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 paper present two Syrian block-printed amulets coming from the Qubbat al-khazna find, in the Great Mosque in Damascus, that are currently at the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum in Istanbul. The Arabic texts of amulets are edited and translated into English. The technique of block-printing is discussed and the two exemplar put in a wider cultural and social context.

The Fatimid coins in the National Museum of Damascus were only partially published so far. This contribution presents one hundred and one pieces from the Syrian museum, of which fifty were previously unpublished and only two of which had been illustrated before. Through this new material, and its detailed catalogue, it is now possible to add new data to Fatimid numismatic history and to document the holdings of an important museum collection.