The Arabic Language

9.2 Muslim Middle Arabic
There is one category of texts that stands apart from all other categories to be 
mentioned here, namely, the large corpus of papyri. The earliest manuscript 
copies of Classical Arabic texts, literary and non-literary alike, date from the 
third century of the Hijra. Since they may contain adaptations and corrections by 
scribes or copyists, it is hazardous to draw any conclusions from them about the 
state of the language at the time the texts were composed. The papyri, however, 
are original documents. It has been estimated that more than 16,000 papyri have 
been preserved and a total of more than 33,000 items written on paper; there 
is, moreover, a very large collection of texts written on other materials (leather, 
wood, coins, glass and so on), as well as a corpus of inscriptions.
The earliest papyri date from year 22 of the Hijra (two papyri and a Greek–
Arabic bilingual; cf. Sijpesteijn 2013: 119, 231, 235f.). For the period between years 
54 and 70 of the Hijra, the archives of Nessana (Nitsana, a Nabataean site in the 
Negev) have produced as many as a hundred Arabic papyri and many fragments 
(Stroumsa 2008). In the archives of Aphrodito (present-day Kūm Išqāw in Upper 
Egypt) a large number of papyri has been found, dating from the end of the first 
century of the Hijra and containing official correspondence with the governor of 
Egypt. From the end of the first century of the Hijra, there is a steady increase of 
papyri, the largest number dating from the third century of the Hijra, after which 
they gradually disappeared. Most of the papyri stem from Egypt, most of them 
were written by Muslims, and most of them contain non-literary (administrative 
or commercial) texts.
The significance of the papyri lies in the fact that their language exhibits more 
or less the same traits as later Middle Arabic texts, which confirms the fact that 
from the very beginning these changes had been present in colloquial language. 
On the other hand, the colloquial interference should not be exaggerated, since 
the language of the papyri is never free from the influence of the Classical norms. 
In view of the purpose of most of these documents, this is not surprising: they 
were written by official scribes (i.e., people who had had some kind of education) 
for official purposes, and their bureaucratic language contains many stereotyped 

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The Arabic Language
formulae. Thus, for instance, when we find that in the papyri the internal passive is 
used rather frequently or that the negative 
lam
is quite common, this does not mean 
that people used the passive in everyday speech. Such forms are typical examples 
of Classical markers (not only then but still today!). This is also confirmed by the 
abundant occurrence of pseudo-corrections in the papyri, for instance, the use of 
the accusative 
ʾalif
in nominative position, the verbal ending 
-ūna
after 
lam
, etc. 
There are no instances of analytic genitives or 
aspectual particles, but this is not 
unexpected, since such forms belonged to the most informal register of speech.
Apart from the papyri, various categories of pre-modern Middle Arabic texts 
may be distinguished. Among the best known are fairytales of the Arabian Nights 
(
ʾAlf layla wa-layla
) type. Most of these stories originated in the period from the 
twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, and the manuscripts date from the thirteenth 
to the nineteenth centuries. In the form in which we have them, they have under
-
gone a literary adaptation, and the colloquial elements represent a conscious 
attempt to enliven the narrative. Most printed editions have ‘corrected’ the text 
in the manuscripts according to the standard norm, but the most important 
collection, that of the Arabian Nights, is now available in a critical edition by 
Muḥsin Mahdī (1984), based entirely on the manuscripts. As an example of this 
style, we quote from another collection of similar stories the following passage, 
again with the caliph, his vizier and his eunuch as protagonists. It illustrates the 
dialogue style with a number of colloquial traits (use of the negation