A Digital Edition of The Book On the History of the City of Homs and on Some Geographical Matters (Cambridge Add. 338): XML and TEI/XML datasets and indices

On the importance of Dalālah al-uṣūlīyah al-bahīyah fī tawārīkh madīnat Ḥimṣ (the “al-Gugrāfiyā”), a local chronicle of Ḥimṣ in ca. 1100 pages It is a duty of historical scholarship to remember those who preserved the heritage of earlier generations and transmitted it—often at great personal cost in time, travel, and painstaking observation. In the modern history of Ḥimṣ (Homs), few figures embody this duty more clearly than Constantin ibn Dāʾūd, a Homsi author profoundly attached to his city and to its material and written culture. His long work—commonly designated by him as al-Gugrāfiyā and known by its fuller title Dalālah al-uṣūlīyah al-bahīyah fī tawārīkh madīnat Ḥimṣ—survives in a unique manuscript copy in Cambridge (Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 338). Alongside it, Constantin also authored a shorter historical book of roughly 300 pages, often cited simply as al-Tārīkh, preserved as a unique copy in Paris (Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Arabe 5936). Taken together, these two works form a rare, internally coherent “double lens” on the city: a vast topographic–antiquarian inventory on the one hand, and a more biographically oriented historical narrative on the other. The importance of the Dalālah is, first, methodological and documentary. Constantin did not write from a distance: he walked the streets of Ḥimṣ, entered its churches and mosques, revisited monuments repeatedly, and built his account from direct inspection. His practice anticipates what a contemporary scholar would call fieldwork. He copied inscriptions when possible, returned to re-check dates when building works or erosion made readings uncertain, and even notes cases where inscriptions were hard to decipher with time. His description of the citadel is especially revealing of his empirical temperament: he explains the tools he used, the limits of measurement when cords could not be laid across complex structures, and the difference between an estimate and a mathematically exact survey—at one point using binoculars to read an inaccessible inscription. These are not literary flourishes; they are a “protocol of observation” that makes the Dalālah an unusually transparent source for the history of architecture and urban space in nineteenth-century Syria. Second, the Dalālah is a major contribution to the social history and confessional topography of Ḥimṣ. Constantin records not only buildings, but the lived practices surrounding them—how communities used spaces, how traditions differed between Ḥimṣ and Damascus, and how religious life intersected with political change. He composed his work in a period he himself understood as decisive: after the Egyptian administration of Syria in the 1830s, when (in his view) society changed fundamentally, and when church building and renovation became more feasible and visible. Yet he also notes that this visibility could provoke tensions, preserving vignettes of local intolerance and communal mobilization around church rebuilding. Such passages matter because they document everyday dynamics at the level of craftsmen, donors, parishioners, and neighborhoods—precisely the strata that are often absent from official chronicles. Third, and crucial for prosopography, Constantin’s Dalālah functions as a “registry of names” for Homsi elites and families across several centuries. Beyond bishops and clergy, he preserves the social micro-history embedded in dedicatory practices: waqf inscriptions on chalices, icons, and books; family endowments; donor networks; and the local economies of piety. These materials allow historians to reconstruct kinship and patronage patterns that colophons alone only partially capture. His portrait of Bishop Athanasius of Damascus—wealthy, multilingual, mobile across the Ottoman world, and active in furnishing and embellishing churches—shows how an individual biography becomes a node connecting economic capital, artisanal labor (including imported carpenters), and interconfessional public life. In short: the Dalālah does not merely “mention” people; it preserves the social mechanisms by which a community reproduced itself materially and spiritually. Fourth, the work is exceptionally valuable for the history of books and reading. Constantin writes as a committed bibliophile shaped by ecclesiastical proximity and by libraries—especially the collection he repeatedly calls “the library of the late priest Dāʾūd,” very likely his father. He describes the value of rare books, recounting attempts by a consul to purchase a unique copy he refused to sell, insisting that books were more precious than money. He also provides evidence for manuscript circulation and readership through dated reading notes, marginalia, and reports of lost collections. His account of how a church library survived because looters overlooked a side room—while service books kept in the main church were taken—captures, in one scene, the vulnerability of textual heritage and the accidental contingencies that decide what remains. For projects concerned with Christian Arabic textual transmission, these observations are not anecdotal: they are primary evidence about how libraries were structured, what kinds of books were exposed in liturgical spaces, and how loss and survival shaped today’s manuscript record. Fifth, the Dalālah intersects directly with the history of Arabic printing and the aims of the TYPARABIC project. Constantin preserves information about copies of printed books—particularly those associated with Aleppo—that were present in Ḥimṣ in his time. Such notices are rare and often impossible to retrieve from catalogues alone. Here, a local historian becomes an inadvertent bibliographer of print circulation: he tells us not simply that books existed, but where they were kept, who handled them, and how they were valued. In this sense, the Dalālah is a bridge between the archaeology of monuments and the archaeology of texts—between stone inscriptions, church furniture, manuscript colophons, and the afterlives of printed volumes in provincial libraries. Finally, the Dalālah’s importance today is amplified by the way it can be made usable. A manuscript of ca. 1100 pages is, by default, a “closed archive”: accessible only through long-term, manual reading. The detailed description presented here is the fruit of a complete Handwritten Text Recognition workflow carried out in collaboration with Cambridge University Library. That intervention changes the status of Constantin’s work: it becomes searchable, excerptable, and linkable to prosopographical databases, place gazetteers, and print-history datasets. In other words, Constantin preserved the heritage of Ḥimṣ for his generation; digital philology can now preserve—and activate—Constantin for ours. A final note is necessary for responsible use: Constantin is a careful observer, but not infallible. Some dates require verification, especially where he converts between chronological systems (e.g., “Adam” years or Alexandrian eras) and when a missing digit can shift a date by a century. These slips do not weaken the value of the Dalālah; they clarify how we must read it: critically, comparatively, and with the same respect for evidence that Constantin himself so often models.This research is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 883219-AdG-2019 – Project TYPARABIC). The text reflects only the author’s views. The ERC is not responsible for any use that may be made of the information it contains.