Following the Links in T-S NS 192.11: A Qurʾanic Exercise from a Cairene Public School (2020)
No individual possesses the expertise required to understand every manuscript in the Genizah collections, so as researchers we must utilise all available resources to interpret what we find. Sometimes that means consulting long-forgotten tomes in the deepest vaults of the University Library, or squinting at microfilms that were surely cutting-edge at some point in the distant past. Other times we must travel to the far reaches of the globe, seeking aid abroad from generous colleagues and libraries with windows. In truly desperate times, we may even attempt to decipher the handwritten records of Goitein himself, eager for any overlooked philological detail amongst his nearly 30,000 individual notecards. This is not one of those times. This time, our most helpful tools were Facebook and Google Maps. Without them, we might never have identified the original scribe of T-S NS 192.11: a young student at a Cairene public school at the end of the nineteenth century.
Cite this work: Posegay, Nick. 2020. “Following the Links in T-S NS 192.11: A Qurʾanic Exercise from a Cairene Public School.” Fragment of the Month (January). Cambridge: University Library Genizah Research Unit.
