Acts of Writing and Authority in Bəgwəna-Lasta between the Fifteenth Century and the Eighteenth Century: A Regional Administration Comes to Light

This presentation of a project for editing and translating documents that can be used to write the history of Bəgwəna-Lasta from the twelfth till the eighteenth century seeks to study the sorts of documents set down in writing as a function of the type of power exercised at the time and the means for writing and recording documents. Following a brief description of the corpus, the question of how these documents came to be kept in manuscripts in Bəgwəna-Lasta is examined. Through these documents, a regional administration comes to light, along with changes in it from the fifteenth till the eighteenth century. These changes are reflected in the production of written documents, which varies as a function of the powers-that-were in the region.