IFAO

Ostrich eggs held great importance among the Arabs before Islam. Their importance also continued after the emergence of Islam, with various uses such as hanging them in religious establishments like mosques, mosuleums or civil buildings such as houses. The eggs were decorated in different ways: inscriptions, paintings and multi-level engravings on their surfaces. These decorations made them valuable gifts for Kings and Caliphs. In this paper, I am studying Ostrich eggs on different levels, from their functional uses to their religious aspects. I am relying on Egyptian museums’ collections which contain unpublished Ostrich eggs. I am also using historical sources which provide important information that has not yet been taken into account.

Documents from the Ḥaram Šarīf are considered to be among the most important historical sources from the Mamluk Jerusalem society because they provide much documentary evidence covering all aspects of life in this community during that era. Among the most important documents included in this collection; documents on the cases of marriage and divorce in the community of Jerusalem. The document being studied (No. 646) belongs to this group, and includes two marriage contracts and two divorce contracts for a former slave named Zumurrud, who lived in Jerusalem at the end of the 8th century of the Islamic calendar/14th century. Since the case of Zumurrud is one of the few cases of the lower classes that can trace a large part of its family history thanks to the existence of this document, which includes marriage and divorce contracts, in addition to another document registering a third marriage for her, this study attempts to discuss the case of Zumurrud through the publication and discussion of document 646, which appears to be rich in details revealing important aspects of the life of women in Jerusalem during the Mamluk era.

What is interesting for us in this work is to understand the true meaning of the princely city through the Raqqāda model. In this context, we have conducted research using various Orientalist and Arab studies. It is clear from these studies that these royal or princely cities are divided into two categories, or possibly even three. Raqqāda, is one of the two princely cities that were founded in Ifrīqiya during the Aghlabid dynasty. The other is the city of al-ʿAbbāsiyya. The importance of Raqqāda lies in the fact that it constitutes a transitional point and a passage from the palace-villa to the palace-city, and from the open princely city to the closed princely city. This is what we have seen by navigating between historical texts and archaeological data. Raqqāda was not destroyed by the Normans, but by the severe vandalism of the Banū Hilāl. Nevertheless, there are still some archaeological traces that reflect the princely and royal character of this city, and show that its architecture has mixed the ancient heritage with the oriental influences.

إنّ الغاية التي نروم تحقيقها من خلال هذا العمل هو معرفة معنى المدينة الأميرية من خلال نموذج رقادة، ومن هذا المنطلق قمنا بالبحث عنه في مختلف البحوث والدراسات الاستشراقية والعربية. والواضح من خلال هذه الدراسات أنّ هذه المدن الملكية أو الأميرية هي على نوعين أو ثلاثة. ورقادة هي إحدى المدينتين الأميريتين اللّتين تأسّستا في إفريقية في العصر الأغلبي، والأخرى هي مدينة العبّاسيّة. إنّ أهمية رقادة تكمن في كونها تمثل نقطة عبور وتحوّل من القصر-فيلا (الضيعة) إلى القصر-المدينة، ومن المدينة الأميرية المفتوحة إلى المدينة الأميرية المغلقة. هذا ما توصلنا اليه من خلال المراوحة بين النصوص التاريخية والمعطيات الأثرية.

Despite the importance of the financial administrators of Egypt (aṣḥāb al-ḫarāǧ) and their basic role in the administration system in the early Islamic period, historical sources don’t provide sufficient information about them. On the other hand, hundreds of papyri from ­al-Ušmūnayn province still exist. These papyri, especially tax receipts, contain many names and some information about the financial directors of Egypt during the 2nd-3rd/8th-9th centuries. Some of the financial directors are not mentioned in other historical sources, but al-Ušmūnayn Arabic papyri provide some new information about known directors and introduce new ones.

