Lajjun: forgotten provincial capital in Ottoman Palestine

Abstract

During the 16th century CE, the town of al-Lajjun in the Marj ibn ‘Amir (the Jezreel Valley), served as one of Ottoman Palestine’s provincial capitals under the administration of the Turabay Dynasty (1517–1688 CE), and was an important centre on the imperial highway between Damascus and Cairo. However, the town of this period has never been the subject of historical investigation. This paper seeks to bring together, assess and synthesize, rarely accessed Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources, along with oral histories and an archaeological survey, to provide the first comprehensive historical account of Turabay al-Lajjun and it its ultimate demise in the 19th century CE.

Keywords:

• Al-Lajjun
• Marj ibn ‘Amir
• Jenin
• Turabay Dynasty
• Ottoman Palestine

Notes

1 Linguistic note: The name Turabey is of Turkish or Turkmen origin, and it was pronounced differently in Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Unfortunately, the consonantal skeleton by itself does not provide us with the vowels for reconstructing its original pronunciation. Contemporary sources transcribe it differently, for example, ṭrbyh, ṭrh b’y. It has been variously transcribed in contemporary scholarship as Turabay, Turabey, Tarabey or Tarabia. For convenience, it is transcribed here as Turabay. The name of the lineage was Ibn Tarabey in Arabic, and it is equivalent with Turabayoğlu in Ottoman Turkish (cf. Stephan 1937). The appellative/patronym ‘Ibn Tarabey’ is especially confusing, as it may also denote someone’s direct father, with many members of the dynasty called ‘Tarabey’ (see Table 1; cf. Sharon 1975: 26).

2 This study was carried out under the auspices of the Jezreel Valley Regional Project (JVRP), directed by Matthew J. Adams and Yotam Tepper. The JVRP is a long-term, multi-disciplinary survey and excavation project, investigating the history of human activity in the Jezreel Valley from the Paleolithic through the Ottoman period. This project strives for a total history of the region using the tools and theoretical approaches of disciplines such as, archaeology, anthropology, geography, history, ethnography and the natural sciences, within an organizational framework provided by landscape archaeology. This research was conducted with the much-appreciated consideration and advice of Lajjun's former residents living in Israel, whose life stories were recorded by Marom as part of his Palestine Rural History Project (PRHP). The authors thank them for sharing their knowledge of their native land. Marom carried out his research as Fulbright postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, which sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin), the original landscape of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County, CA.