Dr. Rachel Schine

@rachelschine

Picks books up and puts them down. Will work 4 ليمون نعناع. Professes Arabic and History @ UMD Hears selectively. Reads voraciously.

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Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· 2d

And we're back! ቍጥዓ here means fury. Leslau says it's related to ቅ-ጥ-ጥ, a root that produces words like 'butt end,' 'spear,' and is related to Arabic قط, used for cutting or sharpening the nib of a reed pen. But might قط then also be related to قطع, to cut, in Arabic? Thoughts @acbm.bsky.social?

entry in Leslau's Ethiopic dictionary about the relationship between ቍ-ጥ-ዕ root and ቅ-ጥ-ጥ

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jul 8

Good to know that in the Ge'ez tradition one still never really has good ol' sexy funtimes, just 'knows another (Biblically) and conceives.'

passage from a manuscript in which 'Adam knew Eve and she conceived'

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jul 3

Got a little public-facing piece coming out soon about a really cool late-16th-century Arabic source on scarification's origins in Northeast Africa. Submitting the edits today. A teaser.

By the late Middle Ages Egypt was at the epicentre of the Islamic world and was a crucial hub for non-Muslims as well, from Italian merchants and Ethiopian envoys to many local Christians and Jews. One marker of difference people might have noticed around them as they moved through Cairo’s streets, sailed down the Nile, or ventured farther afield into Mediterranean and Red Sea was quite literal: the ink, scars, and brands worn as body art. Though tattooing was said to have been performed by women in Mecca during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime (c. 570-632 CE), it was typically understood as forbidden for Muslims, as was cauterisation and scarification for non-medical purposes. Despite exceptional cases like the North African Berbers (known for continuing to wear their tattoos proudly after Islamisation), more often permanent body art was therefore linked to religious and/or ethnic difference in the Islamic world. Christian communities in Northeast Africa—Copts, Nubians, and so-called Abyssinians (hubush in Arabic)—became especially known by their Muslim neighbours for inscribing their skin with distinctive marks. Because of where these people lived, knowledge of their body art was frequently tied to Egyptian historical memory, even for authors writing far beyond Egypt’s borders.

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jul 1

Reading a text where God is chatting with Adam about all the shit He's about to put humankind through, and this delightful cognate came up. Y'know that strait that's become much more newsworthy since the Hormuz stuff, Bab El-Mandeb? Mandab/məndābe, in Arabic and Ge'ez, mean lamentation/distress...

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jun 29

ok so perhaps you won’t find this “Fun Fact” from the Metropolitan Opera as amusing as I do, then, but I also am a sucker for reception history 😅

Fun Facts from the Metropolitan Opera re: Porgy and Bess’s centrality to the “what’s an opera vs a musical” debate

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jun 23

idk, in my experience these kinds of things always end pretty well...

passage about the Safavid shah's defeat of the Uzbek Shaybanid shah in the early 16th century, after which he supposedly had his skull turned into a drinking cup

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jun 17

It's pretty important, when you're opening a book, to ask God to preserve you body and soul and establish you in what is proper... because otherwise you might write something dumb.

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jun 17

Pwoofs 🥺

Abstract for a forthcoming article titled, "A Slave per Day in Perpetuity: Conquest Numeracy and the Saharan Frontier," about a string of agreements across the Sahara attested in early Muslim conquest narratives that elicited 360 persons per year from parts of what are now Niger, Libya, and Upper Egypt/Nubia.

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jun 16

I tend to think each language has its own idioms and should keep them, because difference is beautiful, but every time I come across the idea of something 'so scary it could make a baby go gray' in Arabic I'm like 'yeah no English should steal that it's great.'

وكان لهم ساعة يشيب من هولها الطفل المولود

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jun 16

My little exercise of the day included this passage about Jesus's flight into Egypt to escape Herod, which taught me a few new words, but I particularly liked አምገጸ, 'from the face/presence of,' to indicate direction.

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jun 14

Giant mushrooms spotted on my run today. Ta-da.

Large white mushrooms sticking out from under a wooden step on a dirt trail

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Jun 12

Like ok let's just say that 'both sides' of the Humanities Discourse are authentically aggrieved: folks who think their work has (the right) politics feel gagged *and* folks who think their work is above politics also feel gagged. At least one group has to be wrong. It so happens that both are.

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· May 28

Hey language freaks, is the Ge'ez word ከርሥ (abdomen, womb) cognate with Arabic كرسي? Because for the sake of my own geeky satisfaction I *feel like it should be.*

passage from liturgical manuscript discussing Christ's descent from heaven into Mary's womb

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· May 19

Our God also literally has a God-off with a powerful but deeply lazy Baal at one point, fwiw. *gestures in henotheism*

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· May 18

Can the linguists help out with this one? This claim from Bowersock that 'berber' in Arabic comes from Barbaria in Somalia but in a way wholly unrelated to Greek barbaroi while also having identical etymological lore applied by later authors seems... intentionally convoluted.

