Familles et fortunes à Damas : : 450 foyers damascains en 1700 / / Colette Establet et Jean-Paul Pascual.

• Superior document: Études arabes, médiévales et modernes ; 148
• VerfasserIn: Establet, Colette
• TeilnehmendeR: Pascual, Jean-Paul; Raymond, André
• Place / Publishing House: France : : Presses de l'Ifpo,, 1994
• Year of Publication: 1994
• Language: French
• Series: Publications de l'I.F.E.A.D. ; 148.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (226 pages) :; illustrations, charts, maps.
• Notes: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

The analysis of a large sample of probate inventories has led to several conclusions concerning the state of the Damascene family and society towards 1700.Despite immigration to the city, Damascus did not experience any significant expansion at this time. Families were largely monagomous, and contrary to what travellers had assumed, were composed of two or three children, hardly enough to ensure a natural growth for the city.Patrimonial hierarchy and structures suggest the existence of an inegalitarian society. This society was dominated by a group of important merchants intimately associated by marriage ties and also by personal interest to the principal shaykh families as well as the military milieu which, despite their having been reined in by the central political authority, still managed to wield economic and social importance. The weight of family heritage in the personal destiny of individuals was considerable at all levels in this society, although individual social promotion was not a completely unknown phenomenon. Cohesional factors did however exist in all strata of society, albeit strictly among males, such as participation in the pilgrimage and the role of shaykhs as transmitters of cultural and religious patrimony.