6 Babylon’s principal embankment: W. Kubiak points this out in his excellent monograph Al-Fustat, Its Foundation and Early Urban Development, pp. 43–7 & 117–8 (American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, 1987). See also Oleg V. Volkoffs Le Caire, 969–1969, p. 7 (L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, 1971); and Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Cairo, 1001Years of the City Victorious, pp. 4–5 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971).
7 In Ben Yiju’s time: See Nâîr-e-Khosraw’s Safarnama (Book of Travels), p. 55, (trans. W. M. Thackston Jr, Persian Heritage Series, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, No. 36, Persian Heritage Foundation, New York, 1986).
8 ‘fossaton’: Cf. W. Kubiak, Al-Fustat, p. 11; Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Cairo 1001 Years, p. 13; and Desmond Stewart, Cairo, pp. 42–3.
9 Their army routed the Egyptians: Cf. Stanley Lane-Poole’s A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages, p. 102 (Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, London, new impression, 1968); and Oleg V. Volkoff’s Le Caire, p. 44.
10 In its original conception al-Qahira: Volkoff, pointing out that it was not for nothing that the city was called al-Qâhira al-Ma
rûsa, ‘the Guarded’, compares it to Peking and Moscow (Le Caire, p. 49).
11 Archæological excavations have shown: The various different kinds of mud and earth that were used as building materials in medieval Fustat are discussed at length in Moshe Gil’s article, ‘Maintenance, Building Operations, and Repairs in the Houses of the Qodesh in Fus
â
’, p. 147–52 (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, XIV, part II, 1971). The terms used in Lataifa and Nashawy for the kinds of earth that serve as building materials are in many instances the same as those current in medieval Fustat (e.g. in aswad, în afar, turâb).
12 Possibly Fustat even had … look of an Egyptian village: My speculations about the appearance of medieval Fustat are founded largely on Wladyslaw Kubiak’s description of the archaeological findings at the site (in his monograph Al-Fustat). I hasten to add that Kubiak does not himself suggest that the medieval city had a rustic appearance: however, the findings described in the monograph seem to me definitely to indicate that likelihood. See in particular the section on ‘Streets’, pp. 112–117. Some medieval travellers reported Fustat to be provincial in aspect but crowded and busy, while others spoke with admiration of large multi-storeyed buildings, suggesting that houses in some parts of Fustat were of imposing dimensions (Cf. Oleg V. Volkoff, Le Caire, p. 22; and S. D. Goitein, ‘Urban Housing in Fatimid and Ayyubid Times’, p. 14, Studia, Islamica, 46–7, 1978). In all likelihood the township had a few wealthy neighbourhoods which were built on a very different scale from the dwellings inhabited by the vast majority of the population. In many details the domestic architecture of medieval Fustat appears remarkably similar to that of rural (Lower) Egypt today. Indeed there was clearly a direct continuity between the living patterns of the surrounding countryside and those of the city of Fustat. Dwellings in medieval Fustat even made provision for cattle pens or zarîbas within the house (Cf. S. D. Goitein, ‘A Mansion in Fustat: A twelfth-century Description of a Domestic compound in the Ancient Capital of Egypt’, in The Medieval City, ed. H. A. Miskimin et. al., Yale University Press, New Haven, 1977). The word zariba has of course passed into the English language as ‘zareba’. A contemporary zariba is soon to play a part in this narrative.
13 The ‘Palestinian’ congregation: The principal doctrinal division within the Jewish community of medieval Fustat lay between the Karaites and the other two groups, known collectively as the Rabbanites; the Karaites took the Bible as their sole sacred text while the others invested the Talmud and other later Rabbinical writings with the authority of Scripture as well, as do the majority of Jews today. Of the two Rabbanite groups, the ‘Iraqis’ consisted of Jews from the area of Mesopotamia, who followed the rites prescribed by the schools of that region, while the ‘Palestinians’ of course followed the rites of the school of Jerusalem. See S. D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society, Vol. I, p. 18 (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1967); and Norman Golb’s article, ‘Aspects of the Historical Background of Jewish Life in Medieval Egypt’ (in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1967).
14 Incredible as it may seem, excavations: See G. T. Scanlon’s ‘Egypt and China: Trade and Imitation’, p. 88 (in Islam and the Trade of Asia, ed. D. S. Richards, Oxford and Philadelphia, 1971); and Ruth Barnes’s article ‘Indian Trade Cloth in Egypt: The Newberry Collection’ (in the Proceedings of the Textile Society of America, 1990).
15 For Ben Yiju the centre of Cairo: It was once thought that the synagogue of Ben Ezra was originally a Coptic church, but that theory has long been discredited by S. D. Goitein, although it continues to be widely propagated. A church was indeed converted into a synagogue in Fustat, in the ninth century, but it probably belonged to a different congregation and stood upon another site. (Cf. A Mediterranean Society, Vol. I, p. 18; and Vol. II, p. 149, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971). Goitein has persuasively argued that the church which changed hands in the ninth century was bought by the ‘Iraqi’ congregation, which, being composed mainly of immigrants, probably needed a site for its synagogue. The site of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra on the other hand had probably belonged to the ‘Palestinians’ since antiquity.
16 It is known to have had two entrances: See S. D. Goitein’s ‘The Sexual Mores of the Common People’, p. 47 (in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. A. L. al-Sayyid Marsot, Udena Publications, Malibu, 1979); and Vol. II of his Mediterranean Society, pp. 143–52.
17 For the Synagogue … the influx of migrants: Cf. S. D. Goitein, ‘Changes in the Middle East (950–1150)’, p. 25; and ‘Mediterranean Trade in the Eleventh Century: Some Facts and Problems’, p. 61, (in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East, ed. M. A. Cook, Oxford University Press, London, 1970).
18 The North Africans … affinity for the flourishing trade: Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East may have turned increasingly to the India Trade after the tenth century because they had been squeezed out of the Mediterranean trade by the Christian states of the northern coast. (See, for example, S. D. Goitein’s article ‘Portrait of a Medieval India Trader; Three Letters from the Cairo Geniza’, p. 449, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 50, part 3, 1987). After the twelfth century Jewish merchants appear to have been gradually pushed out of the eastern trade by the Muslim association of Kârimî merchants. (Cf. W. J. Fischel, ‘The Spice Trade in Mamluk Egypt’, pp. 166–7, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. I, part 2, E. J. Brill, London, 1958.)