Waqfiyyas are only slowly being discovered and appreciated as perhaps the most detailed and accurate source for the social and economic history of the institutions of learning and teaching in Egypt and Syria in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.Only few waqfiyyas have been published, fewer still evaluated and translated.'No comprehensive study of the beginnings of waqf is available, 2 and we know only very little about the development of this institution in the Mamluk period.Certainly the waqf documents, as an epistolographical genre, show change; even a superficial comparison of the endowment deed of Sultan Qaldwan from 685-6/1286-7 3 with waqfiyyas from the early Circassian period reveals a growing interest in architectural details during the fourteenth century.But the history of the awqdf themselves in the late Middle Ages, as it is reflected in these deeds, remains largely obscure to us. 3 a The reason for this state of the art is simple: A comprehensive analysis of Mamluk waqfiyyas requires the availability of these texts; yet to this day most of them remain inaccessible 1 Leo A. Mayer: The buildings of Qaytbay as described in the endowment deed (London, 1938).Ahmed Darrg, L'Acte de waqf de Barsbay (Huaat waqf Barsbay), (Textes et traductions d'auteurs orientaux, III) (Cairo, 1963).For the last decade of the 7th/13th century see: Axel Moberg, "Zwei gyptische Waqf-Urkunden aus dem Jahre 691/1292," Le Monde Oriental 12 (1918), 1-64. 2 Jim Goodenough, UCLA, is working on the origins of waqf and its place in early legal and hadith-works.3 Muhammad M. Am1T1/4"Watha'iq waqf al-sultan Qaldwun cal.1-bimrist.nal-man*ari" in his edition of a1,1:14san b.Habib, Tadhkirat al-nabih fi ayynz al-Mansiir wa-banih, I (Cairo, 1976), 295-396.3a I have not used M. M. Amin's recent monograph on the waqf: Al-awqaf wa'l-hayt al-ijtim`iyya fi Misr 648-923 H.I1250-1517 A.D. Dirsa ta'rikhiyya wathci'iqiyya (Cairo, 1980) nor Leonor Fernandes' Princeton Ph.D. thesis (1980) on the Khnqh in medieval Egypt
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Ulrich Haarmann (1980) studied this question.