Reuniting Text and Puppet: Toward Integrated Documentation of Late Ottoman Damascene Shadow Theatre

Re-examining late Ottoman Damascene shadow theatre ( khayāl al-ẓill ), this article treats the script, the puppet, and the performance space as a single system of meaning-making. It proposes an integrated documentation method that correlates textual, material, and spatial evidence to reconstruct shadow theatre as lived urban practice. This addresses the field’s long-standing fragmentation, which isolates manuscripts from surviving objects and from performance venues. Focusing on Faṣl al-khashabāt (The Wooden Pillars Play), the study sets late Ottoman Arabic playtexts alongside leather puppets preserved at the Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions in al-ʿAẓm Palace to show how vernacular diction, visual caricature, and gesture articulated critiques of bureaucratic authority and class hierarchy in the convivial coffeehouse. Reading word and image together clarifies how humour functioned as social commentary and political mediation. The article concludes by outlining how this method can inform museum practice and heritage curation. In practical terms, it proposes an interactive museum coupled with a linked digital research archive (virtual museum) that pairs object dossiers with time-stamped script excerpts, sonic cues, and short staged clips keyed at the level of individual puppets. This hybrid model extends scholarly reproducibility and public access, offering a transferable protocol for activating intangible heritage and sustaining performance as a living archive.