What Travels When People Don’t?

This seminar will be presented by Arezou Azad, who will offer an original perspective on the Silk Roads through a study of the Bamiyan Papers. By focusing on everyday documents rather than solely on travelers and traded goods, she will shed light on the practices, institutions, and networks that enabled movement and exchange across the medieval Islamic world.

"What does it mean for a society to be connected to a wider world? Histories of long-distance exchange tend to follow things and people in motion: merchants, pilgrims, precious objects and manuscripts. This paper starts somewhere less glamorous—with debts, receipts, petitions, accounts and letters. Drawing on several hundred medieval documents from central Afghanistan known as the Bamiyan Papers, it explores the everyday workings of connectivity across the medieval Islamicate world. Written in Persian, Arabic, Judaeo-Persian and Hebrew, these documents reveal people operating across linguistic, religious and institutional boundaries. By comparing them with documentary practices from Cairo to Central Asia, I ask how ways of writing themselves travelled: how legal formulae, accounting conventions and scribal techniques crossed linguistic boundaries and outlived the states that produced them. At the same time, the documents reveal a paradox: mobility depended upon people who stayed put. The paper argues for a history of connectivity built not only around routes and travellers, but around the documentary practices, institutions and ordinary relationships that made movement possible.

The Invisible East Programme The Invisible East Programme is a University of Oxford research initiative devoted to recovering the social, cultural, economic and linguistic history of the medieval Islamicate East, particularly Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Working with documentary sources such as legal and administrative records, letters, accounts, receipts and literary fragments in New Persian, Judaeo-Persian, Arabic, Bactrian, Khotanese, Middle Persian and other regional languages, it seeks to bring into view the everyday lives, communities and institutions often missing from conventional historical narratives. The programme transcribes, translates and analyses these materials and makes them accessible through a multilingual digital corpus, allowing dispersed documents to be studied together. 

Invisible East has been supported by a range of funders and donors, including major grants from the European Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. This funding has supported research, publications, digital resources and wider public and educational engagement."

• Arezou Azad is a historian of the premodern Islamicate East (Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia), specialising in the period from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century. She is a member of the Centre de recherche sur le monde iranien and holds the Chair in the Arts and Heritage of Afghanistan at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris. She also directs the Invisible East programme.
• Discussant: Mahya Tooranpoor is a PhD candidate in Islamic Architecture at Tabriz Islamic Art University, Iran. Her research focuses on the history of Iranian architecture and foundational questions in historical manuscripts. As a visiting researcher invited by Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, she explores architectural knowledge transmission in Islamic contexts. She is also passionate about photography and has participated in group exhibitions in Tehran, Iran.