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"Arab Traders in their Own Words explores for the first time the largest unified corpus of merchant correspondence to have survived from the Ottoman period. The writers chosen for this first volume were mostly Christian merchants who traded within a network that connected the Syrian and Egyptian provinces and extended from Damascus in the North to Alexandria in the South with particular centers in Jerusalem and Damietta. They lived through one of the most turbulent intersections of Ottoman and European imperial history, the 1790s and early 1800s, and had to navigate their fortunes through diplomacy, culture, and commerce. Besides an edition of more than 190 letters in colloquial Arabic this volume also offers a profound introductory study"--

Abstract
An illustrated cosmographical and geographical manuscript at Oxford's Bodleian Library, known as the Book of Curiosities, has recently seen a rare confluence of public and scholarly attention. It is widely regarded as one of the outstanding Arabic works of geography, with stylistically idiosyncratic maps and a text that can be traced back to Egypt in the Fatimid period. However, few concrete facts are known about the history of this unique artefact. This article will identify and analyse the traces left by some of its previous owners and thus unlock the Ottoman history of this Fatimid work. By placing it in a concrete temporal and geographical context, we are better able to envisage the intellectual, social, and political environment in which this book could make sense to its owners and readers.

Apart from military personnel, the presence of Arabs in post-conquest Upper Egypt is poorly documented both in the literary sources and the papyri. The present first edition of an Arabic document from the town of Djême may be evidence of very early contacts between conquerors and indigenous population on a civilian level even in such a remote provincial place. In the text, a Copt receives a receipt for the purchase of real estate from a recently deceased Arab woman.

Only a fragment of the sizeable work of Kamāl al-Dīn survived and is now preserved in the Forschungsbibliothek Schloss Friedenstein in Gotha. It represents the earliest known Arabic notebook of an artisan or merchant and sheds light on the everyday life in 10th/16th century Aleppo.