added to this advantage, but not uniquely so. As better knowledge of Jewish practices uncovers evidence for polygyny and temporary marriage, these cannot be seen as exclusively Muslim advantages. Whatever one’s faith, the sometimes long seasons of monsoon travel and the absence of formal travel infrastructure in much of South Asia made taking a local wife and establishing a home, however temporary, an eminently practical response to a long wait for the next boat home, a travel skill in and of itself. The more challenging question awaiting historians is whether the India trade can be understood within even larger, “super-macro” contexts. Chapter 2 already pointed to the syncronicity between the Fatimid economic crisis of the 1060s and 1070s, their development of an oceanic policy in the Indian Ocean and the entry of Mediterranean Jews into the India trade. But these events may be connected to even larger processes and phenomena driven by global changes in climate. In an ambitious experiment in Middle Eastern climate history entitled The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean, Ronnie Ellenblum connected this Fatimid crisis to broader changes in the climate of the eastern Mediterranean caused by a period of warming in western Europe known as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), and thence to a dizzying number of events and phenomena across western Eurasia.27 Many of these events bear directly on the India Book material and the world of the Cairo Genizah more generally, be it the Berber incursions into Fatimid North Africa, the Crusades, even the Ghurid raiding and later settlement of northwestern India.28 There is undoubtedly more to do in terms of responding to, and testing, Ellenblum’s theory not only for South Asia and the Indian Ocean region but for the Middle East too.29 27 28 29

Ronnie Ellenblum, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950 1072 AD (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 59 159. Briefly mentioned in ibid., 251 2. On possible implications for South Asia see, for example, A. Sinha, G. Kathayat, H. Cheng, S.F.M. Breitenbach, M. Berkelhammer, M. Mudelsee, J. Biswas and R.L. Edwards, “Trends and Oscillations in the Indian Summer Monsoon Rainfall over the Last Two Millennia,” Nature Communications 6 (2015), DOI:10.1038/ncomms7309 which suggests an enhanced summer monsoon during the MWP. A full scientific bibliography is available in Y. Kamae, T. Kawana, M. Oshiro and H. Ueda, “Seasonal Modulation of the Asian Summer Monsoon between the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age: A Multi Model Study,” Progress in Earth and Planetary Science 4 (2017), DOI:10.1186/s40645 017 0136 7. For an excellent example of the kind of multi disciplinary approach required, combining the sciences and humanities, see Elena Xoplaki, Dominik Fleitmann, Juerg Luterbacher, Sebastian Wagner, John F. Haldon, Eduardo Zorita, Ioannis Telelis, Andrea Toreti and Adam Izdebski, “The Medieval Climate Anomaly and Byzantium: A Review of the Evidence on Climatic Fluctuations, Economic Performance and Societal Change,” Quaternary Science Reviews 136 (2016), 229 52.

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Nevertheless, the MWP is now securely evidenced for Europe by a wide range of data sets and has already been connected to contemporary events such as the Viking settlement of Greenland.30 While it is far from likely that the MWP was a global warming event, it now seems clear that at this period the climate shifted subtly but noticeably in different parts of the world. To now understand all these Eurasian historical phenomena as fundamentally interconnected through climate would certainly open tantalizing new approaches to the study of the documentary genizah, at the same time benefiting world history. However improbable it may first seem, Abraham’s arrival in Malibarat in 1132 and the Ghurid conquest of northern India sixty years later may have proceeded from a common cause and it may be within a macro context such as this that we eventually situate Abraham’s biography and those of other India traders. Until then, Abraham contributes to a more nuanced picture of contemporary mobilities and the new hybridities they produced – in India and back in the Middle East, and eventually in Southeast Asia too. From such gentle comings and goings, from this lapping human movement, were forged the new social networks, the new communities of converts or populations of mixed ethnicity, and the new cultures that make our modern world.

30

A.E.J. Ogilvie, L.K. Barlow and A.E. Jennings, “North Atlantic Climate AD 1000: Millennial Reflections on the Viking Discoveries of Iceland, Greenland and North America,” Weather 55 (2000), 34 45.

Appendix Abraham’s List of Luggage (India Book III, 24): Transcription, Transliteration and Translation Amir Ashur and Elizabeth Lambourn

The use of so-called Classical Judaeo-Arabic in the huge majority of documents making up the documentary genizah is a testament to the deep embeddedness of Jewish communities in the medieval Middle East, but also a frequent impediment to the integration of these sources into wider medieval histories. The Arabic spoken and written by Jewish communities across Spain, North Africa and the Middle East has often been almost indistinguishable, linguistically speaking, from that of other communities in those regions, marked principally by its incorporation of certain Hebrew and Aramaic words and phrases. Many individuals also wrote Arabic in the Arabic script; however, the use of the Hebrew script was widespread and it is this, more than any linguistic barrier, that has often served to partition Judaeo-Arabic from its relatives.1 One solution to the wider use of these documents, at least by other Arabists, has been to include Arabic transliterations alongside photographic reproductions of the documents, an approach explored by S.D. Goitein in a number of articles.2 In Abraham’s Luggage we propose a slightly different approach, namely to include for Abraham Ben Yiju’s list of luggage (India Book III, 24) a full transcription of the Judaeo-Arabic, obviously in Hebrew characters, with a facing transliteration in Arabic script. The Arabic transliteration is by Amir Ashur. The two are placed directly opposite each other for easy comparison. Following this, readers will find the English 1

2

See the helpful overviews under “Judaeo Arabic” in EI2 and EALL with further biblio graphy including Joshua Blau, The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo Arabic, 3rd edn (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute, 1999). S.D. Goitein, “Two Eyewitness Reports on an Expedition of the King of Kish (Qais) against Aden,” BSOAS 16, no. 2 (1954), 247 57 which also includes on p. 254 guidelines on the Arabic transcription of Judaeo Arabic. Also S.D. Goitein, “Judaeo Arabic Letters from Spain (Early Twelfth Century),” in Orientalia Hispanica: Sive Studia F.M. Pareja Octogenario Dictate, edited by J.M. Barral (Leiden: Brill, 1974), vol. 1, 331 50; S.D. Goitein, “From Aden to India: Specimens of the Correspondence of India Traders of the Twelfth Century,” JESHO 23, no. 1 (1980), 43 66; and S.D. Goitein, “Portrait of a Medieval India Trader: Three Letters from the Cairo Geniza,” BSOAS 50, no. 3 (1987), 449 64.

252

Appendix

253

translation and longer commentary of the luggage list. This same English translation, free of substantial annotations, is repeated at the start of the Introduction. While recognizing that there is a huge leap to be made from reading printed Hebrew characters to deciphering the original documents, we hope that this approach will nevertheless encourage Arabists to learn their Hebrew alphabet and, with a little effort and initiative, to begin to work with edited Judaeo-Arabic sources. Figures 1b and 2b, black and white photographs of T-S NS 324.114 (recto and verso), allow those emboldened by this first contact to venture into the world of twelfth-century Judaeo-Arabic palaeography and Abraham Ben Yiju’s own handwriting in order to decipher the original document. So as to replicate the archival experience as far as possible, the edge of the Melinex folder and the visibly “upside-down” accession number have not been trimmed back.3 As with the original, to read the Judaeo-Arabic you will need to rotate this book in order to follow the list as it skips and jumps between the earlier text. The original document is written sequentially, i.e. a new line is not begun for each component of the list, a space-saving format typically used in medieval letters for sequences of commodities or in inventories. Sequential lists are notably different from modern listing practices where a new line is typically begun for each new item, what we might term “well-spaced lists.” In medieval Judaeo-Arabic both layouts are found, with the spaced format reserved for documents such as donor lists, memorial lists for synagogue services or lists of synagogue expenses.4 As in Goitein and Friedman’s English translation of the list, and in order to retain a feel of the original document, the English translation given at the start of the Introduction retains a sequential layout while indicating the lineation of the original by means of bracketed numbers. In the context of this Appendix, however, to facilitate quick and easy comparison between Judaeo-Arabic, Arabic and English we begin a new line for each “line” of the original document, the system adopted in the Hebrew edition of India Traders.

3

4

In Cambridge University Library Joseph b. Abraham’s earlier memorandum (India Book document III, 8) is considered the “primary” document and oriented accordingly. For IB III, 8 see the full transcription and Hebrew translation in S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, Abraham Ben Yiju India Trader and Manufacturer: India Book III, Cairo Geniza Documents (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010), 104 5. We are grateful to Miriam Esther Wagner for this information (personal communication, 17 January 2012). The chapter on “Layouts for Listing, Recording and Summarizing” in Colette Sirat, Writing as Handwork: A History of Handwriting in Mediterranean and Western Culture (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006) does not discuss sequential listing.

254

Appendix

The present translation is very much indebted to that published in S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman’s India Traders of the Middle Ages5 but it also departs from the 2008 edition in a number of areas. The revised translation and extended commentary are by Elizabeth Lambourn. Sequential lists in Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic typically use the particle wa, “and,” between each component. Most English translations, including those in India Traders, avoid the slightly repetitive feel this convention imparts by rendering all but the final wa as commas. Again in the interest of retaining something of the rhythm of the original text, in Abraham’s Luggage I translate every occurrence of wa as “and.” The original document’s idiosyncratic enumeration, mixing numerical symbols and fully spelled numerals, is also retained. Some numbers are written, as is common in Judaeo-Arabic, in Hebrew letters with each letter of the alphabet representing a different value; others are written out in full. The English translation retains this variation and, given the counted character of the list, also translates singular nouns as “one X”: thus jū niya is translated “one gunny” rather than “a gunny,” and so on. As this example illustrates, in some instances I have also chosen less common English terms because of their shared Indic origins and, in this case, continued use in Indian English. Now, as then, a gunny is a coarse textile sack or bag. The English translation also retains a number of Judaeo-Arabic words with an English qualifier to clarify the type of foodstuff or object listed, thus “fatiya chest,” or “hū t fish.” This approach risks ˙ accusations of tautology: a fatiya is a type of chest, hū t was a species of ˙ fish. However, I feel that it also preserves in translation something of the linguistic variety and complexity of the material world under study. Sigla Outlined letter: letter partly damaged. [. . .] hole, gap, lacuna. [?] reading and/or meaning of preceding word uncertain. (( )) gloss or correction written above or outside the line. 5

S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book” Part One) (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 661 4 and Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 201 5.

Judaeo-Arabic Transcription and Arabic Transliteration Amir Ashur

‫ ﻣﻌﺮﻓﺔ ﻋﺪﺩ ﺍﻟﺰﻧﺎﺑﻴﻞ‬1’‫בשם יי‬ ‫ﻭﺍﻟﺠﻮﺍﻧﻲ ﻭﺍﻟﻘﻨﺎﻧﻲ ﻭﺍﻟﻔﻮﺍﺗﻲ‬ ‫ﻭﺑﻘﺎﺋﺔ ﺍﻟﺪﺑﺶ ﻣﻦ ﺫﻟﻚ ﺠ]ﻭ[ﻧﻴﺎ‬ [. . . .]‫ﻛﺒﻴﺮﺓ ﺭﺯ ﻭﺟﻮﻧﻴﺔ ﻟﻄﻴﻔﺔ ﺭﺍ‬ ‫ﻭﺃﻳﻀﺎ ﺑﺮﺳﻢ ﺍﻟﺰﺍﺩ ﺍﺭﺑﻌﺔ ﺟﻮﺍﻧﻲ‬ ‫ﻟﻄﺎﻑ ﻭﺯﻧﺒﻴﻠﻴﻦ ﺭﺯ ﻭﺯﻧﺒﻴﻠﻴﻦ ﺑﺮ ﻭﺯﻧﺒﻴﻞ‬ [. . .] ‫ ﻓﻮﺍﺗﻲ ﻠ‬٣ ‫ﻧﺎﺭﺟﻴﻦ ﻭﺯﻧﺒﻴﻞ ﺩﻗﻴﻖ ﻭ‬ ‫ﻭﻓﺎﺗﻴﺎ ﺩﺍﺩﻱ ﻭﻓﺎﺗﻴﺎ ﺻﻔﺮ ﻭﺣﺪﻳﺪ‬ ‫ﻭﻓﺎﺗﻴﺎ ﻣﺘﺎﻉ ﺍﻟﺴﻤﺎﻛﻴﻦ )) ﺻﻴﻤﺎﺩ (( ﻓﻴﻪ ﺣﺪﻳﺪ‬

1

2 3 4 5

6

7 8

9

‫בשם יי’ מערפה עדד אלזנאביל‬ 2 ‫ואל ̇גואני ואלקנאני ואלפואתי‬ 4 ‫ אלדבש מן דלך ג]ו[ניא‬3‫ובקאיה‬ 5 [. . . .]‫כבירה רז וגוניה לטיפה רא‬ ‫ואי ̇צא ברסם אלזאד ארבעה גואני‬ ‫לטאף וזנבילין רז וזנבילין בר וזנביל‬ 8 [. . .]‫ פואתי ל‬7‫ וזנביל דקיק ו ̇ג‬6‫נאר ̇גין‬ ‫ופאתיא דאדי ופאתיא צפר וחדיד‬ ‫ פיה חדיד‬9((‫ופאתיא מתאע אלסמאכין ))צימאד‬

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The list opens with the Hebrew invocation ‫( בשם יי‬beshem yy), which cannot be translit erated into Arabic although it functions in this context as equivalent to the Arabic bismillah. On this Hebrew invocation see Mordechai A. Friedman, Jewish Marriage in Palestine: A Cairo Geniza Study (Tel Aviv and New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1980), vol. 1, 91 2. Fawa¯tı¯ (sing. fa¯tiya), a loanword into Judaeo Arabic; see full discussion and references in n.5 of the English translation that follows. Written baqa¯ya for baqa¯ya¯ (plural of sing. baqı¯ya, “remainder,” “rest”). Alif maqsura for ta¯’ marbuta is common in Judaeo Arabic; see J. Blau, A Grammar of ˙ edn (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995), 44 (in Hebrew). Medieval˙ Judaeo Arabic, 2nd Illegible, a word or two words of approximately six letters of which the first two appear to be resh and alef, or possibly an initial dalet, as indicated in Goitein and Friedman’s transcription in the Hebrew edition (S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, Abraham Ben Yiju India Trader and Manufacturer: India Book III, Cairo Geniza Documents [Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2010], 201); the number of missing letters is unclear although they may be sufficient for two words. See discussion in n.9 of the English translation for a possible identification for this term. Written na¯rjı¯n, very certainly a misspelling of na¯rjı¯l, “coconut”; see discussions in nn.12 and 61 of the English translation below for full references to this drupe and the utensils for its processing. Here the letter gimel is used to represent the numeral 3; see also Lines 15, 24, 29 and 33. Illegible: Goitein and Friedman’s transcription in the Hebrew edition suggests an initial lamed but the text is so degraded that the number of letters missing in the word cannot be determined, Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 201. S¯ıma¯d, as indicated in S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman (India Traders of the ˙Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book” Part One) [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 662, n.14), this is a variant spelling of s¯ıma¯d, “head kerchief” used to tie a bundle. ˙ In the translation we give the more generic “cloth.” The letter dalet might also be read resh giving s¯ıma¯r, but it is unclear what this would designate. ˙

‫‪Appendix‬‬ ‫‪10‬‬ ‫‪11‬‬ ‫‪12‬‬ ‫‪13‬‬ ‫‪14‬‬ ‫‪15‬‬ ‫‪16‬‬ ‫‪17‬‬ ‫‪18‬‬ ‫‪19‬‬ ‫‪20‬‬ ‫‪21‬‬ ‫‪22‬‬ ‫‪23‬‬ ‫‪24‬‬ ‫‪25‬‬ ‫‪26‬‬ ‫‪27‬‬ ‫‪28‬‬ ‫‪29‬‬ ‫‪30‬‬ ‫‪31‬‬ ‫‪32‬‬ ‫‪33‬‬ ‫‪34‬‬ ‫‪35‬‬

