Ricerc@Sapienza

Until the early twentieth century, this corpus was housed in a dome in the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. This “Qubbat al-khazna” (the name is far from straightforward, as will be shown in this volume) and its con- tents became known to scholarship from the late nineteenth century, having been “discovered” at around the same time as its famous sibling, the Geniza of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo.

The Introduction illustrates the principal aim of this volume that is as simple as it is ambitious: to take a first step in placing a large set of (often fragmentary) documents and manuscripts on the map of Middle Eastern history as a corpus. Moreover it provides with a brief story of the Genizah-like deposits like that of the Qubbat al-khazna in the Omayyad Mosque in Damascus; an overview of the scattered materials published so far coming from this deposit; the account by G.