Soundscapes of Eranshahr

2025-09-01T18:45:38+00:00

Aspects of the sensory experience of past environments, such as tastes, smells, textures (including of food), sounds, and other sensory stimuli, cannot be fully reconstructed and appreciated with archaeological evidence alone. Interpreting the importance of sounds from archaeological evidence presents challenges due to the ephemeral nature of sound and biases inherent in historical sources. The recreation of soundscapes, closely associated with sensory archaeology, addresses this gap by focusing on the auditory environment of past societies. This article presents the methodology used to create a soundscape of a Sasanian city, Rev-Ardashir, to better understand auditory experiences in ancient urban settings. The methodology involves an extrapolation of sound-related data from a comprehensive analysis of historical sources, complemented by archaeological investigations and contextual environmental information. Through meticulous analysis of available data and the application of theoretical frameworks from sensory archaeology, this research has the potential to enhance our understanding of the daily lives and behaviors of Sasanian city dwellers and illuminate gaps in historical and archeological research.

Intellectual Practice and Manuscript Culture in Early Islamic North Africa

2025-11-17T13:49:39+00:00

This article examines the figure of Abū al-ʿArab al-Qayrawānī (d. 333/945) as a scribe-scholar in early Islamic North Africa, situating his manuscripts within the broader history of intellectual and material practices in Ifrīqiya. Moving beyond his well-studied role as jurist and historian, the study highlights his intense scribal activity as a constitutive dimension of scholarly authority. Through codicological and paleographical analysis of nine manuscripts copied in his own hand and preserved within the Kairouan collection, it reconstructs the material formats, graphic conventions, and paratextual strategies through which Abū al-ʿArab enacted intellectual responsibility—clarifying ambiguous readings, correcting transcriptional slips, and documenting oral and written transmission chains. These fascicles, subsequently endowed and annotated by later readers, reveal how manuscripts functioned not only as textual vessels but also as enduring instruments of teaching, verification, and communal memory. By tracing their trajectory from private notebooks to endowed objects of collective learning, the article argues that the material labor of copying was central to the formation and transmission of scholarly authority in Kairouan. More broadly, it demonstrates how the study of manuscript culture reshapes our understanding of scholarly practice and authority in the Islamic West.

Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta

Soundscapes of Eranshahr

Intellectual Practice and Manuscript Culture in Early Islamic North Africa