Inscriptions and portraits from the past. A fictional temptation in al-Mas'udi's Muruj al-dhahab

The paper aims to highlight how al-Mas‘ūdī, in the 4th/10th century, works out with historical objects and their meaningful weight capable of playing a functional role in explaining the otherness of the past and its hermeneutical value to understand the present – here an ancient carpet, coming from the past, with a foreign writing to be deciphered in order to understand the very relationship between history and destiny. In making his short “gothic novel” about a crime, the author seems to elaborate in a literary refined fashion a previous narrative strategy put forth earlier by poetry (namely al-Buḥturī) and later by historiography (namely al-Ṭabarī), both of them treating a crime at court (al-Mutawakkil’s parricide by the hand of his son al-Muntaṣir), and justifying the bloody event within a tragic view of history and its ineludibility.