Manuscripts as Mirrors of a Multilingual and Multicultural Society: the Case of the Damascus Find

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the multilingual material found in the Umayyad Great Mosque’s Qubbat al-khazna in 1900. The particular way of preservation of this material, a clear case of Genizah-like practice in an Islamic context, offers an unique opportunity to deal with the Damascus cultural life, animated by different languages and identities, through many centuries. The find encompassed documents related to the Umayyad mosque, certificates of piglrimage to Mecca, Qur’anic fragments, Arabic and Turkish literary texts, parchment fragments in Latin language and script, Latin fragments in Greek script, fragments in old French, in Hebrew (including Samaritan), in Armenian, in Coptic, in Syriac, in Aramaic and in Greek – also in Arabic language and Greek script. This ensemble of manuscripts, which ranges in date from the Late Antiquity to Modern Times, exemplifies the so-called phenomenon of “absolute multigraphism” which had a long history, particularly in the Middle East, across the Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.