Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on transliteration and dating
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Early Islam and late antiquity
- 3 New directions in the early Islamic period
- 4 The countryside
- 5 Towns, cities and palaces
- 6 Religious practice in the Islamic world
- 7 Crafts and industry
- 8 Travel and trade
- 9 The ‘post-medieval’ Islamic world
- 10 Conclusion
- Glossary
- Dynasties and periods
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on transliteration and dating
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Early Islam and late antiquity
- 3 New directions in the early Islamic period
- 4 The countryside
- 5 Towns, cities and palaces
- 6 Religious practice in the Islamic world
- 7 Crafts and industry
- 8 Travel and trade
- 9 The ‘post-medieval’ Islamic world
- 10 Conclusion
- Glossary
- Dynasties and periods
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It should be known that many weak-minded persons in cities hope to discover property under the surface of the earth and to make some profit from it. They believe that all the property of the nations of the past was stored underground and sealed with magic talismans. These seals, they believe, can be broken only by those who chance upon the [necessary] knowledge and can offer the proper incense, prayers, and sacrifices to break them.
This admonition forms part of a chapter entitled ‘Trying to make money from buried and other treasures is not a natural way of making a living’, in Ibn Khaldun's famous sociological treatise al-Muqaddima (The Prolegomenon). There is no mistaking Ibn Khaldun's disdain for the superstitious practices of treasure hunters. Although his own reconstruction of the past relied upon texts – chronicles, biographies, geographical encyclopaedias, religious and legal scholarship, and archival sources – he was not insensitive to the material world around him and to the ways in which the human environment had shaped the course of history. Thus he interests himself in the diverse characteristics of settlements, the rise and fall of civilisations, and the crafts practised by the inhabitants of urban and rural areas. Given the extraordinary range of his interests, it is tempting to speculate upon how he might have viewed the activities of modern archaeologists. Would he have judged archaeology to be a legitimate avenue of research into earlier centuries, or would he have dismissed it as little more than treasure hunting conducted by the ‘weak-minded’?
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- Information
- An Introduction to Islamic Archaeology , pp. 192 - 222Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010