Inscriptions and portraits from the past. A fictional temptation in al-Mas'udi's Muruj al-dhahab
The paper aims to highlight how al-Mas‘ūdī, in the 4th/10th century, works out with historical objects and their meaningful weight capable of playing a functional role in explaining the otherness of the past and its hermeneutical value to understand the present – here an ancient carpet, coming from the past, with a foreign writing to be deciphered in order to understand the very relationship between history and destiny.