‫ואדבש וקרטלא ̇כבז ו ̇ה‪ 10‬מראני כל‬ ‫ואי ̇צא פאתיא כיזראן אקפ]א[ל וזנב]יל[‬ ‫וחאמל מפרד פי אלתבן וזיר אכואן‬ ‫מפרד פי אלתבן וזנביל נ]ח[אס מעמול‬ ‫וזנביל איצא נחאס מעמול וזנביל אי ̇צא‬ ‫נחאס מעמול כביר ו ̇ג זנאביל לטאף‬ ‫חדי]ד[ וחואיג וסלה גזאג‪ 11‬ופאתיאן‬ ‫זגאג וטאגנין ח ̇גר פי חשיש וברמתין‬ ‫ח ̇גר וסלה ציני ו ̇ד‪ 12‬רטאלי מלאן‬ ‫סליט וחמו ̇צא וקנינה נביד ומצידה‬ ‫ללפיראן וסתה קנאני סליט ופאתיא כשב‬ ‫וסתה קנאני פרג וקנינה צאבון‬ ‫וברניתין לימון וזנ ̇גביל ו ̇ה גחאל ענבא‬ ‫וגחלתין חיתאן וגחלתין לימון ו ̇ה גחאל פרג‬ ‫וסלה אלכבז וטבק כביר ו ̇ג מרבאת ומרב‬ ‫כביר ומן אלקצאע קצעתין ואי ̇צא קצעה‬ ‫כבירה וקצעה גדידה וקצעתין קדם‬ ‫‪13‬ומן אלפואתיא ̇ד פואתי תיאב‬ ‫וברינתין‪ 14‬סמן ו ̇ד ארגל לסריר וקצעתין‬ ‫קדם ו ̇ד קצאע ̇גדד ו ̇ג בראכס ברם‬ ‫ובאב בליג גיר מעמול‬ ‫‪16‬‬ ‫וענד אל נאכודה אבו אלש]‪[..‬ע פידם‪ 15‬מחבל‬ ‫ומו ̇גה ו ̇ד קצאע‬ ‫]‪ [. . .‬אלואח‪[.] 17‬אלבליג ו ̇ג אלואח לסרור‬ ‫ו ̇ד עידאן‪ 18‬ולוח כרסי‬ ‫]‪ [.‬ושת‪[. . .] 19‬עיא פיה חואיג‬

‫‪256‬‬

‫ﻭﺍﺩﺑﺶ ﻭﻗﺮﻃﻼ ﺧﺒﺰ ﻭ ‪ ٥‬ﻣﺮﺍﻧﻲ ﺧﻞ‬ ‫ﻭﺃﻳﻀﺎ ﻓﺎﺗﻴﺎ ﺧﻴﺰﺭﺍﻥ ﺃﻘﻓ]ﺍ[ﻝ ﻭﺯﻨﺒ]ﻳﻞ[‬ ‫ﻭﺣﺎﻣﻞ ﻣﻔﺮﺩ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﺘﺒﻦ ﻭﺯﻳﺮ ﺍﺧﻮﺍﻥ‬ ‫ﻣﻔﺮﺩ ﻓﻲ ﺍﻟﺘﺒﻦ ﻭﺯﻧﺒﻴﻞ ﻨ]ﺤ[ﺍﺱ ﻣﻌﻤﻮﻝ‬ ‫ﻭﺯﻧﺒﻴﻞ ﺃﻳﻀﺎ ﻧﺤﺎﺱ ﻣﻌﻤﻮﻝ ﻭﺯﻧﺒﻴﻞ ﺃﻳﻀﺎ‬ ‫ﻧﺤﺎﺱ ﻣﻌﻤﻮﻝ ﻛﺒﻴﺮ ﻭ ‪ ٣‬ﺯﻧﺎﺑﻴﻞ ﻟﻄﺎﻑ‬ ‫ﺣﺪﻴ]ﺩ[ ﻭﺣﻮﺍﺋﺞ ﻭﺳﻠﺔ ﺟﺰﺍﺝ ﻭﻓﺎﺗﻴﺎﻥ‬ ‫ﺯﺟﺎﺝ ﻭﻃﺎﺟﻨﻴﻦ ﺣﺠﺮ ﻓﻲ ﺣﺸﻴﺶ ﻭﺑﺮﻣﺘﻴﻦ‬ ‫ﺣﺠﺮ ﻭﺳﻠﺔ ﺻﻴﻨﻲ ﻭ ‪ ٤‬ﺭﻃﺎﻟﻲ ﻣﻼﻥ‬ ‫ﺳﻠﻴﻂ ﻭﺣﻤﻮﺿﺎ ﻭﻗﻨﻴﻨﺔ ﻧﺒﻴﺪ ﻭﻣﺼﻴﺪﻩ‬ ‫ﻟﻠﻔﻴﺮﺍﻥ ﻭﺳﺘﻪ ﻗﻨﺎﻧﻲ ﺳﻠﻴﻂ ﻭﻓﺎﺗﻴﺎ ﺧﺸﺐ‬ ‫ﻭﺳﺘﻪ ﻗﻨﺎﻧﻲ ﻓﺮﻍ ﻭﻗﻨﻴﻨﺔ ﺻﺎﺑﻮﻥ‬ ‫ﻭﺑﺮﻧﻴﺘﻴﻦ ﻟﻴﻤﻮﻥ ﻭﺯﻧﺠﺒﻴﻞ ﻭ ‪ ٥‬ﺟﺤﺎﻝ ﻋﻨﺒﺎ‬ ‫ﻭﺟﺤﻠﺘﻴﻦ ﺣﻴﺘﺎﻥ ﻭﺟﺤﻠﺘﻴﻦ ﻟﻴﻤﻮﻥ ﻭ ‪ ٥‬ﺟﺤﺎﻝ ﻓﺮﻍ‬ ‫ﻭﺳﻠﺔ ﺍﻟﺨﺒﺰ ﻭﻃﺒﻖ ﻛﺒﻴﺮ ﻭ ‪ ٣‬ﻣﺮﺑﺎﺕ ﻭﻣﺮﺏ‬ ‫ﻛﺒﻴﺮ ﻭﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﻘﺼﺎﻉ ﻗﺼﻌﺘﻴﻦ ﻭﺍﻳﻀﺎ ﻗﺼﻌﺔ‬ ‫ﻛﺒﻴﺮﺓ ﻭﻗﺼﻌﺔ ﺟﺪﻳﺪﺓ ﻭﻗﺼﻌﺘﻴﻦ ﻗﺪﻡ‬ ‫ﻭﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﻔﻮﺍﺗﻴﺎ ‪ ٤‬ﻓﻮﺍﺗﻲ ﺛﻴﺎﺏ‬ ‫ﻭﺑﺮﻳﻨﺘﻴﻦ ﺳﻤﻦ ﻭ ‪ ٤‬ﺍﺭﺟﻞ ﻟﺴﺮﻳﺮ ﻭﻗﺼﻌﺘﻴﻦ‬ ‫ﻗﺪﻡ ﻭ ‪ ٤‬ﻗﺼﺎﻉ ﺟﺪﺩ ﻭ ‪ ٣‬ﺑﺮﺍﻛﺲ ﺑﺮﻡ‬ ‫ﻭﺑﺎﺏ ﺑﻠﻴﺞ ﻏﻴﺮ ﻣﻌﻤﻮﻝ‬ ‫ﻭﻋﻨﺪ ﺍﻟﻨﺎﺧﻮﺫﺓ ﺍﺑﻮﺍﻠﺸ]‪[. . .‬ﻉ ﻓﻴﺪﻡ ﻣﺤﺒﻞ‬ ‫ﻭﻣﻮﺟﺔ ﻭ‪ ٤‬ﻗﺼﺎﻉ‬ ‫]‪ [. . .‬ﺍﻟﻮﺍﺡ ]‪[.‬ﺍﻟﺒﻠﻴﺞ ﻭ‪ ٣‬ﺍﻟﻮﺍﺡ ﻟﺴﺮﻭﺭ‬ ‫ﻭ‪ ٤‬ﻋﻴﺪﺍﻥ ﻭﻟﻮﺡ ﻛﺮﺳﻲ‬ ‫]‪ [.‬ﻭﺸﺕ ]‪[. . .‬ﻋﻴﺎ ﻓﻴﻪ ﺣﻮﺍﺋﺞ‬

‫‪Here the letter he is used for 5; see also Lines 22, 23.‬‬ ‫‪Written jaza¯j but clearly zaja¯j, “glass,” indicated in Goitein and Friedman (India Traders,‬‬ ‫‪663, n.26).‬‬ ‫‪Here the letter dalet represents the numeral 4; see also Lines 27, 28, 32 and 34.‬‬ ‫‪There may have been another line of text below Line 27. However, this area corresponds‬‬ ‫‪to a fold in the earlier memorandum and any writing there is almost completely erased.‬‬ ‫‪Written barı¯natayn, this is a misspelling of barniyyatayn, i.e. two barniyyas.‬‬ ‫‪Although the letters F Y D M can be read clearly this is not an Arabic name or nisba and‬‬ ‫‪it is unclear how it should be vocalized.‬‬ ‫‪The letters M H B L are legible and Goitein and Friedman vocalize this as mahbal (India‬‬ ‫˙‬ ‫‪Traders, 664); however,‬‬ ‫‪the word has not yet been identified. One suggestion˙ might be‬‬ ‫‪that in his evident haste Abraham transposed some of the letters and that we read M H‬‬ ‫‪L B which would give the noun mihlab, a type of wooden bowl. See discussion in n.51 ˙in‬‬ ‫˙‬ ‫‪the English translation that follows.‬‬ ‫‪Final three letters partly damaged, the reading is uncertain.‬‬ ‫‪Blank spaces before and after this word. For this term see n.53 in the English translation.‬‬ ‫‪Judaeo Arabic typically uses the Hebrew letter samek for Arabic sı¯n, and in Line 39 the‬‬ ‫‪numeral six sitta is written with samek; in this instance, however, the writer used a variant‬‬ ‫‪spelling with the Hebrew letter sin.‬‬

‫‪10‬‬ ‫‪11‬‬ ‫‪12‬‬ ‫‪13‬‬ ‫‪14‬‬ ‫‪15‬‬ ‫‪16‬‬

‫‪17‬‬ ‫‪18‬‬ ‫‪19‬‬

257

Appendix ‫ﻭﻣﻦ ﺍﻟﺼﻔﺮ ﺯﻳﺮ ﺍﺧﻮﺍﻥ ﻭﻃﺎﺟﻦ ﻭﻃﺼﺖ ﻭﺍﺑﺮﻳﻖ‬ ‫ ﺑﺴﻂ ﻭﺳﺮﺍﺝ ﺣﺪﻳﺪ‬٢٠‫ ﺗﻮﺍﻟﻢ ﻭ‬٣‫ﻭ‬ [. . .] ‫[ﻟﻪ ﺍﻟﻔﺮﺍﺳﻠﺔ‬..]‫ﻭﺳﻴﺮﺗﻴﻦ ﻭﻋ‬ [. . .][‫[ﺍﺳﻲ ﻭﻣﻴﺰﺍ]ﺭ‬..] ‫ﻭﻣﺤﻚ ﻟﻠﻨﺎﺭﺟﻴﻦ ﻭﺳﺒﻌﻪ‬ ‫[ﺍﻉ ﻋﻨﺪ ﺍﻟﻨﺎﺧﻮﺫﻩ ﺍﺑﻮ ﺍﻟﻔﺮﺝ‬. . .] ‫[ ﺳﺖ‬. . .. . .] 20

21 22 23

‫ וטא ̇גן וטצת ואבריק‬20‫ומן אלצפר זיר אכואן‬ ‫ בסט וסרא ̇ג חדיד‬22‫ ו ̇כ‬21‫ו ̇ג תואלם‬ [. . .] ‫[לה אלפראסלה‬..]‫וסירתין וע‬23 [. . .][‫[אסי ומיזא]ר‬..] ‫ומחך ללננארגין וסבעה‬ ‫[אע ענד אלנאכודה אבו אלפרג‬. . .] ‫[ סת‬. . .. . .]

36 37 38 39

For Abraham’s use of the Persian term zı¯r khuwa¯n, and his particular orthography (seen also earlier in Line 12) see Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 555, n.13 (IB III, 1) and in this book, Chapter 4, p.123, n.68. Tawa¯lim (plural of ta¯lam), a loanword into Judaeo Arabic; see discussion under n.57 in the English translation that follows. Here the letter kaf is used to represent the numeral 20. Lines 38 and 39 run lengthwise along the empty margin of T S NS 324.114 recto and are the section of the luggage list with the greatest number of lacunae, either because of damage to the paper or because of the illegibility of Abraham Ben Yiju’s own hand writing. While two components of the luggage list are partially legible, if currently unidentified, further objects or foodstuffs are clearly recorded in sections that remain completely illegible at present. The edition above renders the legible letters and approx imate number of illegible characters in these final two lines.

Revised English Translation Elizabeth Lambourn

1 In the name of the Lord. Specification1 of the number of baskets2 and 2 gunnies3 and bottles4 and fa¯tiya chests,5 1

2

3

4

5

As S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman suggest, the term macrifa is used here in the same sense as tacrı¯f (India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book” Part One) [Leiden: Brill, 2008], 662, n.4). As translated by Goitein, zana¯bı¯l (sing. zanbı¯l, zinbı¯l), the main term used in this list to refer to a basket. See extensive discussion in Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 562, n.57) where various definitions specify the Persian origin of the term and its use in reference to palm leaf baskets. Juniya (pl. jawa¯nı¯), an uncommon term for which Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 343, n.39) point to M. Piamenta, Dictionary of Post Classical Yemeni Arabic (Leiden: Brill, 1990), 79, who covers the use of the term in a wide range of sources in the sense of “sack.” The term is attested earlier in the Yemen in the late thirteenth century customs documents from Aden published as the Nur al Maca¯rif with reference to sacks of rice and wheat (see Arabic edition with French introduction by Muhammad cAbd al Rahim Jazim as Nur al Maca¯rif. Lumière de la connaissance: règles, lois et coutumes du Yémen sous le règne de Sultan Rasoulide al Muzaffar [Sanaa: Centre Français d’Archéologie et de Sciences Sociales de Sanaa, 2003 5], vol. 1, 512, 521). The term is also recorded in modern Gulf Arabic. It is now possible to recognize the term as another Indic loanword into Arabic and Judaeo Arabic, from Sanskrit g on ¯.¯ı, “sack,” probably via one or several regional languages although the period of transmission has not been established. Goitein and Friedman point to the occurrence of the term in a set of published accounts from Ifriqiya for the year 1045 46, indicating that this loanword was already widely disseminated in the eleventh century (S.D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973], 286, translated as “bags”). The same term was later adopted into English and other European languages, appearing in the former as “gunny,” or “gunny bag,” to designate a sack of coarse cloth; see Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell, Hobson Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo Indian Words and Phrases, new edn William Crooke (London: John Murray, 1903), 403. The term is also now the object of a dedicated entry in Mordechai A. Friedman, A Dictionary of Medieval Judeo Arabic in the India Book Letters from the Geniza and in other Texts (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2016), 96 (in Hebrew). As the term is still in current use in English (OED Online, “gunny, n.”), particularly among transport professionals and in Indian English, I prefer this translation to Goitein and Friedman’s more generic “sack.” Qana¯nı¯, plural of qinnı¯na (also qana¯nin), “bottle, glass bottle; flask, flacon, vial.” There are multiple references to qinnı¯nas in the documentary genizah; see references for the Mediterranean and India Book in Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 662, n.7. These were very likely glass and in this instance came from production centers near Aden; such bottles were often padded for transportation with custom woven “baskets,” much like modern Chianti bottles. IB II, 25 6 mentions the dispatch of Lakhabi glass to Abraham (ibid., 354, Line 7); IB II, 11 discusses supply problems in terms that indicate local production (ibid., 611, Lines 26 31). In the Judaeo Arabic fawa¯tı¯ (sing. fa¯tiya). In their edition Goitein and Friedman inferred from the context that this term, otherwise unknown in Arabic dictionaries, described some form of chest. Further research now indicates that this is a loanword into Judaeo Arabic from Tulu, the language of the Mangalore area. Tulu pata¯yi designates a coffer or chest. The loanword is interpreted as having a quadrilateral root and is given the appropriate broken plural form; see discussion in more detail in Elizabeth Lambourn, “Borrowed Words in an Ocean of Objects: Geniza Sources and New Cultural Histories of the Indian Ocean,” in Irreverent History: Essays

