The Imperial Encounter in Early Islamic Egypt: Dissecting the Aphrodito Archive

Named ‘Aphrodito archive’ because it originates in that otherwise unremarkable Middle-Egyptian town, the most important papyrological archive of the early Caliphate contains the papers of an early-eighth-century district administrator, including correspondence with the provincial governor in the new Muslim capital Fustat, and with village heads in his district, as well as registers and accounts generally related to tax and resource extraction.
Known for over a century, the Aphrodito archive remains underexploited, largely because of its inaccessibility. Its three languages
(Arabic, Coptic, Greek), difficult-to-access editions, and lack of translations have acted as a break to its study, and the partial nature of the existing translated texts (mainly those coming from above) has created a skewed view of its nature, which is much more organic and dialectical than has been allowed for. IMPERIAL ENCOUNTER will make this invaluable group of documents available to scholars by providing a full translation of the archive’s documents.
IMPERIAL ENCOUNTER will also use this archive to produce a microhistory of the Aphrodito area and its engagement with the new
empire. Containing documents from above and from below, the archive admirably illustrates the Caliphate’s conception of empire and its implementation strategy on the one hand, and local reception empire on the other. A team with the necessary linguistic skills
will produce several microhistorical studies exploring some key questions for the Umayyad caliphate and the functioning of early
medieval empires: the balance between coercion and negotiation, the role of archives in establishing power, the indigenous reception of empire.
In this key period of ostensible power display by the Umayyads, the documents found in rural Aphrodito mention such projects as the
building of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus and demonstrate how they affected tiny villages in a different province, providing a
textbook case of global microhistory.