Al-Qadi Kindi Article Der Islam PDF

200 Wadad al-Qadi
An Umayyad Papyrus
in al-Kindi’s Kitāb al-Qud· āt?1
Wa d a d a l - Q a d i (University of Chicago)
For Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti

On her 70th Birthday
Introduction
Almost a century ago, Rhuvon Guest published the two extant

works of the historian of Egypt Abu Umar Muhammad b. Yusuf al-Kindi
(283–350/897–961), Tasmiyat wulat/umara# Misr and Kitab al-qudat.2
Among the texts that attracted his attention was a passage in the Qudat
that al-Kindi said came from a documentary source. On this text Guest
had the following to say:
In El Qudah the official record (Dîwân) of the year 749=131 A. H. is referred
to for an event in that year (page 354); and although this appears to be cited
as having been seen by Ibn Bukair (771–846=154–231 A. H.) rather than by
El Kindî himself, the passage is a reminder that there were public archives
which may have been available to the latter. The fact that the records could
1) I am grateful to Geoffrey Khan, Li Guo, and Lawrence Conrad for reading a
draft of this paper and giving me valuable feedback, and to the Nour Foundation
and Wen Chin Ouyang for providing me with recently published material needed in
this study. I shall identify the papyri collections mainly in accordance with the
“Checklist of Arabic Papyri” published in the Bulletin of the American Society
of Papyrologists 42 (2005), 127–66. The “Checklist” is also available on-line on the
web site of the Orientalisches Seminar, Universität Zürich (http://www.ori.uhz.ch/
isap/isapchecklist.html). An abbreviations list of works of papyri is appended to
this article. In keeping with the style of Der Islam, p./pp. will not be used to indi-
cate page number(s). In order to avoid confusion, papyrus/papyri and glass
weight(s) number(s) will be indicated by the use of no./nos.
2) The Governors and Judges of Egypt, or Kitâb El #Umarâ# (El Wulâh) wa Kitâb
El Qudâh of El Kindî (Leiden, 1912); henceforth Wulat and Qudat, respectively.
Der Islam Bd. 84, S. 200–245 DOI 10.1515/ISLAM.2007.008

© Walter de Gruyter 2008
ISSN 0021-1818
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Authenticated | 128.135.12.127
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An Umayyad Papyrus in al-Kindi’s Kitab al-Qudat? 201
be referred to two centuries after the conquest for information relating to the
time is attested to by a passage from Maqrîzî, which will be cited.3
While Guest’s remark shows his sensitivity to unusual sources in al-

Kindi’s works, it also shows, in a way, the confines of scholarship on early
Islamic history at the beginning of the twentieth century: the authentic-
ity of the text(s) in question is assumed, and the differentiation between
“reference” and citation is not articulated. What I would like to do in this
paper is to study the various aspects of al-Kindi’s text with a view to de-
monstrating its authenticity as an accurate, firsthand reproduction of a
document from Umayyad times.4
Al-Kindi’s text occurs in the biography of Abd al-Rahman b. Salim
al-Jayshani, who was judge of Egypt for over five years during the late
Umayyad and early Abbasid periods, specifically from Muharram
128/October 745 until Ramadan 133/April 751. It is introduced by a
statement about how the author5 fell upon it:
And among what I found in the archives of the Umayyads was a quittance
from the time of Marwan b. Muhammad, which states:
In the name of God, the Merciful the Compassionate. From Isa b. Abi Ata# to the
bursars6 of the Treasury. Give (pl.) Abd al-Rahman b. Salim, the judge, his salary
for the month of Rabi I and Rabi II of the year 131 twenty dinars. Record the
quittance to that effect. Written on Wednesday, 2 Rabi I of the year 131.7
3) Guest’s introduction to Governors, 15. The text in al-Maqrizi’s Khitat will be

discussed below.
4) Gladys Frantz-Murphy, in CPR XXI, 91, cites this text from al-Kindi in
full (“al-Kindi quotes a bara#a in the Umayyad archives (diwan) dated 131 …”),
but she does not comment on it at all. The impression one has is that she takes it to
be authentic, but this is only an impression. Yousef Moukdad, in his Richteramt
und Rechtswesen in Bagdad vor der Stadtgründung bis zum Ende der Buyidenzeit
145/763–447/1066 (Hamburg, 1971), 59, cites this text, taking it for granted that
it is a document, but he does not use it differently from other literary sources, and
actually draws some questionable conclusions from it.
5) For a discussion on whether it was al-Kindi or Ibn Bukayr who saw the
document, see below, at nn. 101–112.

