Arabic letters on papyrus challenge the modern reader. There are few to no diacritical dots to distinguish homographs, no systematic spacing between single words, and in the majority of cases a low degree of graphical structuring. However, contemporary readers usually read and understood these documents easily - probably because the recipient of a letter knew what to expect. The letters are formulaic, and their information packaging follows an algorithm typical for their time and content. Here formulaic letter writing means not only the reuse of the same formulae or topoi but expressing thoughts in a predictable linguistic way and order, both as a matter of readability and as one of adequacy and politeness. The main concern of this work is to discover these unwritten rules and norms behind Arabic letter writing on papyrus.

Review text: "[...] Grob's dissertation will be for years to come a reference work for scholars of various fields, from papyrologists and specialists of Arabic codicology and palaeography to historians of Late Antiquity and Early Islam."Emily Cottrell in: BMCR 2012.03.51.

A compelling look at the Fatimid caliphate's robust culture of documentation The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909–1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer. Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper’s westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities suggest the strength of Middle Eastern institutions, not their weakness. Tracing the complex routes by which Arabic documents made their way from Fatimid palace officials to Jewish scribes, the book provides a rare window onto a robust culture of documentation and archiving not only comparable to that of medieval Europe, but, in many cases, surpassing it. Above all, Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region’s administrative culture, but with our failure to understand preindustrial documentary ecology. Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical artifacts, showing how the records of the Fatimid caliphate, once recovered, deciphered, and studied, can help change our thinking about the medieval Islamicate world and about premodern polities more broadly.

This volume provides novel social-scientific and historical approaches to religious identifications in late antique (3rd–12th century) Egyptian papyri, bridging the gap between two academic fields that have been infrequently in full conversation: papyrology and the study of religion. Through eleven in-depth case studies of Christian, Islamic, “pagan,” Jewish, Manichaean, and Hermetic texts and objects, this book offers new interpretations on markers of religious identity in papyrus documents written in Coptic, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. Using papyri as a window into the lives of ordinary believers, it explores their religious behavior and choices in everyday life. Three valuable perspectives are outlined and explored in these documents: a critical reflection on the concept of identity and the role of religious groups, a situational reading of religious repertoire and symbols, and a focus on speech acts as performative and efficacious utterances. Religious Identifications in Late Antique Papyri offers a wide scope and comparative approach to this topic, suitable for students and scholars of late antiquity and Egypt, as well as those interested in late antique religion. A PDF version of this book is available for free in Open Access at www.taylorfrancis.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

New Frontiers of Arabic Papyrology contains research presented at the 5th congress of the International Society for Arabic Papyrology (ISAP) held in Tunis in 2012. Like previous ISAP volumes, this one focuses on the transformative era of the Islamic conquests, although some of the articles treat later periods. The volume contains articles relevant to Arabic, Coptic, and Greek papyrology. There is also work on folk religion, astronomy, and epigraphy. Contributors: Lotfi Abdeljaouad, Lajos Berkes, Ursula Bsees, Janneke de Jong, Manabu Kameya, Marie Legendre, Matt Malczycki, Tonio Sebastian Richter, Johannes Thomann, Khaled Younes

Qurʾān Quotations Preserved on Papyrus Documents, 7th-10th Centuries is the first book on the Qurʾān’s Sitz im Leben, i.e. on how the Qurʾān was quoted in Arabic original letters, legal deeds, and amulets. Qurʾān Quotations also serves as an in-depth exploration of the radiocarbon dating of documents and Qurʾānic manuscripts. Contributors: Ursula Bsees; Tobias J. Jocham; Andreas Kaplony; Michael Josef Marx, Daniel Potthast; Leonora Sonego; Eva Mira Youssef-Grob.

Published in Open Access with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Winner of the Manfred Lautenschläger Award! Religion is never simply there. In Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis, Mattias Brand shows where and when ordinary individuals and families in Egypt practiced a Manichaean way of life. Rather than portraying this ancient religion as a well-structured, totalizing community, the fourth-century papyri sketch a dynamic image of lived religious practice, with all the contradictions, fuzzy boundaries, and limitations of everyday life. Following these microhistorical insights, this book demonstrates how family life, gift-giving, death rituals, communal gatherings, and book writing are connected to our larger academic debates about religious change in late antiquity.

A book about the role of books in shaping the ancient religious landscape This collection of essays by leading scholars from a variety of academic disciplines explores the ongoing relevance of Harry Gamble’s Books and Readers in the Early Church (1995) for the study of premodern book cultures. Contributors expand the conversation of book culture to examine the role the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur’an played in shaping the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religions in the ancient and medieval world. By considering books as material objects rather than as repositories for stories and texts, the essays examine how new technologies, new materials, and new cultural encounters contributed to these holy books spreading throughout territories, becoming authoritative, and profoundly shaping three global religions. Features: Comparative analysis of book culture in Roman, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic contexts Art-historical, papyrological, philological, and historical modes of analysis Essays that demonstrate the vibrant, ongoing legacy of Gamble’s seminal work

Maps Egypt's political, economic and cultural connections throughout the Mediterranean and beyond between 500 and 1000 CE.

Verbal Festivity in Arabic and Other Semitic Languages" edited by Lutz Edzard and Stephan Guth deals with one of the most essential and fascinating, though still much neglected aspects of Middle Eastern culture(s) - politeness and the ways it can be expressed or encoded in language. The contributions to the Proceedings of a workshop held in Bonn in 2009 attempt to shed spotlights on several aspects of Verbal Festivity. They include a comparative approach (English-German-Arabic) to the cultural concepts of "politeness", "Hoflichkeit", and "adab" in general (Stephan Guth); a survey of everyday-life polite formulae and expressions of courtesy in Palestinian Arabic (Avihai Shivtiel); a study of the morphological patterns of Arabic formulaic terminology itself (Pierre Larcher); a linguistic analysis of how the wish, or intention, to fulfill ethical duties or prescriptions is expressed in some neo-Aramaic dialects (Geoffrey Khan); a comparative investigation, covering several Semitic languages, of how to remain polite through suppressing explicit mentioning of the negative consequences the addressee will face if he does not comply with the speaker's suggestions (Lutz Edzard); and an analysis of formulae used in commercial documents at a 13th century Red Sea port (Andreas Kaplony).