Nick Posegay

Archives • Manuscripts • Interfaith History

About This Site

Thank you to me for making this site. Thank you to academia./edu for forcing my hand by making their own site unsuitable for hosting academic materials. Most of all, thank you to you, dear reader, for finding this weird sidebar.

Category: Notes

Illuminating an Illuminated Islamic Document: The Twin Arts of Calligraphy and Embroidery in Fatimid Egypt (T-S K10.12) (2024)

It’s been more than five years since I started working for the Genizah Research Unit here in Cambridge. Since then, I’ve written six Fragment of the Month articles – some of them even good – about Genizah fragments that I’ve found particularly interesting or challenging to interpret. My time in Cambridge ends with this month, and I
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The Long Road to Samarqand: Reverse-Engineering the Travels of a 12th-Century Andalusi Muslim (T-S Ar.53.39) (2023)

Over the last 5 years, I have written about several different Cairo Genizah manuscripts for our Fragment of the Month series. Most of the time, I pick a fragment that I’ve spent many days studying to identify what it is and where it came from. These manuscript mysteries often lead to new discoveries that can be fun
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Solving European Writer’s Block in Jewish Cairo (T-S 20.188) (2023)

One of the duties of the Cambridge Genizah Research Unit (GRU) is to identify and describe the manuscript fragments in the Taylor-Schechter Collection. That Collection contains almost 200,000 fragments, so this job is taking a while. Luckily, the GRU regularly employs experts in medieval Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic to catalogue the contents of medieval texts.
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Jewish Parchment, Muslim Prayer – Uncovering an Early Abbasid Palimpsest (2021)

Sometimes it takes a while to identify a Genizah fragment. No one is an expert in all the languages, genres, and scripts that appear in Genizah collections, and even for experts, it is often difficult to decipher severely damaged manuscripts. The Genizah Research Unit has worked for almost five decades to catalogue the Taylor-Schechter Collection,
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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
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