Abstract
In the Jesuit archives in Beirut sits a reader room request for a manuscript at the British Library from the beginning of the twentieth century. Louis Cheikho, a Jesuit Assyrian priest and a precursor of Oriental studies in the “East,” made that request. The manuscript he requested was bought by Claudius Rich in the previous century. Both of these men are responsible for collecting and moving the manuscripts to their final repositories, Rich to the British Library, Cheikho to the Oriental Library in Beirut. Both of them scoured Mesopotamia and other territories in search of “oriental” manuscripts. This paper examines how objects, practices, and concepts travel through both space and time and what repercussions they have on their own and other cultures. Rejecting the oversimplified dichotomies of East versus West and archive versus manuscripts, it elucidates the complex entanglements and interdependencies between cultures and scholarly practices. While Rich was a political agent for the East India Company operating at the height of Napoleon’s rise, Cheikho was an Ottoman subject facing WWI. Through these two chronologically and spatially distinct yet socially and materially intertwined case studies, I demonstrate that the practices of collecting, cataloguing, and searching for manuscripts are inscribed in assemblages and networks that transcend conventional boundaries. Furthermore, this paper argues that as studies and practices revolving around manuscripts persist to this day — albeit in different formats — the epistemological approach towards manuscripts must evolve to encompass their entwined existence within broader social and cultural contexts.
Presenters
Maroun El HoukayemStudent, PhD Religious Studies, Duke University, North Carolina, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2024 Special Focus—Traveling Concepts: The Transfer and Translation of Ideas in the Humanities
KEYWORDS
Orientalism, Manuscripts, Space, Colonialism, Arabic, Syriac, Imperialism, Theory, Collecting
