Indexing a Shared Knowledge Culture from Many Perspectives: The Historical Index of the Medieval Middle East (HIMME) as a Tool for Researching Diversity

The medieval Middle East, at the crossroads of Africa and Eurasia, included more distinct yet intersecting literary traditions in languages than any other part premodern world. While several these were religiously demarcated, others such as Arabic Persian multireligious written cultures. Despite this, religious diversity this region is often conceptualized separate communities who sometimes interacted. Religion was certainly a socially relevant category employed by people to organize their world, from every religion wrote about same government, society, largely culture, culture expressed multiplicity. A new digital research project has developed reference tool (the Historical Index Medieval HIMME) demonstrate shared society diverse East. It provides union index selected primary sources Arabic, Armenian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Persian, Syriac, indexing people, places, practices mentioned each tradition. result that someone interested in, for example, famous counter-Crusader Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn) can search database discover unexpected Syriac well expected Latin sources, while later conqueror Timur Lenk also Greek Armenian texts might easily be missed. This article offers an overview (published on August 1, 2021), discussion its scope, suggestions how it used Jews, Christians, Muslims