Appendix

259

3 and remaining luggage.6 These include: one7 large ¯ [. . .].9 4 gunny of rice8 and one small gunny of RA 6

7

8

9

Dabash. Goitein and Friedman use the American English “baggage”; this translation opts for “luggage,” more common in British English; see OED, “n. baggage” and “n. luggage.” The term is rare in Arabic dictionaries but not unknown; see Goitein and Friedman’s discus sion (India Traders, 228, n.9) which cites Dozy’s definition of “bagatelles,” “things of no value” (Reinhardt P.A. Dozy, Supplément aux dictionnaires arabes, 3rd edn [Leiden and Paris: Brill and G.P. Maisonneuve et Larose, 1967], vol. 1, 423b). Fagnan gives “objets sans valeur” (E. Fagnan, Additions aux dictionnaires arabes [Algiers: Ancienne Maison Bastide Jourdan, Jules Carbonel, 1923], 52). However, as discussed in the Introduction (19 20), examples such as Ibn al Mujawir’s use of the term clearly justify its translation in certain contexts as “baggage” or “luggage.” Friedman cites a responsum of Moses Maimonides, which rules that it is reprehensible for a Jew to stand in prayer with acda¯l or dabash obscuring the wall he faces. Friedman translates these as “bales” and “small packages” respectively in a contrast that recalls Ibn al Mujawir’s distinction between thiya¯b and bada¯’i c, and dabash (Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 228, n.9). The term is attested with a˙ remarkably close meaning in the area of Mecca in the first half of the eighteenth century. In an account of the seizure of letters from the dabash of the Sharif of Mecca and his followers the term is translated as “possessions and belongings” (Marco Salati, “A Shiite in Mecca: The Strange Case of Mecca born Syrian and Persian Sayyid Muhammad Haydar (d. 1139/1727),” in The Twelver Shia in Modern Times: Religious Culture and Political History, edited by Rainer Brunner and Werner Ende [Leiden: Brill, 2001], 16). In other instances, however, dabash clearly designates chattels and portable property of various sorts with little sense of their personal relationship to their owner. In one document Abraham gives instructions for dabash “belongings” or perhaps “chattels” left behind in a warehouse to be sold (Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 721, IB III, 39). In a declaration of assets and liabilities made by a Jewish Maghrebi trader in Fustat in 1072, we find mention of 3 dinars and 1/6th owed for cotton and dabash; in this context the term is simply translated as “miscellaneous goods” (Norman Golb, “Legal Documents from the Cairo Genizah,” Jewish Social Studies 20, no. 1 [1958], 41, Line 28, and note on page 42). We also find dabash of “gold, silver and copper [worth] 50 dinars” listed in an inventory of assets from the India Book (Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 228, IB I, 22). See also the entry for dabash in Friedman, Dictionary of Medieval Judeo Arabic, 121 (in Hebrew). Dabash should not be confused with the Anglo Indian terms dubash, dobash, debash or indeed dabash used to designate an interpreter or agent and later a servant to a European. Hobson Jobson gives the origin as Hindi dubha¯shiya¯, doba¯shı¯ (lit. “man of two languages”) and the Tamil as tupa¯shi; see Yule and Coke Burnell, Hobson Jobson, 328. In the present context of enumeration I read most singular nouns as implicitly designating the presence of one item of the class designated; thus, rather than Goitein and Friedman’s “a large sack of rice” (India Traders, 662), I translate “one large gunny of rice,” and so on. The use of gunnies (juniya, pl. jawa¯nı¯) for rice may underline the non commercial context of its transportation here since in the Mangalore area the commodity was typically pack aged and transported in large rounded “balls,” known as mudi in Tulu, a spherical paddy ˙ local packing technology of grass bundle, secured with paddy twine, which remained the choice for grains well into the mid twentieth century. (Definition in A. Männer, Tulu English Dictionary [Mangalore: Basel Mission Press, 1886], 547, mudi “a bundle of ˙ forty to sixty rice, etc., packed in straw,” also a “measure of grain, etc., containing from seers”; see also K. Hanuru, Encyclopaedia of the Folk Culture of Karnataka [Chennai: Institute of Asian Studies, 1991], 147.) The mudi also corresponds to a dry measure ˙ defined by K.V. Ramesh as equiva first found in medieval inscriptions from the area and lent to approximately 39 kg (A History of South Kanara [Dharwar: Karnatak University, 1970], 275). Rice packed in this manner can be glimpsed in a number of later nineteenth century photographs of the port area at Mangalore, now held in the Basel Mission Archive; a mudi is also preserved in the Thulu Baduku Vasthu Sangrahalaya museum at Bantwal. ˙ and gunnies would have been easier to open and reseal than a mudi during the Baskets ˙ course of a journey but, overall, later European traders seem to have preferred sacks or gunnies and it is possible that rice was also packaged differently according to the consumer culture for which it was destined. For the domestic storage of rice see n.10 below. This combination of initial letters and the word length of six letters matches no well known Arabic or Judaeo Arabic term for a foodstuff; there are, however, two four letter

260

Appendix

5 And also for the travel provisions: four small 6 gunnies and two baskets of rice10 and two baskets of hard wheat11 and one basket 7 of coconuts12 and one basket of flour13 and 3 fa¯tiya chests of L[. . .]14 8 and one fa¯tiya chest of da¯dhı¯15 and one fa¯tiya chest of copper16 and iron,

10

11 12

13

14 15

16

possibilities. Ra¯naj or ra¯nj is an alternative Arabic term to narjı¯l, designating a “coconut.” Ra¯naj is used by al Mascudi in his description of the Maldives alongside narjı¯l “coconut” and apparently as an equivalent (cAli ibn Husayn al Mascudi, Muruj al Dhahab wa Maca¯din al Jawhar, French translation by B. de Meynard, B. and P. de Courteille, revised by C. Pellat as Les prairies d’or [Paris: Société Asiatique, 1962 79], vol. 1, 138). The term is widely found in dictionaries, including the Lisa¯n al Arab (s.v. r n j), and in Ibn al Baytar’s al Ja¯mi c (s.v. na¯rjı¯l). Al Qalqashandi’s later encyclopedic Subh al Acsha¯ usefully hints that narjı¯l belonged to mercantile vocabulary: “ra¯nj is jawz al Hind, merchants call it na¯rjı¯l” (Nawal Nasrallah, personal communication, 26 October 2016). Another possibility is that this is a loanword from Tulu or Kannada. Ra¯gi is finger millet (Eleusine coracana) and was widely grown as a staple in Karnataka; mainly con sidered a rural foodstuff, finger millet is nevertheless typical of this regional cuisine. The use of a gunny would also tally with the identification of a grain but see further discussion in Chapter 4, 116 7. For an overview of the millet issue see S. Weber and D. Fuller, “Millets and their Role in Early Agriculture,” Pragdhara 18 (2008), 69 90. Ethnographic reports indicate that in the domestic environment grains such as rice were stored in large circular bamboo baskets sealed with a layer of paddy straw and cowdung (Hanuru, Encyclopaedia, 147). As Goitein and Friedman note, Abraham uses the Yemeni Arabic term burr rather than the Egyptian Arabic qamh (India Traders, 602, n.45). Na¯rjı¯n identified in India˙ Traders, 662, n.11 as a variant spelling of na¯rjı¯l, “coconut” but not extensively discussed. The term is of Sanskrit origin from na¯rikela, ndrikera and passed (likely via Persian) into Arabic, where the term is found widely in the geographical and travel literature. See nn.9 and 61 for discussions of alternative terms and coconut scrapers; also entry under na¯rjı¯l in Friedman, Dictionary of Medieval Judeo Arabic, 495. Translated “a thin basket” in Goitein and Friedman’s English edition (India Traders, 662), zanbı¯l daqı¯q here means “one basket of flour,” the interpretation was corrected in the subsequent Hebrew translation, see Goitein and Friedman, Abraham, 203. Largely illegible, see n.8 in the preceding Hebrew transcription. Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 662) translate da¯dhı¯ as “lichen,” see explanation in 639, n.2. Lichens are known to have been eaten as a famine food and used as a source of yeast in different parts of the world; they also grow across South Asia. However, it is unclear why lichen would be transported in this context. In Sanskrit and many Indian languages da¯dı¯/da¯dhı¯ designates curds; however, curds are generally set in earthenware vessels and their transportation in a chest seems strange. The term also described a dizzying variety of botanical substances from St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum) via pine resin to mar ijuana. The best surveys are by Nawal Nasrallah, see her commentary to Ibn Sayyar al Warraq’s Kita¯b al Tabı¯kh (al Muzaffar ibn Nasr Ibn Sayyar al Warraq, Kita¯b al Ta¯bikh, English translation, introduction and commentary by Nawal Nasrallah as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens: Ibn Sayya¯r al Warra¯q’s Tenth century Baghdadi Cookbook [Leiden: Brill, 2007], 545 50) and more recently “Da¯dhı¯: In Search of the Mystery Date Wine Additive in Medieval Baghdad” (Petits Propos Culinaires 92 [2011], 36 51). The substance was cer tainly used by medieval Yemeni Jews as witnessed by a recipe for da¯dhı¯ wine from the genizah (S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 93], vol. 4, 260 and n.52, citing T S Arabic Box 43 f.71 p.c.). It may be relevant in this context that Ibn Khurdadhbih mentions da¯dhı¯, whatever it may be, as a product of “the southern regions,” that is from south India and the Bay of Bengal area (Kita¯b al Masa¯lik wa l Mama¯lik, Arabic edition by M.J. De Goeje [Leiden: Brill, 1967], 51). Given this uncer taintly I prefer to leave the term untranslated. Sufr. Terms for copper, brass and even bronze were often used interchangeably or at least ˙with an extreme lack of clarity across the Islamic world and the India traders were no exception (Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 555, n.11 which notes that sufr and nuha¯s are used almost interchangeably to refer to copper and brass). The luggage˙ list uses ˙

Appendix

261

9 and one fa¯tiya chest of the fishermen’s gear.17 ((One cloth))18 with iron 10 and other items,19 and one qartala20 basket of bread and 5 marı¯nas21 of ˙ vinegar

17

18

19

20 21

both sufr (here and Line 36) and nuha¯s (Lines 13 15) but it is unclear whether Abraham ˙ used˙these terms loosely or to designate specific metals or copper alloys. The situation in Malibarat is complicated further by south India’s well established tradition of bronze and high tin bronze manufacturing (bronze is an alloy of copper and tin) as well as Abraham’s own involvement in the metal trade and manufacturing which presuppos a professional awareness of metals. His workshop appears to have depended heavily on cullet sent from the Yemen which, as research indicates, would have consisted predominantly of brass (an alloy of copper and zinc). Paul Craddock and colleagues estimated that 90% of surviving copper alloy metalwork from the medieval Islamic world is technically brass due to the difficulty of obtaining tin in much of the Middle East (Paul T. Craddock, S.C. La Niece and D.R. Hook, “Brass in the Medieval Islamic World,” in 2,000 Years of Zinc and Brass, edited by P.T. Craddock [London: British Museum Press, 1998], 73). The term copper alloy is overly technical for a text such as the luggage list: how then to translate these terms? The mention of worked nuha¯s (nuha¯s macmul) later in the list opens one line of ˙ active ˙ in remanufacturing brass cullet from the interpretation. Since Abraham was Middle East I suggest that we read nuha¯s as brass, and therefore designate sufr as copper, ˙ bronze (copper alloyed with tin). ˙ with the proviso that it may have been Friedman hesitated between translating “a chest of fishermen’s gear,” or a “fishermen’s fa¯tiya” (Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 662, n.13). Abraham was certainly concerned with describing the nature of the containers and packaging in which his provisions and belongings traveled, and his decision to specify that one chest was a “fishermen’s chest” may have had some logic. However, as with the chest of firewood on Line 20 (see discussion in n.36 below), Abraham was generally more interested in what particular containers held. Given evidence for shipboard fishing during sailings and the importance of fish as a protein source I opt for the first translation; see discussion in Chapter 7, pp. 215 17. S¯ıma¯d. Goitein and Friedman interpret this as a “head kerchief,” i.e. a small piece of cloth, ˙here used for tying a bundle (India Traders, 662, n.14) and consequently translate this as “bundle.” I prefer to underline the textile character of the container and translate “cloth.” Adbash. Noted by Goitein and Friedman as of unknown meaning; however, as they suggest, this may simply represent a variant spelling of adba¯sh, the plural form of singular dabash, indicating “small items” or an assimilation of “l” before the solar letter “d” adbash = al dabash, possibly indicating smaller packages within this tied cloth (India Traders, 662, n.15). Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 662, n.16) point to Dozy (Supplément, vol. 2, 331a), “a flat basket of palm leaves.” Mara¯nı¯. Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 662, n.17) identify this as the plural of singular marı¯na, a type of container. The term is not found in Arabic dictionaries but is also present in other India Book documents and later documents from the Red Sea port of Qusayr al Qadim. In these sources marı¯nas are closely associated with the trade in zayt ha¯r or “hot oil,” ˙ a type of lamp oil commonly identified with linseed oil. As Goitein and Friedman indicate, at some time in the 1130s Joseph b. Bundar wrote to Fustat from Aden ordering a huge range of supplies including two marı¯nas of “hot oil.” The same commodity in the same quantity and in the same container is also mentioned in an unpublished genizah document giving another Adenese order to Cairo (IB VI, 37, Lines 19 20). Friedman was the first to identify the same term in documents from Qusayr (425, n.54). The discussion has been continued by Andreas Kaplony (Fünfundzwanzig arabische Geschäftsdokumente aus dem Rotmeer Hafen al Quṣayr al Qad¯ım [P.QuseirArab. II]: Edition, Übersetzung und Kommentar (7./13. jh.) [Leiden: Brill, 2014], 7). However, his identification of this vessel type with two handled dark green glazed jugs should be treated cautiously as these small domestic vessels are unlikely to have been the same as those mentioned in commercial consignments; indeed, the frequent mention of these vessels in pairs suggests that they were large commercial containers for transport by pack animal. Nor can we assume that marı¯nas were ceramic vessels: leather is also a possibility. Nevertheless, marı¯nas do appear to be particular to Egypt and the Red Sea region and a wide variety of large ceramic jars were produced in Upper Egypt so the clue to this vessel type may lie there.

