"BLOCK-PRINTED AMULETS FROM THE QUBBAT AL-KHAZNA IN DAMASCUS: DISCOVERY, TECHNIQUE AND TEXTS"
Arianna D'Ottone Rambach, La Sapienza University, Rome
Part of the Silsila Spring 2022 series
The lecture aims at illustrating two block-printed amulets found in the Qubbat al-khazna in the Great Mosque of Damascus and currently preserved in Istanbul, at the Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts. These two specimens enlarge both the corpus of known block-printed amulets and the map of the regions in which the production of this peculiar type of written evidence is attested.
The history of the find will be recalled in order to put the block-printed exemplars in a wider material and linguistic context. Moreover, the technique employed for their production will be discussed and other new specimens, of various provenances, will also be presented.
Arianna D'Ottone Rambach is an Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Sapienza-University of Rome, Junior Fellow at the Sapienza School for Advanced Studies (SSAS: 2014-2017; 2017-2020), and Corresponding Member of the Académie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer (Bruxelles). In 2018 she was awarded the Samir Shamma Prize of the Royal Numismatic Society (London). Numismatic consultant for the Qatar National Museum (QNM, Doha – Oct 2021-Jan 2022), she is currently Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), Berkeley (Jan-May 2022). Her main fields of research are: Arabic manuscripts (palaeography, codicology, edition of texts), Arabic Papyrology and Numismatics.