Title in Arabic or Hebrew
- خيال الظل
Introduction
- As for “Shadow Play” as general topic, the archive preserves all of the documents, drafts and proofs of various works by Paul Kahle such as the monograph «Zur Geschichte des arabischen Schattentheaters in Egypten» (Leipzig 1909), and the articles “Das islamische Schattentheater in Aegypten” (1912), “Marktszene aus einem egyptischen Schattenspiel” (1912), “The Arabic Shadow Play in Egypt” (1940), “The Arabic Shadow Play in Medieval Egypt” (1954), and “A Gypsy Woman in Egypt in the Thirteenth Century, A.D.” (1950). These articles are related not only to the shadow theatre in the Arab world and individual characters but also to materials collected from the puppeteers by Kahle, documenting this tradition, which was still alive in Egypt when Kahle was there. The sub-sub-series also contains all the other studies (published and unpublished) by Kahle dedicated to other plays (in Ar. «la‘b» or «li‘b», literally “game”, meaning “piece”, “performance”) of shadow theater, and is organized into sub-sub-sub-series. Each sub-sub-sub-series preserves notebooks on which the Arabic text of the play was transcribed in Arabic writing (by an Arab) and (not systematically) re-transcribed and translated by Kahle, along with other related documents. Kahle published only a few materials on these plays, mainly relating to “al-Timsāḥ” and “al-Manār”. The Archive preserves all the documents in the relative sub-sub-sub-series, from the manuscripts edited, the various preparatory studies, and the drafts and the proofs of the works published such as “Das Krokodilspiel («Liʻb et-Timsāḥ»), ein egyptisches Schattenspiel” (1920), “Der Leuchtturm von Alexandria. Ein Schattenspiel aus dem mittelalterlichen Aegypten” (1928), and «Der Leuchtturm von Alexandria. Ein arabisches Schattenspiel aus dem mittelalterlichen Agypten» (Stuttgart 1930).