262

Appendix

11 and also one bamboo fa¯tiya chest of locks and one basket [of locks]22 12 and one meal carrier,23 separate in straw,24 and one table jug, 13 separate in straw, and one basket of worked25 brass26 14 and another basket of worked brass and another basket 15 of worked brass, large, and 3 small baskets of 16 iron and stuff,27 and one salla28 basket of glassware29 and two fa¯tiya chests 17 of glassware and two stone ta¯jins in hay and two stone 18 pots and one salla basket of˙ china30 and 4 ratliya31 jars filled with ˙ 22

23

24

25

26 27

28 29

30

31

When containers were empty they were specified to be so; see empty (fa¯righ) vessels listed in Lines 21 and 23. I therefore make the assumption that this basket (termed zanbı¯l) contained further locks. Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 663, n.21) point to a reference in a document from the Mediterranean to the ha¯mil being “a contrivance consisting of several compartments and a handle in ˙ which various warm dishes could be brought home,” in effect a tiffin. The fact that this container was packed in hay suggests that this was a stone vessel. Tibn. Goitein and Friedman translate “straw” here and on Line 17 “hay” for hashı¯sh. These details about the packing material underline the fragility of soapstone and other stone vessels. Stone vessels were produced at a wide variety of locations across the Islamic world, including in the Egyptian Eastern Desert and the Yemen, and Abraham’s vessels were likely of Yemeni origin. For Yemeni production and supply to Aden see discussion in Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande: état et commerce sous les Sultans Rasulides du Yémen (626 858/1229 1454) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010), 353, n.255. I translate the Arabic term macmul found in Lines 13 15 as “worked” rather than “manufactured” as given in Goitein and Friedman’s translation (India Traders, 663). The distinction between macmul and ghayr macmul in relation to wood and brass may be similar to that made for gold, namely gold shaped by a smith, masa¯gha, and that which was unshaped, ghayr masa¯gha (Goitein and Friedman, India˙ Traders, 227, n.6). Nuha¯s. See n.16 above for an˙ explanation of why nuha¯s is translated in this context as “brass.” ˙ term used is hawa¯’ij. For the huge range ˙of things this designated, Goitein and The ˙ Friedman (India Traders, 663, n.25) point to Werner Diem and Hans Peter Radenberg, A Dictionary of the Arabic Materials of S.D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1994), 50. Goitein and Friedman read “small items”; my translation opts for the overtly colloquial “stuff,” stressing the broad, unspecified nature of these things. See OED Online “stuff n.” definition 1.g. “property, esp. movable property, household goods or utensils; furniture; more definitely stuff of money, stuff of household.” In this context the term seems to be used in much the same sense as adbash in Line 10, a shorthand way to indicate that these containers held yet more movable property. Salla, common Arabic term for a basket. Zaja¯j is understood to designate manufactured glass items, specifically tablewares and containers as imported to India by Abraham. Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 663) translate “glasses” which does not give quite the same sense of the variety of vessel shapes and types encompassed. See Table 2, 82 5, and n.4 in this Appendix for further details. S¯ını¯. I retain Goitein and Friedman’s translation “china” (India Traders, 663) whilst ˙underlining that this is likely to have been a true Chinese or Far Eastern high fired ceramic, in effect porcelain. See extensive discussion in Elizabeth Lambourn and Philip I. Ackerman Lieberman, “Encounters with Disruptive Substances: Chinese Porcelain and the Material Taxonomies of Medieval Rabbinic Law,” The Medieval Globe 2, no. 2 (2016), 199 238. Rata¯lı¯. Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 663) simply translate “jars.” However, in ˙the Middle East the ratl was a liquid measure roughly equivalent in the Fatimid ˙ period to a pint, and it appears to have given its name to a vessel type, the ratliya ˙

Appendix

263

19 oil32 and humū da33 and one bottle of wine34 and one trap ˙ bottles of oil and one fa¯tiya chest of [fire]wood36 20 for rats35 ˙and six 21 and six empty bottles and one bottle of soap

32

33

34

35

36

(pl. arta¯l). Ratliya is therefore often translated as “pint flask.” These jars, like the ˙ were glass ˙ bottles, containers made in Lakhaba outside Aden; see thorough discus sion in Roxani E. Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean Trade: 150 Years in the Life of a Medieval Arabian Port (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 61 and n.124. Salı¯t. A general term for oil but often used specifically in the Yemen with reference ˙ to sesame; see Piamenta, Dictionary, 229. Sesame was also highly valued in South Asia; on this and other Indian vegetable oils see K.T. Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 193 7 and reg ular mentions across Part Three of Om Prakash’s Cultural History of India (New Delhi: New Age International, 2004). Like Friedman I read this as four bottles containing a mixture of oil and humuda. ˙ In India Traders (663, n.31) he translates this last term as “sour juice,” a ˙sensible assumption given the trilitteral root and the definition in Dozy (Supplément, vol. 1, 323). I prefer not to translate this term, but see more extensive discussion in Chapter 8 pp. 235 8. Nabı¯dh. Technically the term refers to a broad class of drinks, “wines,” made from a range of ingredients including honey, dates, fruits, raisins and even coconuts, which might be fermented, and thus alcoholic, or not, see EI2 “Khamr” and “Nabıdh.” However, the Yemen also made its own varieties of nabı¯dh and one, incorporating grape juice, honey and water, was deemed ritually acceptable in an early thirteenth century responsum issued by the Head of Egyptian Jewry, Abraham Maimuni. It is this nabı¯dh, a form of grape wine, that I propose was carried here; see full discussion and further references in Chapter 5, pp. 149 50. Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 663) translate fı¯ra¯n (sing. fa’r) as “mice.” However, in a maritime context rats would have been far more prevalent and a greater problem. In Arabic the term is often used interchangeably and, given the context of usage evident here, I prefer this translation. For fa¯tiya khashab I translate “a fa¯tiya chest containing [fire]wood” rather than the more ambiguous “a fa¯tiya of wood” which can imply that this chest was made of wood (India Traders, 663). No containers are listed without their contents, except in two cases where they are specified to be empty: it therefore makes sense to interpret this as a chest that was filled with wood. Abraham does not use hatab, ˙ the specific Arabic term for firewood. However, the more generic khashab ˙found here is also used in the sense of “firewood” in the late sixteenth century A¯’ı¯n i Akbarı¯ which describes the post of the na¯khuda¯ khashab who was specifically responsible on board large ships for supplying passengers with firewood or other fuels (hayma) and straw (ka¯h) (Abu l Fazl cAllami, A¯’ı¯n i Akbarı¯. English transla tion by H. Blochmann, edited by D.C. Phillott as The A’in i Akbari: A Gazetteer and Administrative Manual of Akbar’s Empire and Past History of India [Kolkata: Asiatic Society, 2010], vol. 1, 290).

264

Appendix

22 and two barniyya37 jars of citrus38 and ginger and 5 waterskins39 of mango 23 and two waterskins of hū t fish40 and two waterskins of citrus and 5 empty ˙ waterskins 24 and the salla basket of bread and one large tabaq41 and 3 ladles42 and one large ˙ 37

38

39

40

41

42

Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 663) translate “earthenware jars.” However, the term barniyya designates any pot or jar, usually with a wide mouth and used for storage. These could be plain earthenware or glazed and came in many sizes. Lı¯mun. As with sufr and nuha¯s, the translation of the term is challenging due to Arabic’s relaxed ˙ l¯ımun, laymun, ˙ use of the terms lı¯m, lı¯ma and lı¯mu and the complex hybridization of citruses themselves. Besides the citron (Citrus medica L.) there are only two other so called “true” species of citrus, the mandarin (Citrus reticulata Blanco) and the pomelo (Citrus maxima): all other cultivated citruses, including lemons and limes, are hybrids and backcrosses. A considerable variety of citruses were known in South Asia and, as Marijke van der Veen has observed, without texts giving “detailed descriptions of the fruits or the plants, it is impossible to know for certain which botanical species is meant” (Consumption, Trade and Innovation: Exploring the Botanical Remains from the Roman and Islamic Ports at Quseir al Qadim, Egypt [Frankfurt am Main: Africa Magna Verlag, 2011], 89). Conventionally, how ever, English translators render laymun or lı¯mun as “lemon,” and lı¯m, lı¯ma and lı¯mu as “lime.” Etymological analysis does not substantially clarify the question (Tom Hoogervorst, “If Only Plants Could Talk . . .: Reconstructing Pre modern Biological Translocations in the Indian Ocean,” in The Sea, Identity and History: From the Bay of Bengal to the South China Sea, edited by Satish Chandra and Himanshu Prabha Ray [Manohar: New Delhi, 2013], 75 80). Genizah documents from India use both terms but it is unclear how specific this identification was. In the light of these problems it is wiser therefore to think of limun as “lemon/lime” or more generically still as “citrus” and it is this option that I adopt here. Jahla is commonly translated “waterskin” and appears as such in India Traders. However, ˙ worth noting that the term sometimes described, in more recent times at least, large it is ceramic containers. Eric Staples reports that during the voyage of the Jewel of Muscat ship to Singapore in 2010, the Omani crew used the term gahla (jı¯m pronounced here as a hard “g”) to describe their ceramic water jars while referring to waterskins proper as gurbas (personal communication, 5 November 2016). Literally “fishes,” h¯ta ı ¯n (sing. hut), undoubtedly preserved fish of some sort. Ostensibly, h¯ıta¯n ˙ dialectal ˙marker since in Andalusi and Maghrebi Arabic, as in Yemeni ˙ is a straightforward Arabic, hut largely replaced the more common term samak (pl. asma¯k, sumuk, sima¯k) to ˙ any type of fish. However, the lack of care implied in the use of the generic term designate “fish” sits poorly with a milieu where fish was prized as a foodstuff and where Jewish dietary laws applied. Joseph b. Abraham’s earlier memorandum on T S NS 324.114 (IB III, 8) in fact differentiates explicitly between sı¯r and hut, suggesting that in the western Indian Ocean these terms described different fish species or˙preparations. There is good evidence for identifying sı¯r with different mackerel species which were salted and dried (Elizabeth Lambourn, “Seer, Kan‘ad and Shir Mahi: Fish and Foodways in the Medieval Economy of the Western Indian Ocean,” paper delivered at the conference on “Oman and the Indian Ocean: Interaction and Exchange,” University of Chicago, 29 October 2013) and so hut must be a different fish. In a fifteenth century Cairene source hut is listed as one of thirty˙ species of edible fish but has ˙ B. Lewicka, Food and Foodways of Medieval Cairenes: not been conclusively identified (Paulina Aspects of Life in an Islamic Metropolis of the Eastern Mediterranean [Leiden: Brill, 2011], 212). Translated “large round tray” by Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 663, n.40), they suggest Piamenta’s record of the Yemeni Arabic use of the term, namely “flat wicker tray” used for serving bread, may be appropriate here. However, the term can also refer to metal trays used for cooking bread or indeed for serving rice. Other usages describe flat iron or earthenware tabaqs being used for baking thin bread (ruqa¯q) or for toasting seeds or grains ˙ Warraq, Kita¯b al Tabı¯kh, Eng. trans. as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens, 697). (Ibn Sayyar al Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 663, n.41) indicate that the vocalization and meaning is unknown and thus leave mrb. However, their footnote points to J.G. Hava, Arabic English Dictionary (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1951), 236, where marabb is defined as a “gatherer,” i.e. a form of ladle, and this is the definition retained here. For the tableware assemblage this belonged to see Chapter 4.

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25 ladle. And of the qasca43 bowls: two qascas and also one large ˙ ca and two old qas ˙ cas. 26 qasca and one new qas ˙ ˙ 27 And of the fa¯tiya chests: 4 fa¯tiya chests˙of textiles.44 28 And two barniyya jars of clarified butter45 and 4 legs for a bed46 and two old 29 qascas and 4 new qascas and 3 bundles47 of pots ˙ 48 cabin door.49 ˙ one undecorated 30 and 43

44

45

46 47 48 49

Identified by Friedman as a type of wooden bowl “manufactured from an Indian timber of a particularly good quality,” Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 326, n.33 with further references. Thiya¯b. Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 664) prefer the translation “clothing.” However, thiya¯b literally means “cloaks” and can be used to refer to textiles more generally, for example in Ibn al Mujawir’s description of disembarkation at Aden (see Chapter 1, pp. 18 19). In this instance I prefer the broader sense of the term. Samn. Goitein and Friedman give “melted butter” in the main translation and “ghee” in the footnote (India Traders, 664, n.43). The more technical term “clarified butter,” used today, helpfully underlines the substantial alteration to butter that this processing pro duced, enabling butter products to be stored for considerable periods without going rancid. “If carefully enclosed in skins, while still hot, [ghee] may be preserved for many years without requiring the aid of salt or other preservatives”; see George Watt, The Commercial Products of India, Being an Abridgement of “The Dictionary of the Economic Products of India” (London: J. Murray, 1908), 479. Sarı¯r, bed or day bed. Shipboard furniture is discussed in Chapter 7, pp. 208 11. Bara¯khis (sing. barkhas). Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 664, n.45) point to Piamenta, Dictionary, 25. Ghayr macmul. I understand “unworked” in the sense of undecorated or plain rather than “unfinished” as given by Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 664). Ba¯b balı¯j (billı¯j). Written here B L I J in the Judaeo Arabic. The rarity of the term has caused enduring confusion among editors and translators about its meaning, derivation and above all spelling. However, as a loanword and a specialist term multiple vocalizations likely co existed. I retain here the form most widely attested in the Genizah documents: namely with an initial short “a.” Goitein and Friedman vocalize this bilı¯j; however, a different option is clearly indicated in two other documents: one, IB I, 33, gives an initial short “a,” thus balı¯j (India Traders, 260, Line 9 and n.8), while IB IV, 30, writes ba¯lij with a long “a” (S.D. Goitein and Mordechai A. Friedman, with the assistance of Amir Ashur, Halfon the Traveling Merchant Scholar: Cairo Geniza Documents, India Book IV/B [Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute and the Rabbi David Moshe and Amalia Rosen Foundation, 2013], 169, Line 4). It is as balı¯j that the term is listed in Friedman, Dictionary of Medieval Judeo Arabic, 54. Although rare in medieval Arabic dictionaries a different vocalization of the term appears in Majid al Din Muhammad b. Yacqub al Firuzabadi’s Qamus al Muhı¯t, where it is described as mu carrab, that is a loanword into Arabic, and vocalized in the same way as sikkı¯n (knife) (Cairo: al Hiy’a al Misriyya al cAma li l Kitab, 1398/1978, vol. 2, 178) (Eric Staples, personal communication, 29 May 2017). According to al Firuzabadi then, B L I J would be read billı¯j with a long final “i” and shadda over the lam. Written bilı¯j (without shadda), the term features also in L. Marcel Devic’s Dictionnaire étymologique des mots français d’origine orientale (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1876), 84 5 and Dozy’s Supplément (vol. 1, 108) on the basis of its appearance in an early edition of the Kita¯b c Aja¯’ib al Hind (Arabic edition by P.A. van der Lith with French translation by L. Marcel Devic as Livre des merveilles de l’Inde par le Capitaine Bozorg fils de Chariyâr de Râmhormoz [Leiden: Brill, 1883 6], 33, 94, 141 2). The term is included in the edited text of a related compilation, the Sahı¯h min Akhba¯r al Biha¯r, recently identified as gathered in early Fatimid Egypt (Abu Imran Musa ibn Rabah al Awsi al Sirafi, al Sah ¯ıh min Akhba¯r al Biha¯r wa cAja¯’ibiha¯, Arabic edition by Yusuf al Hadi [Damascus: Dar Iqra’ li l tiba‘a wa l nasr wa l tawzi, 1326 (h)/2006]), however, al Hadi’s is in fact a composite of the two collections and balı¯j only features in stories from the cAja¯’ib. The term can also be identified in the much later A¯’ı¯n i Akbarı¯ (see Chapter 7, pp. 193 4). The source word from which balı¯j/billı¯j originated has still not been

266

Appendix

31 And with the na¯khuda¯50 Abu l Sh[..]c FYDM: one mihlab bowl51 ˙ 32 and one MWJH52 and 4 qasca bowls ˙ 33 [. . .] planks for the cabin and 3 planks for beds ¯ N53 and one plank for a kursı¯54 34 and 4 CI¯DA 35 [.] and six [. . .]CYA with other stuff.55 36 And of the copper:56 one table jug and one ta¯jin and one basin and ewer ˙

