Paper, Geniza Records and History In the central Islamic lands, written works were widely circulated after the introduction of paper. Paper (made from linen) came from China, where the manufacturing process was a closely guarded secret. In , the Muslim governor of Samarqand took , Chinese invaders as prisoners, some of whom were good at making paper. For the next years, Samarqand paper remained an important export item.
Since Islam prohibited monopolies, paper began to be manufactured in the rest of the Islamic world. By the middle of the tenth century, it had more or less replaced papyrus, the writing material made from the inner stem of a plant that grew freely in the Nile valley. Demand for paper increased, and Abd al-Latif, a doctor from Baghdad (see his depiction of the ideal student on p. ) and a resident of Egypt between and , reported how Egyptian peasants robbed graves to obtain mummy wrappings made of linen to sell to paper factories.
Paper also facilitated the writing of commercial and personal documents of all kinds. In , a huge collection of medieval Jewish documents was discovered in a sealed room (Geniza, pronounced ghaniza ) of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat. The documents had been preserved thanks to the Jewish practice of not destroying any piece of writing that contained the name of God. The Geniza was found to contain over a quarter of a million manuscripts and fragments dating back as far as the mid-eighth century.
Most of the material dated from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, that is, from the Fatimid, Ayyubid and early Mamluk periods. These included personal letters between merchants, family and friends, contracts, promises of dowry, sale documents, laundry lists, and other trivia. Most of the documents were written in Judaeo-Arabic, a version of Arabic written in Hebrew characters that was commonly used by Jewish communities throughout the medieval Mediterranean. The Geniza documents provide rich insights into personal and economic experiences as also into Mediterranean and Islamic culture.
The documents also suggest that the business skills and commercial techniques of merchants