A volume with several kinds of record

The Qatar Digital Library describes IOR/R/15/2/2017 as a register principally containing Arabic deeds of land sales dated between 7 February 1913 and 17 June 1921. The physical record is a volume of 223 folios, held in the British Library’s India Office Records and Private Papers.

The catalogue also identifies materials outside that main description: part of a prison manual in English with a Persian translation, and a list of travellers entering or passing through Bahrain in December 1922. A reader who relies only on the register’s title and headline dates could overlook those differences within the volume.

Numbering is part of the evidence trail

The record’s description explains a main foliation sequence, an additional mixed foliation and pagination sequence, and an earlier sequence that has been crossed out. It also describes the arrangement as roughly chronological. These are practical instructions for identifying material accurately, not incidental details about the object.

If an article cites a land deed from this register, its reference should specify which foliation it follows. An image number in a viewer and a written number on a leaf can differ. Preserving both, where useful, helps another reader reach the same page and understand how the citation relates to the physical record.

The register as a historical source

The mixture raises questions about filing and preservation before it answers questions about law. Why did these materials come together? Was the order created during use, later handling or cataloguing? The catalogue does not by itself settle that history, so the volume’s present arrangement should not automatically be treated as an original institutional classification.

That limit does not diminish the record’s value. It makes the source more specific. The deeds can be studied as documents within an identified archival unit, with the surrounding materials and numbering visible. The resulting account of land transactions has a stronger foundation than a title-based assumption that every image in the register belongs to the same process or date range.

References

  1. Qatar Digital Library: Register of legal documents, IOR/R/15/2/2017

    British Library record for a volume principally containing Arabic land-sale deeds dated 1913–1921, with additional materials and several foliation sequences.

Filed under Manuscripts & history. Sources and corrections.