Ricerc@Sapienza

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. Bell of what happened to the manuscript fragments after the opening of the Qubba in 1900 and a summary of the contents of the various contribution gathered in the volume.