Indexing a Shared Knowledge Culture from Many Perspectives: The Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East (HIMME) as a Tool for Researching Diversity

Abstract

The medieval Middle East, at the crossroads of Africa and Eurasia, included more distinct yet intersecting literary traditions in more languages than any other part of the premodern world. While several of these literary traditions were religiously demarcated, others such as Arabic and Persian were multireligious written cultures. Despite this, the religious diversity of this region is often conceptualized as separate communities who sometimes interacted. Religion was certainly a socially relevant category employed by medieval people to organize their world, and yet people from every religion wrote about the same government, the same society, and largely the same culture, a culture expressed in religious multiplicity. A new digital research project has developed a reference tool (the Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East, HIMME) to demonstrate the shared culture and society of the diverse medieval Middle East. It provides a union index to selected primary sources in Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, and Syriac, indexing the people, places, and practices mentioned in each literary tradition. The result is that someone interested in, for example, the famous counter-Crusader Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn) can search a database and discover relevant primary sources in unexpected languages such as Syriac as well as the expected Arabic and Latin sources, while the later conqueror Timur Lenk is also mentioned in Greek and Armenian texts that might easily be missed. This article offers an overview of the research tool (published on August 1, 2021), and a discussion of its scope, as well as suggestions for how it might be used to research Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the medieval Middle East.