About Sea of Letters

A trading game set among the Jewish merchants of the eleventh-century Mediterranean — the world preserved in the Cairo Geniza, a synagogue storeroom in Old Cairo whose discarded papers kept a thousand years of everyday life. Several of your correspondents were real people; the greetings and news in their letters are adapted from real letters. The sailing season, the forwarded mail, the duplicate copies sent on different ships, the goods consigned to trusted friends — all of it is how this trade actually worked.

Further reading

• S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, 1973) — eighty of the letters in translation; this game's founding text.
• S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society (6 vols., Berkeley, 1967–93) — the great synthesis; vol. I covers trade, seafaring, and the mail.
• Jessica Goldberg, Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean (Cambridge, 2012) — the modern study of exactly these merchants and their business methods.
• The Princeton Geniza Project — the open database of the documents themselves; letter formulas in this game are adapted from its translations (CC-BY; document IDs are cited in the source code).
• Princeton Geniza Lab and the Cairo Geniza (Wikipedia) — background on the find itself.
• Your correspondents: Nahray b. Nissim, Yeshuʿa b. Ismāʿīl al-Makhmūrī, and Salāma b. Mūsā al-Safāquṣī were documented historical merchants; the Tyre, Almería, and Attaleia correspondents are period-plausible composites.

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