Thanks to groundbreaking work by the editors of the Arabic documents from the Qubbat al-Khazna in Damascus, now conserved amongst the Şâm Evrakları or “Damascus Documents” in the Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi (TIEM), the Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, in Istanbul, it is now possible to identify the first corpus of original documents from Kalbid Sicily, in addition to one from Norman Sicily. This preliminary study demonstrates that three of these four acts, in addition to the one deed of sale already published as coming from the island, were indeed made in Sicily. It shows conclusively that, unlike the dīwānī documents issued by the Norman kings, non-dīwānī documents of Norman Sicily belong to an unbroken documentary tradition stretching back into the period of Kalbid rule, and exhibit no evidence of having been transformed after 1130 under the influence of the royal dīwān after it had been recreated on the model of contemporary Egyptian practice. It also begins to make the case that the Arabic documents from Sicily were the heirs of an Ifrīqiyan documentary tradition which remains undervalued and little known, and deserves to be more seriously taken into account in the discussion of the evolution of medieval Arabic documents.
