One of Ben Yiju’s (2) workers: Accounts ENA 1822a.66 (around 1140) (India)
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Taken from: Geniza Lab ; Princeton Geniza Project
https://genizaprojects.princeton.edu/pgpsearch/?a=object&id=5489&q=civet
Accounts. Perhaps in the hand of one of Ben Yiju’s workers, but not his handwriting. Similar to India Book III 19 (shelfmark CUL Or.1080 J95). The account was clearly written in India, as the prices are given in Indian coinage, Kulami filis (3), i.e., from the famous port city Quilon on the Malabar Coast, and fanam (4). The writer's anonymous associate, whose account is registered here, was charged for the receipt of various commodities, including both Indian products and items usually imported for personal use from Yemen and the West. He must have been a Yemeni or from elsewhere in the West, who was staying in India. Commodities: civet (1), cinnabar, a copper pot, glass vessels, raisins, a lamp (or Indian horse chestnut? what is written is "qandali"), sugar, honey, myrrh, storax, and Egyptian sugar. One of the important pieces of information to emerge from this document (assuming the merchant was careful with his sums) is that the fanam was not precisely a quarter of a fili but rather slightly less: the ratio is 0.236 in this document. (Information from India Book and Goitein’s index card.) Not edited in the India Book: an additional list of accounts on verso, written in Arabic script and Greek/Coptic numerals and headed by the glyph. One of the items on that list is zabada (civet), indicating that it is probably connected to the Judaeo-Arabic account. The word "fili" in Arabic script may also appear at bottom left.
(1) Civet according to Goitein was exported from India (coming from Malay) to Aden. However, civet was also produced in Ethiopia and Somalia.
Other works mentioning the civet from Africa are (see my webpage:) Al-Jahiz Al-Fakhar al-Sudan (869); Shah Mardan Ibn Abi al-Khayr (11th); Joseph ibn Abraham (1137); Yakut al Hamawi (1220); Al-Saghani (1252); Nur al-ma'arif (1295); al-Watwat (1318); Friar Jordanus; (1329); Ibn Battuta and the African Diaspora (1331); Cowar el-aqalim (1347); From the Court of Al-Zahir (1439); Ibn al-Ahdal (1451); Ibn Madjid: As-Sufaliyya (1470); Ibn al-Dayba (1496).
The oldest mention of civet from the Horn of Africa comes from: Ibn Sa’d: Kitab aṭ-Tabaqat al-Kabir: The Book of the Major Classes (d845) (Taken from: Untold: A History of the Wives of Prophet Muhammad By Tamam Kahn.) : The King (of Ethiopia) commanded that his women (the King of Ethiopia had married Umm Habiba to the Prophet Mohammed in absentia) send to you all the scent they have. …… (Umm Habiba explains this gift herself: (Abraha-servant of the King-) brought me aloes, wars scent, amber and much civet. I brought all of that to the Prophet. He did not object when I wore it.
(2) Abraham Ben Yiju was a Jewish merchant and poet born in Ifriqiya, in Tunisia, around 1100. He is known from surviving correspondence between him and others in the Cairo Geniza fragments.
Abraham's father was a rabbi named Peraḥya. By some time in the 1120s, Abraham had moved to Aden, where he seems to have gained the mentorship and later business partnership of the nagid (merchants' chief representative), Maḍmun ibn al-Hasan ibn Bundar. It was presumably also here that he met his later Aden correspondents Yusuf Ben Abraham (a trader and judicial functionary) and the merchant Khalaf ibn Isḥaq, along with Maḍmun's brother-in-law Abu-Zikri Judah ha-Kohen Sijilmasi. By 1132, Abraham had moved to the trading port of Mangalore in India (= Malabar).
(3) Fihya or filvis an Indian coin of either gold or silver and is the coinage of the port of Kilam (Quilon). The fili mithqal seems to have been more or less equivalent to the Egyptian mithqal (dinar), it is clear that filiya is the plural of fili.
(3) it was worth a quarter of a fili.