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· May 12

Honestly the primary explanation I've seen of the horns thing is Alexander's own styling as a ruler, particularly on coinage where he seems to be channeling the Greco-Egyptian fusion of Zeus and Ammon. But the ambiguity over whether Dhu'l-Qarnayn and Alexander are even the same person runs deep!

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· May 12

Man how cool is it that I can read stuff like this in random footnotes now?

passage about the Alexander Romance in Ge'ez, featuring his name ('the two horned') written out in Ge'ez characters

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Apr 26

Apparently this was due to a somewhat chance purchase in the 1960s. You can also access the catalog here: www.paulkahle.unito.it (Excerpt from an article by Francesca Bellino on Bruno Chiesa's role in documenting the archive)

Upon his arrival in Turin, the daily consultation of books, manuscripts and
research materials once belonging to the German Orientalist Paul E. Kahle (purchased by the University of Turin in 1966 and kept in the Department of Oriental Studies of which Chiesa was the director) prompted him to start the cataloging of the Islamic manuscripts preserved therein. The project culminated with the publication of the Catalogue of the Islamic Manuscripts from the Kahle Collection in the Department of Oriental Studies of the University of Turin edited by Roberto Tottoli, Maria Luisa Russo and Michele Bernardini. Thanks to his solid experience of working on manuscripts, not to mention his curiosity about the Islamic tradition, Chiesa provided remarkable help to the editors in reading, deciphering and describing many works. At every stage, he participated to the work of description of all the 300 hundred Islamic manuscripts in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. His vast knowledge and his familiarity with the various scripts made it possible to provide plenty of information now included in the catalog

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Apr 9

At least it was a fun one to write... sort of.

Article abstract:

A curious repetition occurs in narratives of the Muslims’ first encounters with polities along the Sahara’s edge, extending from Nubia to Niger. At each turn, agreements involving tributes of 360 enslaved persons were reached with local leaders. I use this recurrence to explore two aspects of Islamic conquest literatures: the significance within this genre of numbers in describing worldly events and the cosmic structures that background them, and the historiographical question of how to contextualize conquest numeracy in practices of statecraft and their representation. I argue that these agreements deploy a Late Antique symbolic vernacular that moved orally across domains of culture and knowledge to define diplomatic and trade relations between Saharan states and their new Muslim neighbors. Using the number of days of the idealized calendar year, authors signified these relationships’ continuous and cyclical returns. Attention to varying uses of the figure of 360 slaves allows us to track political and narrative developments as well as to critique the projection of borderland African regions as passive and perpetual “slaving zones.”

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Apr 8

Anyone know why another term for الخط الحميري is المسند? Because I don't and I wanna know. They're used interchangeably in the source I'm reading.

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Apr 7

Fun fact: according to legend, Bilqīs wed Sulaymān a virgin because she didn't dig dudes until she met a Real One (read: a prophet). (This is a common trope in later Arabic popular literature, too, regarding heroic women who convert to Islam in adulthood.)

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Mar 26

you're better off... because wtf is this?

image of a tweet saying that Jews justify their crimes against Palestinians over a holocaust they 'claim' happened, and so Africans should demand reparations for colonial plunder that 'certainly' happened

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Mar 26

Plus a teaser from the conclusion:

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Mar 13

This just in: synagogues with daycares are "IDF recruitment centers" and therefore legitimate targets of vigilante violence. Really glad we cleared that up.

MRO reposting a troll account tweet reading:
'guy who says 'death to Israel' and then gets mad when somebody attacks an IDF recruitment office'

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Mar 5

Oh no! (All the Ge’ez in the book is right though! And good practice for me.)

Disconnected backwards arabic in an academic book about English-Ethiopian relations

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Mar 5

Teaching a "history & theory" guest class next week where we're doing race, gender, and intersectionality in premodernity. Theory's only useful in practice, so I'm just gonna throw a bunch of stories like this one at mostly non-Islamicists and see what they do with them (from Katz's Wives and Work).

A Black Sufi named Abu Yi'zza serves as a slave in an elite woman's home as a spiritual exercise, when she finds out it is him, though, she vows to take on all of the housework herself instead.

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Mar 4

ok seriously the "Iran is doing decolonization" thing was maybe a bit pathetically naïve yesterday but today I'm beginning to wonder if any of you know the colonial history of Iran... or the Gulf in general for that matter... or what words mean

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Feb 26

here's the whole megilla lol

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Feb 21

GUYS GUYS GUYS my incredible colleague, Antoine Borrut, just texted me this pic, the BOOK IS IN HAND, which means you too can have it soon! Astrology and History in Early Islam, coming out with Edinburgh!

Image of a copy of the book, Astrology and History in Early Islam: Aligning Heaven and Earth, by Antoine Borrut

Dr. Rachel Schine@rachelschine· Feb 20

Well at least now we're 'noticing' Catholics... oh, wait.