50

51

52

53

54 55 56

conclusively determined, although the French Orientalist L. Marcel Devic was the first to suggest a derivation from Malay bı¯liq “cabinet, pièce d’un logis, pavillon” (Dictionnaire étymologique, 84 5), a suggestion later picked up by Goitein (Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, 315 and 481, n.15) and reiterated with expanded references in Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, 577, n.28. The earliest written attestations of the term in Malay classical texts of around the fourteenth century postdate the earliest Arabic occurrences by almost four centuries (Annabel Gallop, personal communication, 15 May 2011), thus confusing understanding of the direction of borrowing. This discussion also overlooks any possible relationship to a cluster of terms sharing the same trilitteral root and featured in Classical Arabic dictionaries. Some editorial decisions have confused the matter even more. In the early French translation and Arabic edition of the Kita¯b cAja¯’ib al Hind, Van Der Lith and Devic decided to correct the term B L I J found in the Aya Sofia 3306 manuscript they used (a thirteenth century copy of an earlier manuscript dated 404 AH/1013) to B L N J and vocalized it balanj (Livre des merveilles, 194). However, the India Book examples, together with al Firuzabadi’s dictionary entry and later Yemeni instances, now confirm that the Aya Sofia manuscript’s writing B L I J is correct. In spite of this, the reading balanj has persisted in several later publications including al Sharouni (Kita¯b cAja¯’ib al Hind, Arabic edition by Yousef al Sharouni [London: Riad El Rayyes Books, 1990]), who nevertheless accurately points to the term being written B L I J in earlier texts; also the composite edition by Yusuf al Hadi of al Sahı¯h min Akhba¯r al Biha¯r (72, 124 and 165) and in Dionisius Agius, Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 370 who suggests a Hindi origin in the term palang for a bed or a bedstead. The term na¯khuda¯ is very common in the Arabic and Persian of the Indian Ocean and derives very directly from the Sanskrit equivalent, see the extensive discussion of this term and bibliography in Goitein and Friedman, India Traders (121 53, “Nakhudas and Shipowners”). Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 664, n.48) suggest mahbal, a term of unknown mean ing. However, given Abraham’s tendency to transpose letters˙I suggest that the term might be read mihlab, “a rectangular bowl made from sycamore wood for keeping yeast” (Ibn Sayyar al ˙ Kita¯b al Tabı¯kh, Eng. trans. as Annals of the Caliphs’ Kitchens, 88). The item is listed Warraq, alongside other wooden objects, strengthening the possibility of this interpretation. The letters are clearly legible and Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 664, n.49) suggest the reading mawjah, although without a clear indication of what this object might be. Another M W J H is mentioned in IB III, 12 (ibid., 619 and n.31), as they note, alongside further qas ca bowls. While Goitein and Friedman appear to suggest a relationship with the Japanese ˙term moxa, designating mugwort or Artemisia vulgaris, there is no evidence for the presence of Japanese loanwords in either the Arabic or the Indic languages of the Indian Ocean at this period, and this identification, while striking, is tentative at best. In the first English translation Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 664) read “four rods”; the revised Hebrew edition and translation leaves the term untranslated as “4 [ . . .]” (Abraham, 202, n.7). Here I prefer to leave CIDAN as an unidentified term. These objects are listed along with wooden items but it is unclear what they might have been. In Arabic a kursı¯ can designate a chair, and this is the spirit in which the term was translated by Goitein and Friedman as “a stool board” (India Traders, 664, n.52). For hawa¯’ij and the colloquial translation “stuff” see discussion under n.27 above. Sufr,˙ translated here as copper, with the proviso that it may have been bronze (copper ˙alloyed with tin); see discussion in n.16 above.

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267

37 and 3 ta¯lam platters.57 20 carpets58 and one iron lamp 38 and two strips of leather and its C[..]L,59 the fara¯sila60 [. . .] ¯ SI¯62 and one mı¯za¯r wrap63 [. . .], 39 and one coconut scraper61 and seven [..]A C 64 ¯ [. . . . . .] six [. . .]A , with the na¯khuda¯ Abu l Faraj. 57

58

59

60

61

62 63

64

Tawa¯lim (sing. ta¯lam). Goitein and Friedman’s English translation vocalized ta¯lim (India Traders, 664 and n.53). Linguistic analysis indicates that ta¯lam is a loanword into Judaeo Arabic from Malayalam, via the local Tulu language of the Mangalore area, and desig nates a particular type of south Indian flat platter typically used to serve rice (see Lambourn, “Borrowed Words,” 220 6). This Arabic broken plural form was typically used for nouns with a quadrilateral root, often for non Arabic loanwords. See also Friedman, Dictionary of Medieval Judeo Arabic, 911. Busut. Goitein makes clear that the term, mainly found, as here, in the plural, designates a rug˙ or carpet. While other terms for carpet tunfusa, namat could also designate bedding and hangings, this term apparently carries no such ambiguity (Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 4, 126). A four letter word with the central two characters illegible, the final he is identified as rendering the Arabic masculine possessive particle hu relating to the preceding item, the sı¯ratayn or “two strips of leather,” and is thus translated “its.” It is unclear what this C[..]L might be. Written al fara¯sila. A fara¯sila was a measure of weight, usually one twentieth of a baha¯r, therefore approximately 15 lb (Goitein and Friedman, India Traders, xxviii and 173, n.31 which refers back to an observation by Goitein that this was the approximate weight he had noted in genizah documents). The passage detailing the item that had this weight is entirely illegible. Mihakk/mahakk. Goitein and Friedman (India Traders, 664, n.56) translate tentatively ˙ comb,” ˙ and point to a number of dictionary definitions. While the term indeed “steel suggests some kind of toothed implement it is clear that this describes a common kitchen utensil used to scrape out the flesh of mature coconuts and found across the coconut’s range. Consequently, I use the term “coconut scraper.” Utensils of different forms and materials are found across the Pacific and Indian Ocean; all, however, consist of a low wooden stool, upon which the person doing the scraping sits, with a projecting scraper, often of metal, attached to one end. In spite of their ubiquity, coconut scrapers are poorly researched, but see Phil Iddison, “Katai: Coconut Scrapers,” in Food and Material Culture: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2013, edited by Mark McWilliams (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2014), 175 83 and figs. 8 and 9 showing brass and wooden peetas from Kerala. Similar implements are documented among the Bene Israel of western India, known in that context as morli (the board) and khawni (the blade) (Orla Slapak [ed.], The Jews of India: A Story of Three Communities [Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1995], 104). Five letter word ending in alef, samek and yod, item unidentified. The final letter is indistinct. A final nun rather than a resh would give the alternative reading mı¯za¯n, “scales” as in weighing scales. However, as the focus of the list is on containers Goitein and Friedman’s reading mı¯za¯r, “wrap” (India Traders, 664 and n.58), seems most likely, another textile bundle containing luggage. Five letter word, approximately three missing letters with final alef and ayin, item unidentified.

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Index

A¯’ı¯n i Akbarı¯, 184: definition of balı¯j, 193 4 Abraham Ben Yiju: arrival in Malibarat, 52, 63; Ashu conjectured to be his Indian wife, 37; based in Mangalore, 55, 68 9; biographies of, 10, 39, 41, 242 3; death, 241; defense of children’s legitimacy, 60; documents associated with, 31, 242; dress, 99 100; extended Indian family, 61 2, 241 2; family background and education, 41 2, 220; final years in Egypt, 241 2; his afterlives, 102, 242 3; household orders, Tables 1 and 2, 71 6, 82 5; Ifriqiyan connections, 39 40; Indian household, 67; intermediary in east west trade, 53; medical prescriptions copied by, 219 20; return to Aden (1140), 25; return to Aden (1149), 26, 29, 240; suhba relationships ˙ ˙ practices, in Yemen, 50 2; writing 100 2 Abu l Khayr ibn al Minqar (Abraham’s cousin): sails with Bomma from Aden, 72, 83; trades in India, 42 accommodation. See lodging Aden: absence of formal travel infrastructure in, 47; commodity shortages in, 97; described by al Muqaddasi, 48; disembarkation at, described by Ibn al Mujawir, 197; Iranian presences in, 50, 125; Jewish merchant networks in, 50; rise as entrepôt, 48; routes from Dhofar, 215; sailing seasons from, 52, 218 afa¯wı¯h (spice condiments). See also Table 1, 71 6; in household orders, 93 Akhba¯r al Sı¯n wa l Hind. See Notices of China and India Alfasi, Isaac b. Jacob: accepts raisin infusions as substitutes for grape wine, 148; on use of shortened Full Grace, 142

288

Allami, Abu l Fazl. See A¯’ı¯n i Akbarı¯ Allan b. Hassun: career in India trade, 43; provisioning at Kollam, 168, 184 Amram Gaon: opinion on use of raisin infusions during Passover, 146 Anı¯s al Hujja¯j: advice to carry personal water supplies, 173; on chulha¯ da¯nı¯ (hearth container), 183; on poor quality of water from ships’ tanks (finta¯s), 173; ˙ syrup to use of sour juice or pomegranate treat water, 237 Appadurai, Arjun: on potential and limitations of the social lives of things, 27 Argo Navis (constellation of). See al Safı¯na Ashu: conversion and manumission, 37; debate about possible na¯yar identity, 61; described as the proselyte of Tuluva, 37; identified as Abraham’s Indian wife, 37; purchased from her mistress, 59 Ashur, Amir: transcription and Arabic transliteration of the luggage list, 252, 255 7 Assemblies (of al Hariri). See Maqa¯ma¯t (of al Hariri) al Awsi al Sirafi, Musa. See also Truth of the Stories and Wonders of the Seas; compiles Indian Ocean stories in Egypt, 44 c c

baggage. See luggage Bagnall, Roger, 237 Balberg, Mira, 131, 160 balı¯j. See also cabin(s); Bomma’s use of, for return to Malibarat, 173, 189 91; described in A¯’ı¯n i Akbarı¯, 193 4; earliest uses of term in The Book of the Wonders of India, 194 5; etymology, 265 6; in genizah sources, 196; Malay etymology posited by Devic, 202; pl. balalı¯j in fifteenth century Yemeni source, 196; vocalization as balı¯j, 265; vocalization as

Index billı¯j, 265; wooden components for, in Abraham’s luggage, 193, 202, 265 6 Bama. See Bomma bed(s): bedsteads (s´ayya¯) recommended on ships in The Wishing Tree of Practical Knowledge, 210; components and planks for sarı¯rs carried in the luggage, 29, 208, 265 6; conjectural reassembly of bed components and planks, 210 11; De Laval on merchants traveling with their own beds, 207; Goitein on use of chests or benches for sleeping, 208; use of daybeds on deck, 209, 211; widely used across Middle East, 210 Ben Ezra, Abraham: Book of Medical Experiences as layman’s medical guide, 221 Ben Yiju (family): departure for Sicily (1148), 40; origins of name, 40 Berenike, 181, 237 Birkat ha mazon. See Full Grace After Meals Bomma: Amitav Ghosh’s study of, 11; differing vocalizations of his name, 11; expenses for furnishing cabin, 173, 189 91; greeted in letter from Madmun, 67; in Egypt (1150s), 29, 241 Book of the Wonders of India: earliest use of term balı¯j in, 194 5; food offering of rice, 181; Maqa¯ma¯t illustrations added to French edition, 192; relationship to Truth of the Stories and Wonders of the Seas, 44 5 brazier(s): as chulha¯ da¯nı¯ (hearth container) in Anı¯s al Hujja¯j, 183; as ka¯nun in Middle East, 214; missing from the luggage list, 214; representations of, in the Ni cmat na¯ma, 214 bread. See also food(s), ritual; Full Grace After Meals; millet(s); as civilizational marker, 116; as religious medium within material religion, 151 2; central to the Sabbath, 132 3, 140; daily and divine, staple and ritual food, 140; essential to Mediterranean maritime provisioning, 179; from the five grains, halakic status of, 142; from the five grains, mnemonic power of, 144; millet breads common in Yemen, 142; rice bread used by Jews in Khuzistan, 143; two baskets of, in Abraham’s luggage, 133, 261, 264; unavailable at Honnavar, 115 bullrush millet. See millet(s) butter, clarified: as samn, two jars in the luggage list, 265;˙essential fringe to rice in Malibarat, 110 11; long shelf life of, 265

289 cabin(s). See also balı¯j; advantages of, 218; as gṛha and mandira in The Wishing Tree of Practical Knowledge, 195 8; construction materials for, in The Wishing Tree of Practical Knowledge, 202; in representations of al Safı¯na (Argo Navis), 201; likened to the grave by Ibn al Mujawir, 197; seclusion of women in, 205 6; termed dabusas on Gulf dhows, 197; variety of deck top configurations, 198; within partially decked ships, 198 201 Cambridge University Library, 9, 242 caravanserai. See lodging chair(s). See also postural culture(s); as lawh kursı¯ in Abraham’s luggage, 208, 266; in˙ Persianate and Indic culture, 125 6; use of kursı¯s at Honnavar, 122 Chaudhuri, Mamata, 195 cheese(s). See also Table 1, 71 6; Abraham receives kosher (hala¯l) cheese, 156, 159; ˙ Cretan and Sicilian, imported to Egypt, 155; Jewish demand for rennet free product, 155 6; two thirteenth century kosher certificates, 156 7 Chojnacki, Christine, 168 Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, The: on fishing on board ship, 216 chutney(s). See pickle(s) citrus(es): bactericidal properties of, 238; challenges of translating terms lı¯mun and lı¯m, 264; eaten salted with green ginger at Honnavar, 107; juiced limes excavated at Qusayr, 237 8; oil used to seal fresh citrus juice, 238; salted, sent from Malibarat to Aden, 119; two jars of citrus and ginger in Abraham’s luggage, 264; two waterskins of, in the luggage list, 238, 264 Clifford, James: dwelling in traveling, 19; traveling in dwelling, 44 climate. See Medieval Warm Period Clunas, Craig, 30, 162 coconut(s): archaeological evidence from Qusayr, 177 8; as sources of potable water, 176 7; basket of, in the luggage list, 260; coconut scraper (mihakk li ˙ l narjı¯n) in the luggage list, 267; cultivation and consumption in South Asia, 119 20; extension of cultivation in western Indian Ocean, 120; Gulf imports of, 120; Ibn Battuta on aphrodisiac qualities of, 120; possible reading of Line 4 RA as ra¯naj, 259; termed na¯rjı¯n in the luggage list, 260; termed ra¯nj in Arabic,

