Manuscript Migration: The Multiple Lives of the Rubenstein Library's Collections

Dictated by God to Muhammad, the Qur’ān is the holiest book of the Muslim faith. These fragmented Qur’āns from the Rubenstein collection tell two very different stories about the social worlds that produced Qur’āns and brought them to Duke. The first example, a papyrus amulet, was created in Egypt and passed through Germany before being purchased by Duke (Duk. Inv. 274). The second and third examples are of pages from Qur’āns dismembered by the American bookseller Otto Ege to create teaching collections of manuscript pages. Acts of fragmentation, dismemberment, and dispersal make it especially difficult to recover an object’s earlier historical settings.

Fragment

Duk. Inv. 274 (Duke Papyrus Inventory Number 274) is a deteriorated papyrus fragment containing four short chapters (Surahs) from the Qur’ān. Each of these Surahs was employed in prayers, especially prayers for healing. It is therefore likely that this small document was used as an amulet that could be worn close to the body to ward off disease. Anton Fackelmann (discussed further later in the exhibit), a prominent purveyor of Greek papyri, sold this object to Duke in 1970, perhaps after acquiring it during a 1969 visit to Cairo. This Qur’ān was already fragmentary when it was excavated and sold, its deterioration a mark of the antiquity that made the artifact so valued by collectors and dealers.

Fragmented

In the beginning of the twentieth century, American bookseller Otto Ege detached these pages from various Qur’āns and reorganized them into teaching portfolios. An avid believer in disseminating manuscript leaves for educational purposes, he sold these sets to collectors and institutional collections in custom-made portfolio boxes. Ege’s collections are found in numerous institutions in the United States. Each page comes from a different manuscript that Ege had purchased, most of which were originally created in what is today the Middle East or North Africa. Scholars have been attempting to reconstruct the dismembered manuscripts by digitizing and reuniting the individual leaves online. This particular portfolio was donated to Duke University by Otto Ege’s daughter in 1992.

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Research contributed by Maroun El Houkayem, Doctoral student in the Religion Department, Duke University.