Tonight I took the time to go through some of my old notes and papers on my long standing, never really finished body of work on Shelomo Dov Goitein's work on the Cairo Genizah. Admittedly it's been about 5 years since I looked at this stuff, but it's obscure and inconsequential enough for me to assume that the implications of his work have yet to be picked up by most historians.
I can only imagine what it would have been like finding 2500000 individual fragments of what Cairo life was like after the ninth century (Source)
Before I get into Goitein's work, I think I should explain what the hell a genizah is. There is a belief within the Jewish faith that all unwanted scriptural writings should be preserved until there is an opportunity to give them a proper burial. They acted as a depository for all kinds of scraps that would have otherwise been thrown away. What's so useful about this is the range of topics that were available to study. The requirement for being saved in a genizah was just to have the literal word "god" written on the paper. This would have included correspondences, shipping records, and all kinds of secular, day to day things on top of academic and religious writings. The place that they were stored in was usually just a back room of a temple or a small building in a cemetery. Genizahs still exist today, although they're a lot less... nice looking compared to the older ones:
(Source)
Most of my body of work was based around the implications of unintentional archives and the differences in what the official record states compared to what the people were saying. Thinking about it now it reminds me of what Steemit is. I'm not going to pretend like I understand a whole lot about blockchain and the ledger it produces(?), but I wonder what historical value of something like Steemit where a large population is generating content that represents a piece of who they are (or want to be), and expiry date on when people lose interest, and having a largely irreversible record of what was said. I get really excited when I thin about what future generations will find what we left behind, and I think blockchain technology will leave behind treasure troves of information, just as the Cairo Genizah did for historians in 1897.
Fragments like these make me really happy. It's very much an everyday letter written by a scribe and used to its maximum potential.
Next post I'd like to look at the fragments themselves. There are some long conversations stored there, and I've grown fond of the people who wrote them. They make me feel as though humans have not changed at all in the last 900 or so years.
Sources:
Goitein, S.D. India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from Cairo Geniza. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2008.
Goitein, S.D. Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
Goitein, S.D. Studies in Islamic History and Institutions. Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010.