← ArchiveAl-Istakhri manuscript, Khalili Collections MSS 972. Khalili Collections, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO
AP-0013 · recovered record
The withdrawn treatise
era
c. 985 CE
tradition
Islamic · Baghdad school
provenance
Three leaves of a treatise withdrawn by its author, al-Muqaddasi. Cairo-adjacent find → archive, 1971.
pattern
appears in 4 independent traditions
The geographer wrote, then withdrew, a comparative study of flood accounts. The second leaf reads:
“In every country I asked the learned men for their oldest story, and in every country it was the same story with different clothes, and when I showed them this they were not amazed but afraid, as men are afraid who have been told a thing in childhood and made to promise not to repeat it.”
The third leaf ends mid-sentence. A fourth leaf, recovered separately, is held under the single-read protocol as AP-0044.
In plain words
A traveling scholar found the same oldest story in every country he visited. When he showed people, they were not surprised. They were afraid.
Readings · how 3 of the five doctrines interpret this record
The learned men were fragment-keepers who knew their duty: hold your piece, deny the others exist.
“Told a thing in childhood” — the transmission is received early, individually, in every generation. He was describing the delivery mechanism and did not know it.
He was visited. The withdrawal pattern matches finding 07 exactly. The custodian does not punish discovery; it files the discoverer.
Related records
These records share a thread or a tradition with this one.
