A manuscripts of xeer cisse from 1814

[Midas]

It's amazing what you can find my crawling through somali social media. This guy apparently found a somali ajami manuscript of xeer cisse from 1814. That's 211 years ago.

 

[Midas]

My bad he actually talls about it in part 2

 

[Midas]

It really seems like this stuff was heavily formalized and written. He's also talking about the xeer and mentions a lot of esoteric stuff about it

@Shimbiris @Idilinaa @NidarNidar

 

[Midas]

I think this is actually the oldest somali ajami manuscript I've heard of so far and the longest as well.

 

[Idilinaa]

This is major. They need to digitize this.

Someone should send this to that Somali academic(forgot his name) , who works with old manuscripts.

 

[Midas]

This is major. They need to digitize this.

Someone should send this to that Somali academic(forgot his name) , who works with old manuscripts.

They really should. But it goes to show that the excerpt you posted on here about the guy talking about somali books is no joke. We'll hopefully find more of these kinds of manuscripts.

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[Som]

I think this is actually the oldest somali ajami manuscript I've heard of so far and the longest as well.

We can only imagine how many others there are which are more ancient and haven't been publicized. Somalia's history research is literally in it's baby footsteps. Somali wadaad script is supposedly at least 700-800 years old , if complex stuff like this was being written in 1814 when can reasonably expect works from at least 200-300 years old before that date

 

[Midas]

We can only imagine how many others there are which are more ancient and haven't been publicized. Somalia's history research is literally in it's baby footsteps. Somali wadaad script is supposedly at least 700-800 years old , if complex stuff like this was being written in 1814 when can reasonably expect works from at least 200-300 years old before that date

Yeah i can't imagine how much there must be out there. It also seems to mainly be writing on local cultural and historical stuff. At the end of the video for example he talks about the book mentions spefically the xeer of some profession/job called uul haye ?

He also interestingly enough talks about how if people think their are mistakes in the work that corrections are more than welcome but that is should have some evidence behind it. (This dudd seems like a very serious researcher he's also apparently the guy behind the aaya reeb book series )

 

[Nur_]

I think this is actually the oldest somali ajami manuscript I've heard of so far and the longest as well.

I do remember seeing a letter somewhere on twitter that was between some ottoman empire leader and a somali sultanate leader. I'm not sure if it was legitimate though.

 

[Midas]

I do remember seeing a letter somewhere on twitter that was between some ottoman empire leader and a somali sultanate leader. I'm not sure if it was legitimate though.

It's possible that it's real somali leaders would have definitely communicated with the ottomans.

 

[Midas]

Ive been digging around and This manuscript might actually be one of the oldest example of a fully ajami manuscript in africa.

The thing with the ajami script in africa is if you Google how old it is you get numbers like 15/16/17th century. But this is actually a bit deceptive since the reality is not what you'd imagine when you hear it's this old. because when you dig a little deeper the definition of ajami they use is basically if you have a word or a name or line in ajami they call it an ajami text. As far as I can tell out of the 8 or 9 famous ajami lanaguges. there are no texts fully written in ajami before the 19th century. It's all words/lines.

Most of the 19th century works also seem to date to post European contact period ( a good portion of them were actually written at the rquest of European scholars/explorers at least in the case of hausa). And a lot of it is relegious poetry. As best as I can tell this image i had after hearing about the timbukut manuscripts of people actually writing books on medicine,geography,literature,etc in african lanaguges never actually existed. It was only really in the mid - late 19th century this started to come into being

 

[Idilinaa]

Ive been digging around and This manuscript might actually be one of the oldest example of a fully ajami manuscript in africa.

The thing with the ajami script in africa is if you Google how old it is you get numbers like 15/16/17th century. But this is actually a bit deceptive since the reality is not what you'd imagine when you hear it's this old. because when you dig a little deeper the definition of ajami they use is basically if you have a word or a name or line in ajami they call it an ajami text. As far as I can tell out of the 8 or 9 famous ajami lanaguges. there are no texts fully written in ajami before the 19th century. It's all words/lines.

Most of the 19th century works also seem to date to post European contact period ( a good portion of them were actually written at the rquest of European scholars/explorers at least in the case of hausa). And a lot of it is relegious poetry. As best as I can tell this image i had after hearing about the timbukut manuscripts of people actually writing books on medicine,geography,literature,etc in african lanaguges never actually existed. It was only really in the mid - late 19th century this started to come into being

That revelation you shared of Timbuktu really was the most surprising to me, how 90% of what they regarded as manuscripts was in reality 1 page study sheets.

Also i think we might be surprised at what more we might find lying around in private hands, Somalia was unique in Africa in the sense we exported scholarship abroad and had local learning centers that disseminated texts.

 

[Midas]

That revelation you shared of Timbuktu really was the most surprising to me, how 90% of what they regarded as manuscripts was in reality 1 page study sheets.

Also i think we might be surprised at what more we might find lying around in private hands, Somalia was unique in Africa in the sense we exported scholarship abroad and had local learning centers that disseminated texts.

Yes i think we'll find lots of intresting stuff . The fact that this manuscript record local xeer and folkloric astronomy knowledge has me confidence will find similar stuff and probably even poetry. If we have early 19th century manuscripts then I'm sure we'll find 18,17,16th manuscripts as well.

The timbuktu thing was surprising to me as well. But now that I now that actual ajami literature is only from the 19th century it makes a lot of sense. Look at how with swahili we have the inshkisahfi poem. Isn't it strange that In west africa with 10 times the number of Muslims in the swahili coast. There's is not a single famous work before the 1800s ? I mean isn't it strange that nobody wrote down the stories of these griots and the famous oral epics about mali? In the context of ajami really developing in the late 19th century it makes a lot more sense

 

[Midas]

Although now I'm aware of glosess being common in africa manuscripts. I'm confident we have manuscripts in somalia from at least the 11th century that survived. I mean the harar museum has 2 manuscripts from the 1300s . And another 12 that date before 1500. There must be several of these manuscripts that have glosses in somali. Imagine the potenial for reconstructing medieval somali using this