Al-Masa¯q, Vol. 21, No. 3, December 2009
Communities of the Dead in Umayyad Cordoba
ANN CHRISTYS
There are frequent references to Cordoba’s cemeteries in Arabic, Latin and Romance sources, and archaeologists have uncovered several of them. This provides some evidence for the social aspects of burial. This paper considers two factors that seem to have determined where a citizen of Cordoba might be buried – the individual’s social status and religious affiliation – and evaluates their significance.
ABSTRACT
Keywords: Cordoba; Umayyads; Christian; Muslim; Burial; Cemeteries in al-Andalus; Ibn al-Qu¯tiya; al-Ghaza¯li; al-Andalus – archaeology _
On a September day in 972, the caliph al-Hakam II left his palace inside the old _ walled city of Cordoba to inspect a factory making t ira¯z—silk woven for the ruler _ 1 and embroidered with his name. He went out by the Ba¯b al-Yahu¯d (the gate of the Jews), and passed by the cemetery of Umm Sala¯ma, which lay just outside the walls. There are many casual references like this to the cemeteries of medieval Cordoba in a range of written sources, in Arabic, Latin and Romance. Putting them together, scholars have identified more than 20 cemeteries and three royal burial grounds and they are fairly sure where some of them were.2 In addition, since the brief biographies of the eminent men of al-Andalus in the collections now known as biographical dictionaries often end with the subject’s interment, we are almost able to say where individual bodies were buried, although in practice, one cannot dig at the spot marked ‘‘X’’. Excavation is contingent upon modern redevelopment. To make matters more difficult, until the early 1990s, archaeologists tended to rush through Cordoba’s Islamic layers in search of the Roman city beneath and vital evidence has been destroyed. Recently, however, more than a dozen burial sites have been uncovered: a huge expansion in the material remains which corroborates
Correspondence: Ann Christys, 2 Moseley Wood Farm, Smithy Lane, Leeds, LS16 7NG, UK. E-mail:
[email protected] 1
Ibn Hayya¯n, Muqtabas, ed. A.R.A. al-Hajji (Beirut: Da¯r al-Thaqa¯fa, 1983), p. 92. _ _ Rafael Pinilla Melguizo, ‘‘Aportaciones al estudio de la topografı´a de Co´rdoba isla´mica: almacabras’’, Qurtuba, 2 (1997): 175–214.
2
ISSN 0950–3110 print/ISSN 1473–348X online/09/030289-11 ß 2009 Society for the Medieval Mediterranean DOI: 10.1080/09503110903343291
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some of the written evidence.3 We can say as much about the cemeteries of Umayyad Cordoba as about anywhere in the medieval Islamic world. This in turn contributes to our knowledge of social aspects of Islamic burial, which have been little studied.4 Indeed, it is strange that scholars who continue to debate the topography of ‘‘the Islamic city’’ rarely consider the ultimate fate of its citizens.5 This paper uses two case studies to investigate what determined where Cordoba’s citizens were buried. The first deals with ‘‘elite’’ burial, the second with ‘‘convivencia’’—or its post-mortem equivalent—the disposal of the dead of the three religions of al-Andalus. My first case study is the death and burial in 367/977 of the scholar Ibn al-Qu¯tiya, author of a History of the Conquest of al-Andalus.6 Ibn al-Qu¯tiya’s _ _ biography was written before 1013 by one of his pupils, Ibn al-Faradi.7 _ Unfortunately, as is so often the case, only one late manuscript of Ibn al-Faradi’s _ collection as a whole has survived, and the versions of the biography of Ibn al-Qu¯tiya that were copied into a number of later biographical dictionaries show _ a number of more or less important variants on what is presumed to be the original accoun