290

Index

259 60; use in maritime provisioning, 176 8; water as rehydration solution, 178 commensality: Hindu Muslim, legislated in the Fath al Mu’ı¯n, 58; in Malibarat, described by Ibn Battuta, 57 commodity histories: expanded understanding of, in The Social Life of Things, 27; of raisins and raisin infusions, 145 9; of sugar, 225; of vinegar, neglected, 233; of wheat, 134 7; of wine, 136 8; rare in history of medicine, 226 core carbohydrate and fringe principle: aids analysis of Abraham’s luggage, 111 12; aids analysis of two contemporary menus, 108 11; principle identified by Sidney Mintz, 109 correspondence. See also ink; paper; as locus of distributed personhood, 101; central to suhba, 101; mercantile, subject matter of, ˙91; ˙ typical formats of, 3 dabash. See also luggage; English translation as luggage, 19 20; etymology, 259; plural forms, 261 da¯dhı¯: one fa¯tiya chest in Abraham’s luggage, 260; translated as lichen in India Traders, 260; varied meanings and resistance to translation, 239, 260 Dahfattan. See Dharmadom dairy: as part of elite rice spice dairy assemblage, 118; concludes court meal in Ma¯nasolla¯sa, 110; last course of Honnavar dinner, 107; separation from meat in Judaism, 112 13 Danet, Brenda, 243 deck houses. See cabin(s) Description of Cities, Indian and Persian, 56 Dharmadom: as destination of household order, 75; under Musikas, 54 dhurra. See millet(s) dietetics. See food(s), medicinal dining: Indic, importance of ta¯lam, 112; postural cultures of, 122 6; postural cultures within the Jewish community, 125; use of table and chairs at Honnavar, 122 dining mat(s). See also postural culture(s); Tables 1 and 2, 71 6, 82 5; close association with mobility, 125; natc and has¯ır in household orders, 93, 124˙ 5; ˙sourced ˙ from Berbera and Abyssinia, 124 distributed object: Gell’s definition of, 20; gunny as, 186; luggage as, 20 1, 30 1

distributed personhood: definition of, in anthropology, 102; of Abraham Ben Yiju through documents and scholarship, 242 3; of Abraham Ben Yiju through his correspondence, 102 documentary genizah: estimated size of, 9; importance of India Book documents, 10 11; materiality of, 24, 243 5; potential for study of religious practices, 133 Doležalová, Lucie, 30 dukhn. See millet(s) Eco, Umberto, 30 Ellenblum, Ronnie, 49, 135, 250 Fandarayna. See Pantalayini Kollam Fath al Mu’ ¯ın. See Macbari, Zayn al Din Fatimids: circulation of information about India, 44 5; droughts and famines in Egypt, 49; effect of droughts on wheat exports, 135; in Ifriqiya, 40 1; missions to South Asia, 15; oceanic policy, 48 9; relations with Yemen, 48; routes to the Yemen, 45 6 fa¯tiya (pl. fawa¯tı¯), chest(s): etymology, 258; of bamboo, in the luggage list, 262; thirteen in the luggage, 2 Fengshi Gaoli Tujing (Illustrated Record of an Embassy to Korea in the Xuanhe Reign period). See Xu Jing Firdaws al Hikma fı¯ l Tibb. See al Tabari firebox(es). See brazier(s) firewood: fa¯tiya chest of, in Abraham’s luggage, 263; loading mentioned in Kuvalayama¯la¯, 184; provisioned at Kollam, 184; responsibility of the na¯khuda¯ khashab, 184 fish: al burı¯, 215; core protein for coastal communities, 111; extensive discussion in the Ma¯nasolla¯sa, 111; hut (pl. h¯ıta¯n), ˙ etymology and dialectal use, 264;˙ identification of sı¯r fish, 264; shı¯r mahı¯ (Chanos chanos), 217; two waterskins of h¯ıta¯n in the luggage list, 264 ˙ fishing: fa¯tiya chest of fishing gear, in Abraham’s luggage, 261; on board ship, described by Cosmas Indicopleustes, 216; on board ship, described by Ibn Battuta, 216; on board ship, in Pingzhou Tabletalk, 216; wealth of Mediterranean archaeology, 215; weights and hook recovered from Belitung wreck, 216 Flood, Finbarr Barry, 12, 100, 102

Index flour: Nasir i Khusraw provisions at Aydhab, 135; one basket in the luggage list, 133, 260 food culture(s): cult of rice in South Asia, 116 17; elite nature of rice spice dairy assemblage, 118; Hindu Muslim differences in Kerala, 126; Indic sources, archaeological, 105; Indic sources, written, 106; Jewish, 112 13; medicine, dietetics and cuisine inseparable in medieval period, 224 5; millet complex in South Asia, 116 17; millets, centrality in Yemeni diet, 134 5; of acculturated Middle Eastern elites in Malibarat, 126 8; postural frontiers in the western Indian Ocean, 122 6; premodern, conservatism of, 99; sensory dimensions of, 121 2; shifting frontiers in Indian Ocean, 118 19, 180; translation to maritime environment, 111 12 food(s): mnemonic power of, discussed by Sutton, 99 food(s), medicinal. See also food(s), sour; advantages over complex drugs, 234, 236; antiemetic fruits and antinauseants recommended in Ibn Sina, 227 8; medicine, dietetics and cuisine inseparable in medieval period, 224 5; sugar as, 221, 225; vinegar as, 230 2; within Hippocratic Galenic humoral system, 224 5; work of Waines and Marín on, 224 5 food(s), ritual: adaptability in translocation, 141 4, 146 8; central place of bread and wine in Jewish ritual, 132 3; complex overlap with staple foods, 127, 140, 142; emergence of rice as ritual food in South Asia, 116; grape wine preferred for the Kiddush, 148; high status of the five grains in Jewish law, 140, 144 food(s), sour. See also humuda; sourness; ˙ ˙ compared to vinegar; easy availability of, complex drugs, 236; evidence for popular medicinal use during epidemics, 236; four jars of oil (salı¯t) and humuda, in ˙ 235;˙Ibn Ridwan ˙ Abraham’s luggage, on use in Egyptian summers, 236; Ibn Sina recommends sour foods (humuda¯t) and ˙ a)˙ for water sour robs (al rubbub al ha¯mid ˙ ˙excavated at treatment, 235; juiced limes Islamic Qusayr, 237 8; medicinal versatility of, 238; properties of, in humoral theory, 228; provisions of quince water from Roman Berenike, 237; sour juice or pomegranate syrup

291 recommended for water treatment in the Anı¯s al Hujja¯j, 237; unlikely as antiscorbutics in medieval Indian Ocean, 237 8; used to marinate meats in Ma¯nasolla¯sa menu, 110 foraging. See fishing; inhabitation, of the ocean Friedberg Genizah Project, 243 Friedman, Mordechai Akiva: cloth used by India traders for writing, 100, 219; comments on household orders in India Traders, 81; identification of Lines 36 39 of the luggage list, 10; identification of qasca as wooden bowl, 265; on human ˙ legal consequences of increased and Jewish mobility, 59 Full Grace After Meals: Abraham Maimuni’s responsa to the Yemen on, 141 2; adapted for use with millet breads by Abraham Maimuni, 141 2; Alfasi on shortened form when bread from five grains unavailable, 142; associated with bread from one of the five grains, 140; recited with millet breads in Yemen, 142 Gell, Alfred: idea of distributed object applied to the luggage list, 20 1, 30 1; micro histories of accretion in Jewish supply chains, 155 60; micro histories of accretion traced in Abraham’s luggage, 20, 22, 155, 159 60; on images as parts of a thing, 245; use of term distributed personhood, 102 al Ghazali, Abu Hamid: on disruptive nature of travel, 99; on essential utensils for Sufi travelers, 172, 187; tolerates use of tables, 123 Ghosh, Amitav: Abraham Ben Yiju in In an Antique Land, 10, 242; article on Bomma, 11; innovative analysis of India Book documents, 10 Ghurids, 14, 250 Giard, Luce, 106 gift(s): contribution of India Book to study of gift exchange, 103; Goitein posits Indian mercantile gifting practices, 79; problematic use of term in India Traders, 70 80 Gil, Moshe, 147 glass. See utensil(s), glass Goitein, S.D.: edition of Abraham Maimuni’s responsa to Yemen (with A.R. Friedman), 141 2; estimate of a family’s monthly expenditure, 80; estimate of

292

Index

a family’s yearly consumption of wheat, 153; identification of the luggage list, 9; observations and documents on recruitment into the India trade, 43 4; on centrality of bread in Mediterranean maritime provisioning, 179; on centrality of wheat bread to the Sabbath in India, 140; on Malay etymology of balı¯j, 202; on social and ritual consumption of wine among Jews, 137; on suhba as informal ˙ ˙use of chests or relationship, 89 90; on benches for sleeping, 208; on use of tables and terms khwuncha/khiwa¯ncha, 125; on use of term nabı¯dh, 133; publishes three documents of Abraham Ben Yiju in Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, 242; suggests Indian practice of merchant gifting, 79 Goldberg, Jessica, 41: definition of reciprocal agency (suhba), 89 90; on ˙ ˙ centrality of correspondence to suhba, ˙ in 101; on entry of Mediterranean˙ Jews Indian Ocean trade, 43; on place of trade in Jewish society, 42; on terms khidma (service), ha¯ja (need), shughl (business) within suh˙ba, 89; on the subject matter of ˙ ˙ correspondence, 91 mercantile Gordon, Stewart, 243 gunny: as distributed object, 186; differences between commercial and domestic capacities, 185 6; of two baha¯rs unloaded at Aden, 185; translation of Arabic juniya and shared etymology, 258 Hachlili, Rachel, 130 hadith: on the privations of travel, 162 ha¯ja (pl. hawa¯’ij). See also suhba; as need in ˙ ˙ ˙ context˙ of suhba relationships, 90; plural designates˙a ˙drug mixture, 222; plural translated things, stuff, necessities in majority of contexts, 81, 87, 173, 191, 262 halaka. See law, Jewish ha¯mid. See sourness ˙Havdalah: ˙ integration into Sabbath ritual, 145; Palestinian synagogue in Fustat uses infusion of raisins, 147 Hewes, Gordon, 123 home(s). See also inhabitation, of the ocean; household orders; Abraham as home maker in Malibarat, 68 9; important sites of ritual observance in Judaism, 129 30; references to Abraham’s manzil or bayt,

68; ship as moving house (kha¯na), 189 honey ( casal): ingredient in Yemeni nabı¯dh, 149; ordered by Joseph b. Abraham in India, 87 Honnavar: Ibn Battuta’s account of dinner at, 106 7; no bread at Sultan’s Palace, 115 Horden, Peregrine, 226 9 hospitality. See commensality; lodging household orders: Abraham fulfills orders for colleagues, 86 7; charges waived on, 70 9, 91 3, 95; composition of, 69, 93, 98 9; estimation of annual consumption from, 138; evidence in India Book for, 70 86; exercise mercantile skills, 91; fulfilled by co religionists, 159; fulfillment of, as part of suhba, 79; identification of, 70, 80 ˙ 6;˙ medicinal substances in, 221; precedents for, across Roman Empire, 88; precedents for, from seventh century BCE Yemen, 88; Table 1, 71 6; Table 2, 82 5; timing of shipments, 96; volume obscured by use of term gift in India Traders, 70 80 humuda. See also citrus(es); food(s), ˙ sour; ˙ translated sour juice by Goitein and Friedman, 235 6; understood as singular of humuda¯t, 236, 263; use of plural ˙ humud a¯t˙ (sour foods) in Ibn Sina’s ˙Qanun, ˙ 228, 235; with oil (salı¯t) in ˙ Abraham’s luggage, 263 Ibn al Hajj: condemns tables as ostentatious, 123 Ibn Battuta, Abu cAbdallah Muhammad: account of dinner at Honnavar, 106 7; account of shipboard fishing, 216; description of provisioning in Tonkin, 182; description of travel in Malibarat, 57; descriptions of sequential serving of food, 121 2; diatribe against rice, 114 19; likens preserved mangoes to preserved Middle Eastern citruses, 118; place in rihla tradition, 107 8, 113 14 ˙ Ibn Jazzar, Abu Jacfar Ahmad, 236: Za¯d al Musa¯fir wa Qut al Ha¯dir (Provisions for the Traveler and Sustenance for the Sedentary) as layman’s medical guide, 220 Ibn Ridwan, cAli: recommends sour foods during Egyptian summer, 236 Ibn Sina, Abu cAli al Husain: Classical geneology of his regimen for maritime travel, 228 9; on prevention and regulation of thirst, 229 30; on the

Index destabilizing effects of mobility, 221 2; on treatment of bad water, 234; on treatment of different waters, 234; on treatment of nausea and vomiting at sea, 227 8 al Idrisi, Abu cAbdallah Muhammad: new information about Malibarat, 44; on Kannur, 117; on pickled green mangoes, 119; on wine exports to Sri Lanka, 136; revised dating of Kita¯b Nuzhat al Mushta¯q, 44 Ifriqiya: Abraham plans return to, 40; Abraham’s family connections with, 39 40; Fatimids and successors in, 40 1 Ihya¯’ cUlum al Dı¯n. See al Ghazali In an Antique Land. See Ghosh, Amitav Informationes Pro Passagio Trasmarino, 167 inhabitation, of the ocean: biological nutritional approches to, 161 3; female seclusion on board ships, 205 6; hygiene on board ships, 217 18; identification of “active” luggage, 161 3, 206; Indian sources on furnishing of ships, 210; integration of religious holidays with, 218; limited movement of passengers, 208 11; near invisibility of women in historical record, 205 6; opportunistic foraging, 215; overcrowding experienced by Ibn Jubayr, 204; paucity of medieval sources for, 32 4, 161; postures of travel, 208 11; shipboard fishing, 215 17 ink. See also Table 1, 71 6; essential to mercantile correspondence, 98, 100 2; ingredients (vitriol and gums), imported to Malibarat, 100 2; ingredients never charged in household orders, 93; Khalaf b. Isaac waives charges on vitriol and samgh gum, 70, 80 ˙ Insoll, Timothy, 130 inter marriage: as settlement strategy, 61 3; baya¯sira of Chaul, 62; in first century East Africa, 62; Portuguese Cochin, 62; with na¯yar women, 61 Islamic world: eastwards shift in twelfth century, 14 15; effects of Medieval Warm Period, 49, 250 1 Ja¯mi c al Tawarı¯kh. See Universal History Japheth b. Bundar (father of Madmun): consolidates Egyptian Yemeni trade networks, 50; Iranian background of, 50 Jeffreys, Elizabeth, 167 Jews: at Kodungallur, 50; at Mangalore, 58, 130; at Pantalayini Kollam, 58, 130; early communities in western Indian Ocean, 49 50; in medical professions,

293 220; Mediterranean Jews enter Indian Ocean trade, 43 Joseph b. Abraham: his memorandum on T S NS 324.114, 10, 25, 87, 244; large order for son’s wedding, 87; on delivery of Egyptian wheat to Aden, 154; order from Abraham’s metal workshop, 125; order of mats from Egypt, 87; provisions in wheat from Yemen, 137; provisions ordered from Yemen, 87; requests Abraham to forward items, 87; sa¯hib of ˙ ˙ Abraham Ben Yiju, 90; sends Abraham kosher (hala¯l) cheese, 156, 159; sends ˙ items in exchange for services household (khidam), 91; sends items for Abraham’s household (manzil), 68, 70; sends nabı¯dh, 145 Judah Abu Zikri Kohen: advice to Mahruz b. Jacob on wheat provisioning, 152 4; exchange marriage with Mahruz b. Jacob, 50, 153; friendship with na¯khuda¯ Tinbu of Bharuch, 58; Representative of Merchants in Egypt, 50 Jurfattan. See Kannur ka ck: central to maritime provisioning, 179; origins and manufacture, 179; requested by stranded travelers in Red Sea, 180 al Kacki, Musallam: Egyptian Jewish grain trader, 153; no letters or deliveries for Abraham, 152; possible appearance in Judah Abu Zikri Kohen’s accounts, 153; to deposit wheat for Mahruz b. Jacob at Akhmim, 153 Kannur: Abraham’s family at, 55; rice and grains (hubub) exported from, 117; under ˙ 54 Musikas, Khalaf b. Isaac: charges Abraham for thirty sheets of paper, 80; forgets pan at home, 85; large order of pharmaceuticals from Egypt, 221; letters refer to household orders, 81; offers to fulfill needs or services (ha¯ja aw khidma), 90; on packing ˙ of Abraham’s wheat, 152, 160; sa¯hib of ˙ ˙ for Abraham Ben Yiju, 90; sends items Abraham’s home (bayt), 68; sends sugar and raisins to Abraham’s children, 94; ships household items to Abraham (1147), 55; shops for glasswares for Abraham, 81; two letters dated Elul 1147 and 1148, 96; waives charges on household items, 70; waives charges on kohl, samgh gum and vitriol, 80 ˙ lodging khan. See

