This volume presents the edition, translation and discussion of 73 Arabic legal documents related to property transactions (especially sale, lease and endowment). These documents cover a period between the early fourth/tenth and the second half of the seventh/thirteenth centuries. The importance of the documents, and thus this volume, centres on three aspects: they refer to the Middle Period (for which the number of edited documents is only slowly increasing), they originated in Syria, specifically Damascus (most documents that we have from the Arabic Middle East come from Egypt), and most importantly they are part of a coherent corpus and thus have a clear historical context. All documents are today part of the Şâm evrakları (Damascus Papers) collection held in Istanbul in the Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi (Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum). In Damascus they had been part of the “Geniza”-style storehouse for disused documents and books, the Umayyad Mosque's Qubbat al-khazna or Qubbat al-māl. The Şâm evrakları have hardly been accessible for research over the past decades, but they form the most important known collection of documents from Syria for the Middle Period.

The present volume is based on photographs that Dominique Sourdel and Janine Sourdel-Thomine took in the early 1960s when they had the opportunity to work on the Şâm evrakları. These photographs have led to numerous articles and more recently three books in which documents have been grouped into broad thematic categories: 1) pilgrimage certificates (Certificats de pèlerinage d’époque Ayyoubide, Paris, 2006); 2) legal documents related to marriage and divorce (Mariage et séparation à Damas au Moyen Âge: un corpus de 62 documents juridiques inédits entre 337/948 et 698/1299, Paris, 2013); 3) assorted documents (purportedly) linked to Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (Gouvernance et libéralités de Saladin d'après les données inédites de six documents arabes, Paris, 2015).

In the introduction, the editors give a very useful overview of salient aspects of this corpus and its relevance for historical studies. The 73 documents are on 62 physical items (sometimes recto and verso carry two separate documents). Among these, we find 16 scrolls (these start to disappear from 600/1200 onwards) and 46 sheets. While parchment was the exclusive support material before the mid-fifth/eleventh century, paper starts to gain importance in the following decades to become the main support from the mid-sixth/twelfth century onwards. The largest sub-corpus is that of sale deeds (39), followed by lease agreements (10) and endowment-related documents (8, virtually all of them linked to waqf ahlī, “family endowments”). As all documents were preserved in Damascus until the end of World War I, the vast majority indeed refer to transactions that occurred in the city and its hinterlands. Yet we also find some documents referring to transactions in Sicily, al-Andalus, Morocco, Anatolia, Egypt and Mesopotamia. In these documents 334 individuals are named, of whom 300 are from Damascus or the region of Damascus. Fewer than 10 per cent of those named are identifiable from other textual sources. In terms of this corpus’ wider significance, there are some highly interesting suggestions such as that property prices in Damascus were seemingly rather modest if we compare them with those in Cairo as documented in the Geniza material. The only disappointment in the introduction is that we do not get any information on how this corpus of 62 physical items was put together. The Şâm evrakları collection contains over 200,000 uncatalogued items (ranging from scraps of paper/parchment to substantial parts of manuscripts); so how did the editors proceed to identify the items that we find in this volume as one corpus? What parts of the collection did they not look at? Future scholarship will embark upon enlarging the corpus, but this volume does not contain any indication of how scholars can avoid going through those parts of the collection that have already been covered by the present editors.

The challenge to edit documents written in sometimes rather inaccessible hands and often highly incomplete (only 17 documents have the full text) is evident. To review and assess the editorial work is somewhat difficult as the reproductions of the black-and-white photos are of modest quality to say the least. Repeatedly, massive documents of more than one metre in length are reproduced on a single page so that the reader has no chance whatsoever to check the editions. For many documents we would have simply needed a set of enlargements. As this is such difficult material where many readings are open to debate this is highly deplorable. To include so many reproductions in this inopportune form is especially problematic as the originals in the Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi are very difficult to access (it seems that the editors have also exclusively worked from the photographs without returning to the originals). These photographs are thus of outstanding documentary value and they deserved a more appropriate presentation.

However, as far as it is possible to assess, the editorial work is of the highest standard and the editors have to be praised for their diligent work. There are some typos, for instance document II, line 4 has the female name “Muhadhdhaba” but in the following the name is repeatedly misspelled as “Mudhahhaba” (Iines 8, 9 and 14) and document II, line 4 has حدوداهما (correct حدودهما). The system for square brackets for illegible or missing passages is not always clear and repeatedly parts of a line which are not legible, but instead additions by the editor are not put into brackets (for instance document I, lines 3, 6, 25). Personal names always pose particular problems in any edition and at some points the readings proposed here are highly debatable or require amendment (for instance document II, line 31: read “al-ʿAbbās” instead of “al-Qāsim”; document II, line 33 read “Jaʿfar” instead of “Ḥafṣ”; document III, line 24 read “Jaʿfar” instead of “Ṣafar”; document V, line 7 read “Naṣīf” or “Nāṣīf” instead of “Naḍīf”; document XVIII, lines 6 and 10 read “Yusr” instead of “Busr”). There are some minor mistakes such as document X, line 53 (read الشريف instead of للشريف), document X, line 57 (read ثلثين instead of ثلثون), document II, line 4 (read كلاهما شرقاً instead of باباهما شرقياً) and document X, line 61 (read حل وسعة instead of حل رسعة; we find this correct reading in document XVI, line 14). Sometimes it seems that grammatical “mistakes” in the original were corrected without acknowledgement (for instance document X, line 86 has the grammatically correct “Abī”, but the document reads “Abū”). On account of the small size of the photographs it is hardly possible to propose additional readings for those passages that the editors marked as illegible (one exception is for instance document XVIII, line 1 (p. 183) where “al-Ḥasan b. Muḥammad b. […]” can be added).

In short, this is an important contribution to the history of the pre-Ottoman Arabic lands that makes accessible another fascinating set of documents. These documents and thus the book will remain a point of reference for many years. Hopefully, future editions of Qubbat al-khazna material on the basis of the Paris photographs will have adequate reproductions and methodological statements on how the corpus in question was built.