Moving away from the “private” sphere, I will focus on everyday life and material culture in what Goitein called “semipublic buildings and other landmarks,” or what the sources give the nondescript name dār, “house.” The Houses were central to the day-to-day routine of merchants. They have variously been described as bazaars, traveller’s inns, bourses, and toll-stations. They were all this and more: critical nodes at the interface of commercial exchange and state control. Most of the commodities listed in Geniza business correspondence would have passed through them: the Houses offered storage, lodging, and money-changing services, while also ensuring that objects of exchange passed the scrutiny of state functionaries. There were Houses in the twin cities of Fusṭāṭ–Cairo and in Alexandria, Egypt’s mouth onto the Mediterranean. Yet no archeological trace of these buildings survives, nor do they figure in topographical studies, either ancient or modern.
I propose here to test the spatial analysis of Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault against the evidence of the Geniza and to read the Egyptian Houses as a case-study of the social and institutional production of space. I will argue that it is in fact because of this network that we can reconstruct the path followed by objects of exchange and the merchants who traded them — a case of the past production of space determining the present production of history.