Volume 98, Issue 1

The significant roles played by eunuchs (castrated slaves) in Rasūlid Yemen have thus far escaped scholarly scrutiny. A systematic study of the historiographic and biographical writings of ʿAlī b. al-Ḥasan al-Khazrajī, chronicler of the Rasūlid court at the turn of the 9th/15th century, reveals that eunuchs figured prominently both in the highest ranks of the dynasty’s political, administrative, and military hierarchy, as well as in the most intimate realms of royal households. The author, however, remains silent on the origins of these men and on the capture, castration, and deracination they suffered as young boys. In order to reconstruct the slave trading practices that supplied the Rasūlids with eunuchs, a late 7th/13th-century collection of administrative documents known as Nūr al-maʿārif shall be drawn upon. This source names an African export hub from which slaves were shipped across the Red Sea to Yemen, lists prices and taxes paid for eunuchs, and reveals that the Rasūlids actively interfered in the Yemeni slave trade in order to secure the most desirable eunuchs for themselves. Taken together, these narrative and administrative sources shed light on the eunuch institution in Rasūlid Yemen and on its role in sustaining the dynasty.

Often distinguished by their characteristic five-petalled rosette emblems, objects dedicated to the Rasūlid sultans of Yemen in Egypt or Syria have long been identified as a distinct corpus in histories of Islamic art. Whether treated singly or as a group, these objects have usually been positioned in the periphery of discussions about Mamlūk luxury arts or cited briefly as evidence of diplomatic relations between the Mamlūk and Rasūlid leadership. Perhaps reflecting a general marginalization of South Arabia in the historiographic traditions of Islamic art scholarship, narratives centered on the imperial Mamlūk enterprise tend to overshadow both the Rasūlid context for these objects and the complexities of their global material histories. This essay explores these two themes together, drawing broadly on visual culture connected with the Rasūlid court to analyze a selection of case studies. It reviews art historical literature on the Rasūlid-Mamlūk corpus as reflected in European and North American scholarship, outlines the various modalities by which this material exchange is understood to have taken place, explores the setting for Rasūlid patronage and collection of such objects, and examines their material afterlives.

Relying on textual, ethnographic, and environmental scholarship on Yemen and the comparative insights of research into fisheries in the premodern Mediterranean world, the present study surveys the types of marine resources that appear across a wide range of literary and documentary sources pertaining to Yemen during the reign of the Rasūlids from the early 7th/13th to the mid-9th/15th century. Although Rasūlid-generated texts pay relatively scant attention to fishing, they clearly demonstrate the interest of the Rasūlid state in both the subsistence and commercial economy that fishermen procured. Moreover, when combined with the testimony of travelers and chroniclers and of iconography on a series of Rasūlid coins from the port city of Aden, these sources shed light on the inclusion of fish in Yemeni non-elite and elite diets, the place and roles of fisherfolk in Yemeni society, the maritime symbolism current in Rasūlid times, and ultimately the relationship between shores and inland centers of Rasūlid power. In aggregate this material suggests that the Rasūlid state maintained a symbiotic political and cultural relationship with fishing communities, which had direct access to and the primary role in harvesting and processing the resources in question, yet remain in the shadows of recorded history.

While there is a tradition of Islamic world maps and geographic depictions of direction to the Kaʿba in Mecca, relatively few detailed maps of individual Islamic realms have been studied. In an early 14th-century tax ledger compiled for the Rasūlid sultan al-Malik al-Muʾayyad Dāwūd (d. 721/1321), there is a map of the fortresses ( ḥuṣūn ), major towns, and ports of the areas controlled and taxed, as well as individual maps of Aden, Taʿizz, al-Janad, Dhamār, al-Shiḥr, and several wadis. Given the context of the text, Irtifāʿ al-dawla al-Muʾayyadiyya , as a tax register, some of the maps probably serve a functional purpose. But how should such maps be read against the lists of important locations in other Rasūlid sources and earlier compilations, such as Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-buldān compiled a century earlier or al-Hamdānī’s 10th-century Ṣifat jazīrat al-ʿArab ? In this article I analyze the range of locations, how they are iconically represented, the accuracy of their relative locations, and their links to other Rasūlid lists. In what ways do these maps better illustrate how the Rasūlids viewed their own realm, which in the early 14th century was a rival of the Egyptian Mamluks and a major player in the Red Sea/Indian Ocean trade network? Finally, how does this unique set of maps fit other Islamic maps in the tradition that stems back several centuries before?

The Rasūlid chronicles of the reign of al-Manṣūr Nūr al-Dīn ʿUmar b. ʿAlī b. Rasūl depict its first ruler as steadily consolidating the political foundation of the sultanate. Most of these reports clearly portray the dominance of the sultan in Yemen during this period. But a few reveal the limitations of his power in a more complex political landscape, such as an aborted military campaign against a local tribe, an insurrection by a Zaydi sharīf , and the sultan’s assassination by his own military. These specific narratives of opposition to the sultan, however, progressively change over the course of their production from the late 13th century until the first half of the 15th century, as the strength of the sultanate initially peaks and then slowly declines. As a result, the ambiguity of al-Manṣūr ʿUmar’s authority in these narratives is largely reduced, and the historical memory of the sovereignty of the emergent Rasūlid sultanate solidifies in increasingly ideological ways.

This article presents the edition of a late 3rd/9th- or early 4th/10th-century search warrant for stolen goods (P.Cair.EgLib.inv. 536v). The scribe reports that two black men (aswadayn) were traveling on two donkeys, one of which was also loaded with a saddlebag of money, jewellery and clothes. Upon reaching the Upper Egyptian village of Saqāwa, the two black men were assaulted and murdered, and the goods and donkeys stolen. This document corroborates descriptions in historical works of frequent rebel attacks in various regions of Egypt in the 3rd/9th and 4rd/10th centuries.

This paper edits and studies four Arabic legal documents, written on two papyri, now housed in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. The documents belong to a certain ʿAmmār b. Salama b. ʿAbd al-Wārith, a merchant from al-Bahnasā. Document 1 (P.CTYBR inv. 1720 verso) records a contract of sale of two inherited portions belonging to a Copt with double names, a Christian and a Muslim one. The contract touches on two significant socio-religious subjects: 1. name change after religious conversion, and 2. the loss of paternal filiation ( nasab ) of children born outside wedlock or in wedlock but their paternity was disavowed via the Islamic procedure of liʿān “oath of condemnation” or upon evidence of certain circumstances that prove impossibility of paternity. Documents 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3 (P.CTYBR inv. 1715 recto and verso) contains three debt acknowledgements recording payments in coin and in kind. All documents date to the year 297/909–910.

This article presents the edition of three unpublished 16th-century scrolls preserved in the Palau Ribes Collection (Barcelona) that contain diagrammatic representations of the holy places of Mecca and Medina. One of them certifies the fulfillment of the major ( ḥajj ) and minor (ʿ umra ) pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca on behalf of a little girl, in what appears to be a certificate reused by removing the names of the original parties. The other two documents extoll the city of Medina and the Prophet Muḥammad, as part of the pious visit to his tomb ( ziyāra ) carried out by individuals who are not mentioned by name. In addition, the three documents share the same material characteristics, and present textual structures that suggest they were mass-produced models. They therefore constitute three case studies evidencing a significant shift in the production of Islamic certificates of pilgrimage, and can thus help expand our knowledge of the ritual itself.