Borrowed Words in an Ocean of Objects: Geniza sources and new cultural histories of the Indian Ocean

Historical linguistics has much to offer the discipline of history. While recent work on the prehistory of Indian Ocean contacts has turned to historical linguistics to support research into the early circulation of people, crops and domesticates, linguistic evidence is, on the whole, underexploited, and this in spite of well-established evidence for its validity as a methodology in history. This essay explores the way that even the analysis of single words can contribute to the bigger questions of material and linguistic circulation and hybridity in the medieval Indian Ocean.