The Damascus fragments: towards a history of the Qubbat al-khazna corpus of manuscripts and documents

Until the early twentieth century, this corpus was housed in a dome in the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. This “Qubbat al-khazna” (the name is far from straightforward, as will be shown in this volume) and its con- tents became known to scholarship from the late nineteenth century, having been “discovered” at around the same time as its famous sibling, the Geniza of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Both the Qubba and the Geniza served as depositories of worn-out books and disused documents, although with over 200,000 items, the Qubba material is less extensive than the material from Cairo, currently counted at 350,000 items (though counting such “items” is never an exact science). Despite their similarities, there is one major difference that sets these two depositories apart, and this is also the main rationale for this volume: while the scholarly discovery of the Geniza has gradually generated a fully fledged field of research over the course of the last century, the Qubba has so far remained marginal in the field of Middle Eastern history. That such a massive set of manuscripts and documents has remained so marginal has a variety of causes that will be touched upon in the following pages, though it includes in particular the difficulty of accessing Qubba manuscripts and documents.