6) Guest vocalized the word khazzan, i. e. in the singular. This contradicts the
use of the verb in the plural in the following sentence. Also the singular of khuzzan
is khazin, not khazzan. See the discussion below, at nn. 37–48.
7) al-Kindi, Qudat, 354.

202 Wadad al-Qadi
The document is, in a nutshell, an order from a high-level adminis-

trator to financial officers of the administration to make a specified ad-
vance payment to a named judge equivalent to his salary for two months.
Al-Kindi’s introductory statement indicates without any doubt that, ac-
cording to him, he was using, as a source, an archival document that dates
back to late Umayyad times, and that he had seen this document with his
own eyes. The fact that the text he presents immediately thereafter be-
gins with the formualic basmala and is overall in direct speech indicate,
again without any doubt, that according to him he is reproducing the
text of that document verbatim without any intervention on his part. For
reasons that will become clear later, I would like for the moment to set
aside al-Kindi’s introductory statement and concentrate on the repro-
duced text of the document itself. I plan to examine it in terms of circu-
lation, prosopography, terminology, form and style, and, finally, histori-
ographical context.
Circulation
Examining how a text fared when it circulated in later sources gives us

the opportunity to have more than one version of the same text and to
compare the later version(s) with the original one. In that sense we are
rather fortunate that another version of al-Kindi’s text has survived, to-
gether with its introduction, in a much later, ninth/fifteenth century
source, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani’s (d. 853/1449) Raf al-isr an qudat Misr.8
It is well known that this book has reproduced the greater part of al-
Kindi’s Qudat.9 This reproduction, however, has not always been verba-
tim, and often involved shortening the chains of transmission, rearrang-
ing information in the interest of brevity, inserting explanations, and
rephrasing texts such that they are clearer to the reader. Yet a compari-
son between the two texts in the Qudat and Raf al-isr shows them to be
almost identical, the few differences between them being either stylistic,
due to a change in audience, or the result of scribal error resulting from
the hazards of the transmission process.
Beginning with al-Kindi’s introduction to his documentary text, we
note that Ibn Hajar omits the first words of it (wa-fima, “among”); this is
a stylistic preference quite befitting the beginning of a paragraph, and is
8) See Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Raf al-isr an qudat Misr, ed. Hamid abd
al-Majid (Cairo, 1957), 320.
9) See Guest’s introduction, 12.

of no substantial consequence.10 He then drops the word bara#a in the

same statement and replaces it with the word waraqa, “paper,” putting it
after the name of the caliph, so that the introductory statement becomes:
I found in the archives of the Umayyads from the time of Marwan b. Muham-
mad a paper, which states. …
There is no doubt that this double change is of Ibn Hajar’s making and
that al-Kindi’s reading is the original one. As for his insertion of the word
waraqa, the document cited could simply not have been written on paper,
but rather must have been recorded on papyrus.11 Ibn Hajar must have
made the change here for the sake of his audience in ninth/fifteenth-cen-
tury Egypt and beyond, when papyrus had been out of use for centuries,
and people thought of written texts as being written on paper only. As for
his omission of the word bara#a, this could very well have been due to his
noting that al-Kindi had actually made a mistake – an oversight – when
he called the document a bara#a. The document itself is not a bara#a, but
rather, a letter ordering the Treasury’s bursars to write a bara#a after the
10) There is a potential importance for this omission regarding the person who
saw the document; it will be discussed below.

11) Parchment (raqq) is a very remote possibility, given that what has survived
of Egyptian Umayyad administrative texts is written almost entirely on papyrus,

and that Egypt was the main place where the papyrus plant grew. We do hear of
one documentary administrative text preserved on a piece of parchment in Egypt,
but it comes from the early Abbasid period; it was recorded by the historian of
judges Waki Hayyan b. Khalaf (d. 307/919) in his Akhbar al-qudat, ed. Abd al-
Aziz Mustafa al-Maraghi (Cairo, 1369/1950), 3:233. See also my paper, “The Sal-
aries of Judges in Early Islam: The Evidence of the Documentary and Literary
Sources,” forthcoming in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies 68.1 (2009), 9–30.
Parchment seems to have been used exclusively in the East in Umayyad and early
Abbasid times. This is so the case in the mid-second/eighth century Arabic docu-
ments from eastern Khurasan (modern Afghanistan); see Geoffery Khan’s de-
scription in P. Khurasan, 15, 66. The recently published Bactrian documents from
the same region that span centuries, from pre-Islamic to early Abbad times, are
mostly written on leather; see Nicholas Sims-Williams’ description in P. Bactrian
I, 13. Most of the documents of the Central Asian archive of Dawistich, “Lord of
Samarqand” (d. 104/722), which were found in Mount Mugh in Sogdia (modern Ta-
jikastan) are also written on parchment, but the single Arabic-language document
among them is written on leather (see I. Y. Krachkovski and V. A. Krach-
kovskaya, “Le plus ancient document arabe de l’Asie Centrale,” Sogdyiskiy Sbor-
nik, Leningrad, 1934, 52–90). A letter from the heir apparent to the Abbasid ca-
liph al-Mutazz bi-llah, presumably from Iraq, to a treasurer in al-Fustat, Egypt,
was written on vellum (see n. 37 below).

