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CSMC
CSMCCentre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures

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Register for a CSMC lecture

Thursday, 14 April 2022, 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm (CEST)

Bilingual Tax Demands in Greek and Arabic from Early Islamic Egypt and Palestine

Dr Arietta Papaconstantinou (University of Oxford)

Before the conquest of Egypt was even complete (early 640s), the new rulers were issuing bilingual demands for levies of various sorts. This continued until the early 8th century and a number of original documents have been preserved in a couple of archives in the Negev desert and in Aphrodito in Middle Egypt. They have mostly been studied as documents regarding taxation and used in discussions of the administration’s bilingualism. After an introduction to that background, I will examine their material features and layout more closely, as they also give important insights into the organisation of chanceries and archives in the first Islamic century.

Early Islamic Imperial Governance in the Mirror of Diplomatic ‘Substrates’

Dr Eugenio Garosi (LMU Munich)

In spite of the comparative lack of coeval historical narratives, the rise and consolidation of the early Islamic empire in the 7th and 8th centuries are blessed with a relative wealth of documentary evidence in Arabic, Greek, Coptic as well as several Middle Iranian languages. Besides shedding light on several facets of everyday life in different corners of the Umayyad and early Abbasid empires, these texts provide insight into the ways in which Arab-Muslim imperial presence was negotiated vis-à-vis non-Arabicized local elites.

Examining documents on papyrus, paper and ostraca from multilingual archives from Egypt, Palestine, Iran, and Central Asia, my talk discusses the changing structure of mediation between the Arabic and the substratal scribal milieus involved in the Muslim administration in relation to the increasing reach of the Arabic language in early Islamic societies. In particular, I will focus on diplomatic substrates manifesting themselves in the terminological, formulaic, and paleographic features of Arabic documents as a window into the nature of contact between Arabic and neighbouring languages, as well as into the different typologies of officials operating as intermediaries across linguistic boundaries.