Abstract
With over two one hundred fifty documents, the archives of Abū Hurayra Ǧaʿfar b. ʾAḥmad(floruit 849-868) constitute one of the richest and best-preserved corpora of medieval Egypt. This exceptional collection includes a wide variety of documents: letters, legal contracts, accounting records, literary texts, and paraliterary texts that this merchant wrote down as a sign of devotion. These archives offer a unique insight into the economic and social life of the time, and provide a glimpse into the intimacy of this family, revealing its joys, sorrows, concerns and aspirations. They also reflect the intellectual and religious atmosphere in which the family lived. This presentation will examine some of the texts that shed light on the theoretical and technical knowledge that merchants and notaries from this milieu had to acquire and master throughout their training and professional careers.