While in the Arab world, the totality of Umm Kulṯūm’s repertoire is currently considered as being “classical” both in the sense of its highly regarded status in the artistic hierarchy as well as that of its propaedeutic value; to which extent does it actually qualify as “art music” and what traces of the Nahḍa school has it retained? Starting from the term waṣla, employed throughout her career to identify a song during a concert, the article presents an appraisal of our present knowledge of the singer’s performance policy, which has greatly increased since the internet diffusion of most of her concerts, in addition to the commercially distributed versions of her songs. It suggests that Umm Kulṯūm’s metric (muwaqqaʿ) and non-metric (mursal) improvisations are the forms in which a continuity between her art and the ­aesthetic principles of the former school of court musicians is best observed. Two renditions of Salū kuʾūs al-ṭilā illustrate the successive vicissitudes of the “traditional” learned form known as qaṣīda ʿalā al-waḥda.

Halim el-Dabh (1921-2017) is a collector of “traditional” music and a pioneer of electronic music. He is currently being rediscovered by a new generation of Egyptian musicians who see him as a national precursor. In 1944, El-Dabh composed one of the earliest electronic compositions in history, based on selected and transformed sounds from his own recordings, made in his hometown of Cairo. Such works, and the career of this eclectic musician, both a composer and an academic, shed new light on the production and restitution of anthropological knowledge, which is not so much developed from the act of “writing cultures” as from that of recording and restoring them in different forms, including artistic ones. This text focuses on Halim El-Dabh’s youth in order to retrace his path in a technological and cultural moment of Egypt’s history, while relating it to more global dynamics. Like other 20th century figures, Halim El-Dabh developed new ways of linking collection, research and creation. The practices and itineraries of these figures question the colonial and neo-colonial dynamics of collecting, preserving and restoring music and, more broadly, the production of knowledge.

This article proposes a politically and culturally situated preliminary reading of the biographical and artistic trajectory of Aziz El‑Shawan (1916–1993), a cosmopolitan and nationalist Egyptian composer. The article characterizes the two cosmopolitan cultural formations in Cairo in which he partook and their impact on his career and music: a «modernist capitalist» formation which developed within the framework of colonial rule and the Egyptian monarchy from the late nineteenth century up to the 1952 Egyptian revolution; and a «modernist ­socialist» formation, partly configured by Soviet political and cultural influence, from the late 1950s up to the early 1970s. The article describes how Aziz El‑Shawan became a composer, the phases of his artistic and professional career and his musical style.

The first commercial recordings of Yemeni music were produced in Aden in the late 1930s, at the time of British colonization. These 78 RPM records were first published by a foreign company, Odeon, followed by several local companies, including Aden Crown, Jafferphon and Tahaphon. All of the urban musical traditions of Yemen—ṣanʿānī, laḥǧī, ḥaḍramī, etc.—soon gained recognition and were broadcasted throughout the country in the years between 1935 and 1960, in spite of the ban on music in the north. These first recordings, which are estimated to comprise several thousand records, are still largely unknown. Establishing a chronology has proven difficult, since the various documents that are available are never dated, and many other documents, such as articles from the press, are not currently accessible.

This research must therefore resort to a kind of “industrial and musical archaeology” which attempts to define approximate ranges of dates, periods and temporal correlations. At the same time, the current “wild patrimonialization” on the Internet of these music styles as a cultural heritage allows easy access to many sound recordings on mainstream platforms, particularly YouTube. While this represents great progress in the inventory process, it also implies a very haphazard storage solution for which researchers must try to compensate through increased efforts in documentation, in particular by the development of a database. The reception of the records by the Yemeni society during these twenty-five prolific years shows us that they had an important influence on the musical practice, as well as on a more subtle aspect of Yemeni music: the definition of regional genres which was of great importance in building the cultural identity of the Yemeni people, even until more recent times.

The introduction of the record album in the field of the oral music tradition brings about a break that is as abrupt as it is complete. On the one hand, as an example of objectification, the act of recording undermines the ontological status of the oral musical form; the latter, being fixed on the technical support, acquires a specific material reality and can, therefore, be freed from the traditional environment in which it had remained enclosed. On the other hand, record albums, as commodities, carry ontological reversal to a universal dimension, as a result of which the musical form incorporates the effects of mass commercialization. Hence, such a subversion results in an aesthetic phenomenon of disenchantment. This article analyzes this phenomenon in the cultural context of the Arab world through three symptomatic aspects: 1. increased aesthetic rationality; 2. the intrusion of heterogeneity into musical form; 3. aesthetic reification. In this regard, I refer to the thought of Critical Theory, and more particularly to certain categories developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.