The Old French texts of the Damascus Qubba

Up to the beginning of the twentieth century, four Old French pieces were stored in the Qubbat al-khazna adjacent to the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. All of them are now nowhere to be found. Three went to Berlin in 1903, where they were photographed and studiously edited by Adolf Tobler before being sent back to Damascus in 1909.1 The black and white photographs taken at the time are kept in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin as MSS simulata orientalia 6, photographs 89– 105 (or fols. 44–52), and they are now the sole direct testimony we possess of the documents.2 The last piece, the most fleeting of the four in terms of materiality, never left Damascus and is available for consultation through photographs taken in situ and held at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Berlin under shelf-mark BBAW/GCS, Akz.-Nr. 481/155–156.3