204 Wadad al-Qadi
payment of the monies to the judge had been concluded. In addition, Ibn
Hajar must have been aware that his audience would not have understood
the word’s technical meaning: “quittance”; and, since mentioning the word
in the introduction to the document was unnecessary, he simply dropped it.
This is undoubtedly why he did not drop the same word when it occurred a
second time in al-Kindi’s report, now within the text of the document,
where it would be textually absolutely necessary to keep it. Even here,
though, Ibn Hajar felt he had to offer to his reader an explanation of what
the word implied.12 We shall return to the bara#a as a form of writing below.
Proceeding to the actual reproduced text of the document, we find here
also that Ibn Hajar’s slightly varying version of it is the result of changes he
made to al-Kindi’s original version. Ibn Hajar’s text adds the superfluous
word shahr, “month of”, at the mention of the second month for which the
advance was to be paid (thus li-shahr Rabi al-Awwal wa-shahr Rabi al-
Akhir) and drops the word wa-mi#a, “and one hundred”, from the date of the
two months; both of these differences are probably scribal errors connected
with the hazards of the transmission process. The last difference between
the two texts consists of Ibn Hajar’s omitting the identification of the year
from the date of the writing of the document at its very end, thus sanat ihda
wa-thalathin instead of al-Kindi’s sanat ihda wa-thalathin wa-mi#a. This, I
think, is a stylistic preference of brevity over accuracy, on the basis that the
same year had been mentioned less than two lines earlier. But this is an in-
judicious error on Ibn Hajar’s part: the first mention of the year identifies
the year in which the months whose salary was to be paid fell, whereas the
second identifies the year in which the order to pay the advance was written.
Finally, in the printed edition of Raf al-isr, the text ends with yani shaha-
datan alayhi, “meaning: as a testimony to that”. These words have ob-
viously nothing to do with the text of the original Umayyad document.
They are clearly Ibn Hajar’s words explaining to his audience, as was men-
tioned above, what the word bara#a meant (yani). Overall, the evidence of
circulation thus speaks in favor of the textual authenticity of al-Kindi’s text
as being the original one – which is the situation we would expect anyway.
Prosopography
Examining the document in terms of prosopography gives us another

tool whereby we can determine its authenticity. Can one identify the per-
sons whose names are mentioned in it from the sources? Did they live at
12) Yani shahadatan alayhi, “meaning: as a testimony to that”.

the time and in the place the document claims they did? Do the functions
attributed to them in the document fit the positions they held according
to the sources?
There are two named persons in the document: Isa b. Abi Ata#, the
person in whose name the letter/order was written, and Abd al-Rahman
b. Salim al-Jayshani, the judge to whom the advance was to be paid.
We know enough from the historical record about both of them to make
them credible as people who fit perfectly the profiles given to them in the
document.
Isa b. Abi Ata# served for about seven years as Finance Director
(sahib/amil al-kharaj) of Egypt twice, both of which are known by day,
month, and year: the first is 23 Shawwal 125–28/29 Jumada II 127 [= 19
August 743–7/8 May 745], and the second is 12 Muharram 128–10 Rajab
131 [= 14 October 745–5 March 749]. He was by origin a Syrian, not an
Egyptian, who lived in Damascus and transmitted reports about Umar
b. Abd al-Aziz. This is why he was known as al-Shami, “the Syrian/Dam-
ascene”. Although he transmitted hadith, he seems to have been a career
fiscal administrator, for he was in charge of the Bureau [of Stipends] of
Medina (diwan al-Madina, diwan ahl al-Madina) prior to his tenure in
Egypt. This tenure was interrupted in 127/745, when he was ousted from
office as a result of an army uprising against Egypt’s governor; but that
seems to have left no lasting negative effect on him. He remained in office
until he was recalled by the caliph Marwan II. All this information comes
from the literary sources.13 But Isa b. Abi Ata# is attested also in the
documentary sources.14 Three protocols on papyrus is his name, together
with the name of the caliph amir al-mu#minin Marwan [II, b. Muham-
mad], have survived.15 Another papyrus consisting of a letter sent from
him to the postmaster in Ushmun and dated Rabi II 127 has also sur-
13) See al-Fasawi, al-Marifa wa-l-tarikh, ed. Akram Diya# al-Umari (Bagh-
dad, 1974–76), 1:661–62; al-Kindi, Wulat, 83, 85, 86, 89; Ibn Asakir, Tarikh mad-
inat Dimashq, ed. Umar ibn Gharama al-A mrawi (Beirut 1415–21/1995–2000),
47:327–29; al-Dhahabi, Tarikh al-Islam, ed. Bashshar Awwad Maruf (Beirut,
1424/2003), 3:949; Ibn Taghri Birdi, al-Nujum al-zahira (Cairo, 1963–71), 1:301,
305.
14) See CPR III, 103–104.
15) See CPR III, nos. 116–18. No. 116 is dated 127 [= 744–45] or 129
[= 746–47]; nos. 117 and 118 are dated 130 [= 747–48]. No. 119 gives him the title
al-amir. This title is normally given to the governor, but some glass weights use this
title for Isa as well (see n. 17 below).

