Tobias Scheunchen

Arabic Legal Papyri Research at the Ägyptisches Museum und Papyrussammlung in Berlin

Tobias Scheunchen is a social and material historian of the Middle East interested in the formation of the Islamic state, documentary culture, and the intersection of Byzantine and Islamic law. His research focuses on social, material, and global approaches to history, asking how premodern practitioners and consumers of law engaged with the material form of legal documents, how material scarcity and documentary practices governed the dispensation of Byzantine and Islamic justice, and how ordinary Muslims, Christians, and Jews employed sophisticated legal strategies to navigate the evolving legal landscape of the Islamic Middle East, especially during the first two centuries following the Arab Muslim conquests in the 640s.

During his archival research in Berlin, funded by The Barakat Trust, Tobias will examine some of the earliest Islamic legal documents preserved on papyrus: legal claims (adhkār ḥaqq), quittances (barāʾāt), and affidavits (iqrārāt) for his current book project entitled "Recording Justice in Byantine and Early Islamic Egypt (550–800)."