Abstract
This paper is basically a critical evaluation of the current debate on the question of why so little remains of a large body of documents from both government and cadis’ offices from the pre-Ottoman Muslim world. It also tries to enlarge the regional basis of the debate by including the state of affairs in Persianspeaking lands. The focus is put on archival practices here: who stored which documents, where, and why? Archival practices included discarding and documents that were no longer required. This is closely linked to the reuse of writing materials as draft paper. A central question here is who actually kept archives and in particular whether this was an institutional task or a private matter. One new perspective is research on the physical forms of document storage (containers and buildings). The legal and social context of writing down documents and storing them is also mentioned briefly, as this also needs to be addressed by future studies. Ultimately, research on archival practices may offer better prospects of enlarging the pool of sources for the social history of the Near and Middle East than continuing to search for The Great Central State Archive.