294

Index

khidma (pl. khidam). See suhba ˙ ˙ khiwa¯n/khuwa¯n. See table(s) Kiddush: Abraham Maimuni’s responsa to the Yemen on, 141, 147; divergent views on acceptability of Yemeni nabı¯dh, 149 50; integration into Sabbath ritual, 145; recitation with raisin infusions accepted by Abraham Maimuni, 147 al Kindi, Abu Bakr Ahmad: on bucket (dila¯’) for ablutions, 172; on rights to fish falling on deck, 215; on rights to tank water, 172; passengers’ rights to do laundry, 217; passengers to remain seated, 208 Kita¯b cAja¯’ib al Hind. See Book of the Wonders of India Kita¯b al Ha¯wı¯ fı¯ l Tibb. See al Razi Kita¯b al Sira¯j (The Book of the Lamp). See Maimonides Kita¯b al Taja¯rib (Casebook). See al Razi Kita¯b Nuzhat al Mushta¯q. See al Idrisi Kollam: cAllan b. Hassun provisions at, 168; Judaeo Persian witness clauses from, 49 Kosma Aiguptiou Monachou Christianike Topographia. See Christian Topography of Cosmas, an Egyptian Monk, The Kula, Witold, 174, 185 Kuvalayama¯la¯: on loading of wood, 184 Latour, Bruno, 151 law, Islamic: al Kindi’s al Musannaf on rights of passengers, 172, 208, 215, 217; debate on permissibility of tables, 123; fatwa on cereals in Yemen, 135; on commensality with Hindus, 58; on shipboard seclusion of women, 205 law, Jewish: Abraham Maimuni’s responsa to the Yemen, 141 2; adaptations to long distance trade, 59 60; legitimacy of children born to non Jewish slaves, 60; observance of, among Abraham and his peers, 131, 140, 142, 160; on boarding/ disembarking ships on the Sabbath, 131; on ritually unimpeachable, kosher cheeses, 155 6; on sexual relations with non Jewish slaves, 60; rabbinic purity system, 157; separation of meat and dairy, 112 13; susceptibility of different materials to impurity, 130 1, 132; susceptibility to impurity of large containers, 170 1 lemon(s). See citrus(es) letters. See correspondence

Lewicka, Paulina, 22, 47, 115, 236, 247 Life in Fragments: Stories from the Cairo Genizah, 243 lime(s). See citrus(es) lists. See also luggage list, the; academic studies of, 29; approaches to recontextualization, 104 5, 108; rich potential of, 29 30; versatility of format, 30 livestock: Ibn Battuta provisioned with in Tonkin, 182; Indian goats exempted from taxes in Aden, 188; poultry used as fishing bait, 216; wild, hunted in Red Sea, 215 lock(s): Abraham sends to business partners in Aden, 87; essential during travel, 204; fa¯tiya chest and basket of, in the luggage, 262 lodging: accommodation of non Hindus, 57; caravanserai in South Asia, 56; Chinese account of Bengal, 57 8; dominance of caravanserai model, 46, 47; importance of personal and communal networks, 46 8; in South Asia, 56 8; need for female domestic labor, 59 luggage: academic studies of, 11, 16; as distributed object, 20 1, 30 1; as prism for study of mobility, 11 12, 63 4, 65 6; British English usage and etymology, 18 19; luggage making as skilled practice, 15 17; practices in Malibarat noted by De Laval, 207; premodern assemblages, 17, 18, 207; premodern, impacted by provisioning, 21 2; premodern, paucity of evidence for, 21; procedures for unloading at Aden, 19 20; translation of Arabic and Judaeo Arabic dabash as, 19 20 luggage list, the: Arabic transliteration by Amir Ashur, 255 7; as large microhistory, 12 15, 245 51; as proxy household inventory, 31, 65; as secondary text when catalogued in CUL, 244; authorship of, 9 10; biological nutritional approaches to, 162; date of composition proposed by M.A. Friedman, 25 6, 28; deposition and removal to Cambridge, 9, 242; dimensions of document, 3; documentary genre unclear, 8, 28; ductus, 3 8; embodied movement in, 8; identification by Goitein, 9; Lines 36 9 identified by M.A. Friedman, 10; logic and fitness for purpose of, 2 3, 29; mix of global and local in, 65; nested within documentary genizah, 31; publication

Index history, 10, 244; sources of paper and ink, 100 2; sub assemblage of ritual foods in, 150; words misspelled in, 8; written in Malibarat, 2, 24 5 Macbari, Zayn al Din: recommendations on Hindu Muslim sociality, 58 ma¯’ida. See table(s) Madmun b. Hasan Japheth: account with Abraham for 1131 2, 50 2; account with Abraham for 1134, 80; alludes to Abraham’s forced departure for India, 63; alludes to Abraham’s troubles and discomfort at sea, 64; household order to Fustat, 87; letter evidences Abraham’s growing family, 67; marriage, 50; no news from Musallam al Kacki, 152; offers to fulfill any need (ha¯ja) or service (khidma), 90; packs wheat˙for Abraham, 152, 160; query about ritual purity of porcelain (s¯ını¯), 132; sa¯hib of Abraham Ben Yiju, ˙ sends paper ˙ ˙ from personal stocks, 97; 90; storeroom (makhzan) in Mangalore, 55; uses term hadiya (gift, present) in correspondence, 70 80 Mahruz b. Jacob: exchange marriage with Judah Abu Zikri Kohen, 50; household order sent to nephew in Egypt, 87; to organize wheat provisions in Upper Egypt, 152 4, 159 Maimonides, Moses: discusses purity of water in ship’s tank (sihrı¯j ), 171; does not ˙ ¯dh, 149 accept ritual use of nabı Maimuni, Abraham: edition of his responsa to Yemen (1215 16) by Goitein and A.R. Friedman, 141 2; in communal struggle between reformers and traditionalists, 141; on the Full Grace After Meals with millet bread, 141 2; on the Kiddush in Yemen, 147 50 Malabar. See Malibarat Maldives: as provisioning stop, 176 7; coconuts described by Ibn Battuta, 120; conversion to Islam, 15; early center of coconut domestication, 119 Malibarat: decentralized authority in, 54; fragmentation of Cera polity, 54 5; global and local in food culture of Middle Eastern elites, 126 8; key exports, 53; luggage practices observed by De Laval, 207; main ports mentioned in India Book, 54, 184; Middle Eastern imports, 53; rice cultivation and consumption in,

295 116 18; sailing seasons from, 28; scarcity of wheat in, 136; staple grains and legumes, 117 18; strength of transoceanic links to Middle East, 97 8; term used by India traders, 9, 37 Ma¯nasolla¯sa: date and place of composition, 109; description of court meal, 109 10; on dining posture of kings, 126; on fish, 111; on preparation of rice, 183; on varieties of water, 176 Mangalore: Abraham’s manzil in, 68, 69; as destination of household order, 71 2, 75 76; as part of Tuluva, 52 3; deed of manumission drawn up in, 37; importance of kudu, horse gram (Macrotyloma uniflorum), 117; in Armenian Description of Cities, 56; Jewish trade at, 55; Madmun’s storeroom (makhzan) in, 55; nature of Jewish settlement at, 58, 130; paucity of Middle Eastern sources on, 55 6 mango(es): as canba¯, five waterskins in Abraham’s luggage, 264; green, compared by al Idrisi to olives, 119; likened by Ibn Battuta to Middle Eastern preserved citruses, 118; salted, sent from Malibarat to Aden, 119 Maqa¯ma¯t (of al Hariri): impact of ship representations from, 191 2; representation of merchants sleeping on bales, 208 Margariti, Roxani, 204 marı¯na (pl. mara¯nı¯): carrying vinegar in Abraham’s luggage, 261; commercial use in Red Sea, 230, 261; rarely attested term, 261 al Mascudi, cAli ibn Husayn: on the baya¯sira of Chaul, 62 material culture(s). See also materiality; Abraham’s Luggage adopts inclusive definition of, 23; central to understanding of Jewish trade, 90 2; critical to study of pre metric metrology, 173 6; fundamental to study of religion, 139 40; of ships as unstable objects, 203; potential for emic readings within ontologies of humoral theory, 225 6; potential for emic readings within rabbinic ontologies, 131; terms agency and agents contrasted with economic history usage, 23 material religion. See also food(s), ritual; purity, ritual; agenda and approaches since 2010, 139 40; bread and wine as

296

Index

religious media, 151 2; debates over domestic materializations of Judaism, 129 30; fabrication of religious media, 151 2; identification of ritual sub assemblage in the luggage list, 150; of Judaism, approached through ritual foods and foodways, 132 3, 139 40, 155 60; potential for reading luggage list within taxonomies of rabbinic Judaism, 131 materiality: agency of liquids in the rabbinic purity system, 158; distinctive to humoral theory, 225; distinctive to rabbinic Judaism, 130 1, 157; importance of studying specific expressions of, 24; of bread, 143 4; of documentary genizah, 24, 243 5; of letters, central to their efficacy, 101; of wine, 145 6 Matla¯ c i Sacdayn va Majma¯ c i Bahrayn. See al Samarqandi meal structure: core carbohydrate and fringe in Malibarat elite menus, 108 11; elite assemblage of rice, spice and dairy, 118; reconstituted from the luggage list, 110 12; sequential serving of food, 121 2; South Indian, described in Ma¯nasolla¯sa, 109 10; the sequence (tartı¯b) of dishes at Honnavar, 106 7 measure(s). See metrology medicine: abundance of textual and material sources on health and mobility, 226 7; Hippocratic Galenic humoral system, 224 5; history of, patterns and trends in, 226; importance of good health to commercial travelers, 221 2; importance of Jewish community in, 220; medicine, dietetics and cuisine inseparable in medieval period, 224 5; portable medicine basket in the David Collection, Copenhagen, 224; prescriptions copied by Abraham, 219 20; proliferation of layman’s guides in the Middle East, 220 1; water treatment major topic in Islamic medicine, 234 4 Medieval Warm Period: effects on eastern Mediterranean, 49, 135, 142, 147; India trade within context of, 250 1 Meskell, Lynn, 24 metrology: baha¯r, etymology and metric equivalents, 185; capacity of Abraham’s bottles, 174 5; capacity of Abraham’s waterskins, 175 6; capacity of large glass bottles from Caesarea, 175; complexity of establishing metric equivalents, 173 6;

fara¯sila, measure of weight, 1/20th of a baha¯r, 267; irdabb, unit of measurement for wheat, 153; mann, measure of weight, 135; mudi, dry measure of rice in ˙ 259; paucity of data on Karnataka, containers in Indian Ocean, 174; qinta¯r, ˙ unit of weight, 156; ratl, liquid measure ˙ se’ah, liquid equivalent to a pint, 262; measure in Jewish halaka, 174; siqa¯ya, Middle Eastern liquid measure, 175; Witold Kula on critical importance of surviving utensils for pre metric metrology, 174 Meyer, Birgit, 151 millet(s): dhurra (sorghum) and dukhn (bullrush millet) Yemeni staples, 134 5; finger millet (Eleusine coracana) as kinib, Yemeni consumption of, 135; finger millet (Eleusine coracana) as ra¯gi in Karnataka, 260; Full Grace After Meals recited with millet breads in Yemen, 141 2; possible reading of Line 4 RA as ra¯gi, 260; South Indian staples, supplanted by rice, 116 17, 136; Yemeni sorghum (dhurra) dispatched to Abraham, 80 Mintz, Sidney, 94, 98, 108, 182, 225 Mishnah: on purity of water in a ship’s tank (bor), 170 1 Morrison, Kathleen, 53, 116, 118, 136, 180 1 al Muqaddasi, Muhammad ibn Ahmad: on Aden, 48 al Musannaf. See al Kindi Myos Hormos. See Qusayr al Qadim nabı¯dh. See also Kiddush; raisin infusions; wine (grape); accepted as substitute for grape wine in Yemeni Kiddush, 149 50; advantages over grape wine and raisin infusions, 149 50; ingredients for Yemeni recipe given by Abraham Maimuni, 149; not accepted for ritual use by Maimonides, 149; one bottle in Abraham’s luggage, 133, 138, 149, 263; one bottle sent by Joseph b. Abraham, 145; varied meanings and complexity of translation, 133, 263 Nair. See na¯yar(s) Nasrallah, Nawal, 239 nausea. See also vomiting; Ibn Sina on treatment of nausea and vomiting (at sea), 227 8; treatment of, at sea, 227 8 Na¯ya¯dhammakaha¯o: list of provisions, 181

Index na¯yar(s): in pepper trade, 61; inter marriage with West Asians, 61 Notices of China and India: absence of grapes in India, 134; Indians do not drink wine or vinegar, 136; on coconuts as sources of potable water, 176 7; on rice in India, 116 oil: four jars of salı¯t with humuda, in the ˙¯t as sesame ˙ ˙oil in Yemen, luggage, 263; salı 263; salı¯t ordered˙ by Joseph b. Abraham in India,˙ 87; six bottles of oil (salı¯t) in the ˙ luggage list, 263; used in seventeenth century to seal citrus juice, 238 Pantalayini Kollam: Jewish community at, 58, 130; part of Purakilanadu, 54 paper. See also Tables 1 and 2, 71 6, 82 5; Abraham’s annual consumption of, 97; charges waived on, 93; essential to mercantile correspondence, 98, 100 2; imported to Malibarat, 100 2; Khalaf b. Isaac charges thirty sheets, 80; Madmun sends personal stocks, 97; shortage of, in Aden, 97 Periplus Maris Erythraei (The Circumnavigation of the Red Sea): on couriering of wheat to South India, 88, 137 pickle(s). See also citrus(es); mango(es); as s´a¯ka in the Ma¯nasolla¯sa meal, 110; civilizational associations of, 118; essential fringes to rice in Malibarat, 110; Ibn Battuta provisoned with, in Tonkin, 182; wide variety described by Ibn Battuta at Honnavar, 107 Pingzhou Tabletalk: on fishing on board ship, 216 pollution, ritual. See purity, ritual posca. See vinegar postural culture(s): chairs in Persianate and Indic culture, 125 6; Hewes on postural habits, 123 4; Hindu Muslim differences in Kerala, 126; Middle East as frontier zone, 124; of dining, differences in Jewish community, 125; of travel on board ships, 208 11; transfer of landed habits to maritime environment, 210; use of daybeds (sarı¯r) on ships, 210 11; western Indian Ocean as frontier zone, 122 6 present(s). See gift(s) Pryor, John, 167 purity, ritual. See also law, Jewish; utensil(s); water, storage; central concern of rabbinic Judaism, 130 2; daily

297 management of, in rabbinic Judaism, 131; importance of supply chain/ foodstuff biography in Judaism, 155 60; Neusner on the rabbinic purity system, 157 9; operation of Brahmanical systems in medieval India, 57 8; safeguarding of Mediterranean foodways, 155 9; safeguarding of Red Sea and Indian Ocean foodways, 159 60; Talmudic opinion on impurity of wheat shipped from Alexandria, 158; two thirteenth century kosher certificates, 155 60 Qaisar, Jan, 169, 181 al Qanun fı¯ l Tibb. See Ibn Sina qasca(s). See also utensil(s), wooden; ˙identified by M.A. Friedman as a type of wooden bowl, 265; importance of in luggage assemblage, 211 12; sent by Abraham to business partners in Aden, 87; sixteen loose in the luggage, 265 6 quince(s). See food(s), sour Qusayr al Qadim: coconut remains, 177 8; combs, 217; limes, 237 8; locks, 204; note from stranded travelers, 180; rice excavated at, 181 raisin infusions. See also Kiddush; nabı¯dh; wine (grape); advantages over grape wine, 148 9; deemed acceptable for the Kiddush, according to Maimuni, 147; deemed largely equal to grape wine in rabbinic Judaism, 146 7; evidence for currency of ritual use by Indian Jews, 148; manufacture of, and difference from true raisin wine, 145 6; nascent commodity history of, 145 9; substituted for grape wine during Egyptian drought, 147; substituted for grape wine in Abbasid Egypt, 147 raisins. See also Table 1, 71 6; Abraham’s annual consumption of, 97; as commercial imports to Malibarat, 81; charges waived on, 93 5, 149; listed among synagogue expenses during Egyptian famine, 147; shortage of, in Aden, 97 al Razi, Abu Bakr Muhammad: absence of travel cases in his Kita¯b al Taja¯rib (Casebook), 229; initiates genre of layman’s medical guide, 220; travelers, and soldiers discussed together in al Ha¯wı¯, 226 reciprocal agency. See suhba ˙ ˙ genealogy of Ibn regimen of travel: Classical Sina’s text, 228 9; destabilizing effects of

