Efim Rezvan

MAE (Kunstkamera), RAS, St. Petersburg, Russia

E-mail: efim.rezvan@mail.ru

The Saints and Prophets of the Incense Route (Revisiting the Sources of Old and New Testament Pantheon of the Qur’an)

Abstract. In 2024, the State Museum of the History of Religion hosted the exhibition “Islam in the Photographic Collection of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society”. It has become a further stage in the work on Qur’anic ethnography, a new scholarly discipline devoted to the historical and ethnographic study of society in Arabia at the turn of the 6th and 7th centuries, Arabia of the Prophet, the place where the Qur’an was revealed to the world. The archival photographs uncovered during the study of the IOPS collection were supplemented with the materials taken during 2017—2020, mainly in Oman and Jordan, along the ancient trans-Arabian trade routes, as part of the work of the international expedition “The Material World of the Qur’an (everyday life of Arabia at the time of the Prophet)”. In particular, the participants of the expedition collected materials to validate the working hypothesis that the set of Old and New Testament prophetic legends found in the Qur’an is closely linked to a number of holy sites along the most important Arabian caravan routes.

Keywords: The Qur’an, Biblical and New Testament Prophets, Arabia in the times of the Prophet, the Incense Route, Qur’anic ethnography

Acknowledgments. This paper and the research upon which it is based were conducted as part of the programme “Ethnic history and diversity of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world in historical dynamics”, which is overseen by the interdisciplinary laboratory “International Center for Islamic Studies of the MAE RAS”.

DOI: 10.31250/1238-5018-2024-30-1-85-92

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