ayment Order
T-S 30.184

Date: 1140

MATERIAL: Paper

LANGUAGE: Judeo-Arabic

CONTENT:

These twenty small fragments represent the equivalent of what we would refer to as checks or payment orders. They record that the banker is requested to pay from funds deposited with him a specified amount to the recipient in respect of goods received and it is signed by the drawer of the check, Abu Zikhri Judah b. Joseph Ha-Kohen. Coptic numerals are employed, the date is given and part of the verse from Psalms 85:12 is cited, perhaps to add authenticity to the promise.

IMPORTANCE:These fragments provide evidence for correcting the assertion that it was Italian bankers of the fourteenth century who introduced the notion of the check to the world of finance. Jewish and Muslim traders were employing such a system of payment at least two centuries earlier and may have emulated a practice that they had encountered in their eastward travels as far as India. Like the introduction of paper, such an invention may ultimately owe its origins to Chinese monetary procedures.  

QUOTE: "May the elder Abu ’l-Kayr Khiyar pay the bearer the sum of one hundred dinars for the house [wife?] of Amin al-Dawl, Av [July–August] 1140"

READING: A Mediterranean Society, by S. D. Goitein, vol. 1, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1967, p. 241 and an article by A. Shivtiel entitled ‘Genizah Payment Orders from Fustat’ in a forthcoming Festschrift for S. C. Reif, to be published by Brill, Leiden.