Title in Arabic or Hebrew
- الأدب
Introduction
- The sub-series “Literature” deals essentially with the Shadow Play (in Ar. «ḫayāl al-ẓill») and in particular with Ibn Dāniyāl’s major work «Ṭayf al-Ḫayāl». This is one of the texts studied in most detail by Kahle, but unfortunately not published when he was alive. The series also contains all the other studies (published and unpublished) dedicated to other plays of the Arabic shadow theater. Many texts collected by Kahle in the course of his research and now preserved in the Archive are in manuscript form and are unpublished. In particular, during the work of cataloguing, a few other important manuscripts have been found, purchased by Kahle from a family of Egyptian puppeteers during his stay in Egypt (1903-1909), such as a manuscript written between 1705 and 1707 to reintroduce the texts and techniques of the past into nineteenth-century Egypt. Thus the archive contains the documents personally collected by Kahle during his field research, as well as all of the materials on the shadow theatre (books, studies, articles, notebooks) inherited from Georg Jacob, including photographic copies of the extant manuscripts and a further manuscript copy of the work of Ibn Dāniyāl written down in 1910 in Cairo. A separate fonds contains the materials specifically pertaining to the research work of Georg Jacob, while all of the materials which, although also belonging to Jacob, showed evident signs of use and notes also by Kahle, were left in the Kahle fonds. With regard to the research carried out by Kahle on the subject, the archive contains nearly all the documents relating to all the articles he wrote on the Shadow Play, ranging from the preparatory materials to the drafts and proofs, as well as notes and study of the sources, such as transliteration, transcription and (English and German) translation of the texts examined and/or edited. This sub-series has been divided into one, large, sub-sub-series, “Shadow Play”, and another of “Varia”. The sub-sub-series “Shadow Play” is in turn divided into several sub-sub-sub-series dealing both with single plays including that of Ibn Dāniyāl – of which Kahle preserved materials and manuscripts – and with further topics of research, such as “History of the Shadow Theater”, “Jargon of the shadow player” and “Figures of the Shadow Play”.