Special Exhibit Lecture:
A Cosmopolitan City: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Old Cairo
by Tasha Vorderstrasse PhD
Monday, March 2nd at 10:00 a.m.
The Oriental Institute Breasted Hall
Hidden for decades, the Oriental Institute’s collection of early Islamic and Fustat (Old Cairo) artifacts have been “rediscovered” and a number of them will be shown in the upcoming special exhibit. Other than a handful of specialists, few people know of the OI’s significant collection of material from the early Islamic period as it has lived silently in its storage area.
Key to this rediscovery was the research of co-curator Tasha Vorderstrasse, who noted the richness of the Fustat finds and recognized that some of our Hebrew manuscript pages, purchased in 1932 and since unpublished, were from the famous Cairo Genizah (document repository of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo).
