KONGRE BİLDİRİLERİ
share-holding. Second, in the higher plateaus such as al-Kafarat nahiye in the north and that of alKura in the centre, both olives and grain lands were held in shares. In fact the tapu defters allow finer
distinctions yet between the form of holding in al-Kafarat and a few other villages where both the land
and the olive trees were held in shares as against the dominant pattern in al-Kura where the land was
held in shares, but the trees were individually owned. And lastly in the steeper hills of Kufrinja and
`Ajlun (where the altitude rises above 1000 metres) smaller groups of persons held both tree and field
plots in more individualized plots, albeit sometimes also subdivided in shares.4
The above has given a sense of what one can explore in a synchronic manner from the yoklama
tapu defters in a region where, in general, land rights were registered in the names of cultivators, not of
outside landlords, and hence where something of the structure of rights in the farming (and not just the
ownership) of land could be abstracted. This mapping could be compared to that undertaken for the
same region from the 1596 CE defter-i mufassal by Hütteroth and Abdulfattah.5 Whereas the late 16th
century tax data gave a finer division of crop types and included information about certain livestock,
it did not permit an examination of the pattern of holdings inside the village.6
Beyond this synchronic and restricted cartographic summation of data, we explored how far one
could use the tapu records of the daimi and zabt registers to explore diachronic history of villages, two
drawn from the plains (Hawwara and Bait Ra’s), and two from the al-Kura region (Kufr `Awan and
Khanzira, present Ashrafiya). Here I copied by hand all the entries for transfers for persons in these
villages from the chronological series of registers extending from the late 1870s through to the early
1930s (the same system continued after the end of the Empire in Arabic until the cadastral registration
of the particular village). And I was also permitted to consult the original cadastral documents housed
in the central office of the Department of Lands and Surveys in Amman for the four villages. The
latter are in legal terms more of a ‘live’ record than the pre-cadastral tapu defters, but as I copied all
by hand, the information I took did not take the form of mechanical reproduction of a legal document.
In that sense I transformed it into legally ‘dead’ data for a scholarly pursuit. In fact since the cadastral
documents allowed spatial analysis inside the vill