298

Index

change, 221 2, 229; emergence of travel by sea as separate category, 226; Horden on Mediterranean viaticum tradition, 226 7; on the regulation of thirst, 229; relationship to practice, 228 9, 230; therapeutic effect of travel by sea in the Classical tradition, 222; travelers and soldiers discussed together, 226; water treatment a major topic, 234 religion. See material religion rice: archaeological remains from Roman Red Sea ports, 181; as civilizational marker, 114 19; as core carbohydrate in Abraham’s luggage, 110; as main carbohydrate in Indian Ocean provisioning, 180 2; as part of elite rice spice dairy assemblage in South Asia, 118; association with ta¯lam, 112; cultivation and consumption in Malibarat, 117 18; cultivation and consumption in Middle East, 114 15; cultivation and consumption in South Asia, 115 17; elite status in South Asia, 116, 181; Ibn Battuta provisioned with two elephant loads in Tonkin, 182; in Portuguese source as main ration of Indian sailors, 180; in the luggage list, 259 60; mentioned in Na¯ya¯dhammakaha¯o as maritime provision, 181; overtakes millets in South India, 116 17; packing and storage of, 259 60; preparation of, demands complex assemblage, 183 5; preparation of, demands on potable water, 182 3; thirstiness of, as crop and food stuff, 182 3; used for ritual bread by Jews in Khuzistan, 143 Rihla (of Ibn Battuta). See Ibn Battuta Rogers, Michael, 124 Rothschild, Emma, 12, 245 sack(s). See gunny Sadan, Joseph, 124, 210 al Safı¯na (constellation of): iconography and relationship to shipbuilding, 199 202; in Bodleian al Sufi manuscript, 199 201 al Sahı¯h min Akhba¯r al Biha¯r wa cAja¯’ibiha. See Truth of the Stories and Wonders of the Seas sakanjabı¯n. See vinegar al Samarqandi, cAbd al Razzaq, 189, 197, 208 Sarna, Jonathan, 146 seasickness. See nausea; vomiting

Sefer Hanisyonot (Book of Medical Experiences). See Ben Ezra, Abraham ship(s). See also inhabitation, of the ocean; advantages of deck top travel, 197 8; advantages of un or partially decked ships, 198 201; al Samarqandi likens to moving house (kha¯na), 189; as unstable, reconfigured objects, 203 4; Belitung wreck evidence, 198, 216; De Laval’s observations about decks, 203; hybrid traditions posited by Margariti, 204; Ibn al Mujawir on disembarkation at Aden, 197; impact of representations from the Maqa¯ma¯t of al Hariri, 191 2; important qualities discussed in The Wishing Tree of Practical Knowledge, 199; Middle Eastern representations of the constellation al Safı¯na, 199 202; partial decking in representation from the Universal History, 201 2; partial decking in representations of al Safı¯na (Argo Navis), 201; patterns of wreck distribution, 192 3; paucity of information about, in the documentary genizah, 191; stench of, 197 shopping. See also household orders; suhba; ˙ ˙ as service (khidma) within suhba, 90; ˙ supports exercises mercantile skills,˙91; religious observance, 160 Sitt al Dar (Abraham’s daughter): evidence for veiling, 206; life after departure from India, 240 2 Smith, Monica, 183 soap (sabu n¯ ). See also Tables 1 and ˙ 6, 82 5; Abraham’s annual 2, 71 consumption, 97; for clothes washing, 98; importance to shipboard hygiene, 217; one bottle in the luggage, 263 Somes´vara III. See Ma¯nasolla¯sa (Delight of the Mind) sorghum. See millet(s) sourness: definition of, and relationship to acidity, 228; physiology of thirst quenching properties, 231 Strategikon, 234 al Sufi, Book of Pictures of the Fixed Stars. See al Safı¯na sugar. See also Table 1, 71 6; Abraham’s annual consumption of, 97; as commercial import to Malibarat, 94; charges waived on, 93 5; commodity histories of, 225; meanings of, 94 5; medicinal uses of, 221, 225 suhba: Abraham’s suhba relationships, 128; ˙ ˙as reciprocal agency, ˙ ˙ 89 90; extended

Index services (khidma) within, 89 90; Goldberg defines limits and obligations of, 89 90; Goldberg on associated vocabulary khidma (service), ha¯ja (need), ˙ shughl (business), 89; importance of correspondence within, 101; informality of, stressed by Goitein, 89 90; shopping as service (khidma) within, 90 2; translation from Mediterranean to Indian Ocean, 90 2 suitcase(s). See also luggage; history of, 17 18 Surur (Abraham’s son): arrival in Aden (1149), 29; death in Aden (ca. 1149), 240; gift of coral from Madmun, 72; greeted in letter from Madmun, 67 Sutton, David, 144 sweetness: meanings of, 94 5; privileged position of, 94 al Tabari, Abi l Hasan: soldiers advised to add vinegar to drinking water, 233 4; travelers and soldiers discussed together in Firdaws al Hikma, 226 table(s): legal debate about permissibility to Muslim diners, 123; use of Persian term khiwa¯nchih at Honnavar, 123; used by Jewish community, 125 tadbı¯r al musa¯fir. See regimen of travel ta¯lam (pl. tawa¯lim): associated with consumption of rice, 112; described and vocalized by Ibn Battuta, 107; etymology, 267; Indic loanword, 112 Tilakamañjarı¯: description of ship’s little well (kupika¯), 169; on loading of potable water, 169 Touati, Houari: modern misconstructions of rihla genre, 33 4; Muslim scholars ˙ physical hardship of travel, 222; on court Ibn Battuta’s place in the rihla tradition, ˙ 113 14; potential for fresh reading of Ibn Battuta, 108 Truth of the Stories and Wonders of the Seas: compiled by al Awsi al Sirafi, 44; relationship to Book of the Wonders of India, 44 Tsugitaka, Sato, 225 Tulunad(u). See Tuluva Tuluva: as geographical descriptor of converted slave, 37; as Tuluva of Malibarat in Jewish legal document, 37; culturally and linguistically distinct region, 52

299 Universal History: representation of Noah’s ark, 201 2 utensil(s). See also Tables 1 and 2, 71 6, 82 5; assemblages appropriate to shipboard use, 211 13; containers specified as empty (fa¯righ) in the luggage, 172 3, 174, 263 4; generally charged for in household orders, 93 utensil(s), brass: basis for translation of nuha¯s as brass, 260 1; bulk listed as ˙ worked brass (nuha¯s macmul) in the ˙ (mighrafa) at luggage, 262; ladle Honnavar dinner, 107; ta¯lam at Honnavar dinner, 107; worked brass as overstock from metal workshop, 26 utensil(s), ceramic: one basket of china (s¯ını¯), in Abraham’s luggage, 262; ˙ perceived disadvantages of earthenware in rabbinic Judaism, 131; query about ritual purity of s¯ını¯, 132; translation and ˙ s¯ını¯, 262 identification of utensil(s), copper: ˙basis for translation of sufr as copper, 260 1; one table jug (zı¯r ˙khiwa¯n) in the luggage list, 212, 266; one ta¯jin in the luggage, 266; set of basin and ˙ewer (tast wa ibrı¯q) in the luggage, 212, ˙ ˙ ta¯lams in Abraham’s luggage, 266; three 112, 267 utensil(s), glass. See also Tables 1 and 2, 71 6, 82 5; always charged, 93; basket and two fa¯tiya chests of, bulk listed in the luggage, 262; bottles (qinnı¯nas) in the luggage, 258, 263; capacity of bottles (qinnı¯nas) in the luggage, 174 5; four ratliya jars in the luggage, 262; large ˙ bottles recovered from Fatimid Caesarea, 174; order for cups and lamps with Khalaf b. Isaac, 81; shortage of, in Aden, 97; Yemeni origin of Abraham’s glass, 80, 97, 263 utensil(s), leather: capacity of waterskins (jahlas) in the luggage list, 175; dining ˙ (nat c and has¯ır) in household orders, mats ˙ jahla to describe 124; on ˙use of ˙term ˙ travelers ceramic water jar, 264; recommended to carry leather rakwa (bucket/bottle), 172; waterskins (jahlas) ˙ in the luggage list, 264 utensil(s), miscellaneous: for drawing water, recommended by various authorities, 172; four ladles (marabb) in the luggage, 264; one coconut scraper (mihakk li l narjı¯n), in the luggage, 267; one˙ iron lamp (sira¯j), in the luggage list,

300

Index

197, 267; rat trap, in Abraham’s luggage, 263; tray (tabaq) in the luggage, 264; ˙ variety recommended to Sufi travelers, 187; various, unidentified in Lines 38 9 of the list, 267 utensil(s), stone: advantages and disadvantages of, 131, 212 13; breaks before dispatch, 97; meal carrier (ha¯mil), ˙ in the luggage list, 212, 262; suggests adoption of Yemeni cooking practices, 127; table jug (zı¯r khiwa¯n), in the luggage, 262; two pots, in the luggage, 262; two ta¯jins, in the luggage, 262 ˙ utensil(s), vegetable fiber: bamboo fa¯tiya chest in the luggage, 204, 262; fa¯tiyas in the luggage, 258; one qartala basket in the ˙ luggage, 261; palm leaf baskets (zana¯bil) in the luggage list, 258; salla baskets in the luggage, 262, 264 utensil(s), wooden. See also qasca(s); ˙ in mobility, Table 1, 71 6; advantages of, 211; M W J H, unidentified in the luggage list, 266; one mihlab in the ˙ luggage list, 266; prominence of qasca bowls in Abraham’s luggage, 211 ˙ viaticum. See regimen of travel vinegar: bactericidal properties of acetic acid, 234; common medicinal uses of, 231; consumed as thirst quencher by Roman military, 232; consumed by Umayyad armies, 232 3; consumed with water as thirst quencher in Constantinople, 232; easy availability of, compared to complex drugs, 234; five marı¯nas in the luggage list, 230, 261; properties of, in humoral theory, 234; recommended by Ibn Sina, 230 1, 234; Strategikon advises use in bad water, 234; uses beyond medicine and dietetics, 233; with honey as sakanjabı¯n, 231; with purslane seed to quench thirst, 230; with water as oxykraton, 231; with water, as posca, in Roman military rations, 232; with water, recommended to soldiers in al Tabari’s Firdaws al Hikma, 233, 234 viticulture. See wine vomiting. See also nausea; Ibn Sina on treatment of nausea and vomiting (at sea), 227 8; treatment of, at sea, 227 8 Waines, David, 224 water, conservation: Ibn Sina on prevention and regulation of thirst, 229 30; management of human consumption,

229 30; use of thirst quenching drugs, 230; use of vinegar as thirst quencher by Roman military, 232; vinegar as thirst quencher in Ibn Sina’s Qanun, 230 1 water, potable: average daily hydration needs, 166 8; coconuts as sources of, 176 7; complexity of estimating Abraham’s personal supplies, 174 6; daily consumption in Informationes Pro Passagio Trasmarino, 167; daily consumption on Mediterranean galleys, 167; expenses for, on sailing from Aden, 173; Ibn Sina on dangers of changes in water, 229; loading of, as Indian literary trope, 168, 169; mention of loading at Kollam, 168; poor quality of water in ships’ tanks, 172 3; transportation of personal supplies, 172; volumes circulating on board ships, 167 8; Xu Jing on critical importance at sea, 166 water, storage: advantages and disadvantages of tanks, 171 2; cisterns on Indian ships described by De Laval, 168 9; common ownership of tank water, 172; empty (fa¯righ) vessels in Abraham’s luggage, 172, 263, 264; European and Indian Ocean technologies compared by De Laval, 168 9; European and Mediterranean technologies compared, 171; on Byzantine galleys, 170; poor quality of tank water, 172 3; ship’s tank (sihrı¯j) discussed in Maimonides’s Kita¯b ˙ Sira¯j, 171; tank (bor) of Alexandrian al ship mentioned in the Mishnah, 170 1; tank capacities in Jewish halaka, 174; tanks (shuigui) on Chinese ships described by Xu Jing, 166; tanks known as finta¯s in Gulf, 169; tanks onboard ˙ Archimedes’s Syracusia, 170; Tilakamañjarı¯’s reference to little well (kupika¯), 169 water, treatment: a major topic in Islamic medicine, 234; Anı¯s al Hujja¯j on use of sour juice or pomegranate syrup, 237; bactericidal properties of acetic acid, 234; Ibn Sina recommends use of sour foods (humuda¯t) and sour robs (al rubbub al ˙ 235; juiced limes excavated at h˙a¯mida), ˙Islamic ˙ Qusayr, 237 8; provisions of quince water documented at Roman Berenike, 237; use of vinegar, 233 5; vinegar recommended by al Tabari, 234; vinegar recommended by Ibn Sina, 234; vinegar recommended in Strategikon, 234

301

Index weights and measures. See metrology wheat: Abraham’s networks of supply, 152; commercial circulation through Red Sea and Arabian Peninsula, 134 6; couriered to India traders, 87, 137 8; couriered to South India in first century, 88, 137; cultivation and consumption in the Yemen, 134 5; Egyptian, exports affected by droughts, 135; essential to Mediterranean maritime provisioning, 179; family’s yearly consumption estimated by Goitein, 153; meanings transformed by mobility, 140; Portuguese accounts of Muslim couriering to Calicut, 138; private circulation through Red Sea and Arabian Peninsula, 152 4; scarcity in Malibarat, 136; two baskets in the luggage list, 133, 260; Zhao Rugua on wheat in Malabar, 138 wine (grape). See also Kiddush; nabı¯dh; raisin infusions; al Idrisi on exports to Sri Lanka, 136; as religious medium within material religion, 151 2; becomes central to the Sabbath, 132 3; couriered to Malibarat, 138; cultivation and consumption in Yemen, 137; Girolamo Sernigi’s report of Malvasia wine at Calicut, 138; in daily life of Jewish community, 137; meanings transformed by mobility, 140; prohibited by

al Mutawakkil (822 61), 147; scarcity in medieval India, 136 7 Wishing Tree of Practical Knowledge, The: date and place of composition, 195; on construction materials for cabins, 202; on equipping ships with bedsteads and seats, 210; on ships’ cabins, 195 8 women. See also inter marriage; law, Jewish; as bayt/manzil, conflated with the domestic sphere, 13 14; domestic labor essential to merchant mobility, 59; problem of visibility in historical record, 205 6; seclusion of, in medieval Judaism, 205; seclusion on board ships in Yuktikalpataru, 196 7; seclusion on board ships, provisions in Islamic fiqh, 205 Xu Jing: reflections on water at sea, 166 Yuktikalpataru. See Wishing Tree of Practical Knowledge, The Zhao Rugua: on lodging of Arab travelers in Bengal, 57; on wheat in Malabar, 138 Zhufanzhi (Treatise on the Various Foreign Phenomena). See Zhao Rugua