206 Wadad al-Qadi
vived.16 In addition, dozens of glass stamps from Egypt with his name
appear on all three kinds of glass weights: coin-system weights, ratl-sys-
tem weights, and vessel weights.17
From all this it is clear that, in terms of place, date, and function, Isa
b. Abi Ata# fits perfectly the profile accorded to him in al-Kindi’s docu-
ment. In terms of function, he was the highest financial officer in the
land, who thus had the authority to send orders to the Treasury to make
an unusual payment – an advance – to a government employee, in this
case a judge. In terms of dates, he was indeed in office (for a second term)
on the day the document was written (2 Rabi I of the year 131/30 Oc-
tober 748), and his place of service was al-Fustat, exactly as the docu-
ment implies.
The second named person mentioned in the document is Abd al-Rah-
man b. Salim al-Jayshani, the judge. Not only is this person well known in
the sources, but so also is his family. His grandfather, Abu Salim Sufyan b.
Hani# b. Jabr, came from the Southern clan of Jayshan, from the Maafir,
many of whose members settled in Egypt after the Muslim conquest. Abu
Salim himself participated in the conquest of Egypt and was thus con-
sidered, together with his family, “Egyptian”. He was a tabii, a famous
hadith transmitter, and his hadith was cited in some of the canonical col-
16) See Yusuf Ragib, “Lettres de service au maître de poste d’Ašmun,” Archaé-
ologie Islamique 31 (1992), no. 1. It was published later in P.Ryl.Arab. II, no. 6.
17) See A. H. Morton, Early Islamic Glass Stamps in the British Museum
(London, 1985), nos. 136–47. These are 5 coin weights (dinar, half-dinar, and dir-
ham); 1 disc weight (wuqiyya); 3 qist vessel stamps (half-qist and quarter-qist);
1 ratl weight (half-ratl of fat); 2 mikyala weights (of black cumin and woad). See
also Paul Balog, Umayyad, Abbasid and Tulunid Glass Weights and Vessel Stamps
(New York, 1976), nos. 237–55. These are 5 coin weights (half-dinar and dirham);
5 qist vessel stamps (qist, half-qist and quarter-qist); 4 ratl weights (ratl and half-
ratl, one of meat); 4 mikyala weights (of white cumin, black cumin, and lupin). See
also A. Launois, “Estampilles et poids faibles en verre omeyyades et abbasides au
Musée Arabe du Caire,” Annales Islamologiques 3 (1957), nos. 106–15; Abd al-Rah-
man Fahmi Muhammad, Sunuj al-sikka fi fajr al-Islam (Cairo, 1957), nos. 67–73;
George C. Miles, “Early Islamic Glass Weights and Measures in Muntaza Palace,
Alexandria,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 3 (1964), nos.
21–24; and Samih Abd al-Rahman Fahmi, al-Makayil fi sadr al-Islam (Mecca,
1401/1981), nos. 291–319. Some of these stamps give Isa b. Abi Ata# the title
usually used for a province’s governor, namely al-amir; see, for examples, Morton,
nos. 141, 144–47; Balog, nos. 237–38, 246–49, 253, 255. See also the table of George
C. Miles in his “On the Varieties and Accuracy of Eighth Century Arab Coin
Weights,” Eretz Israel 7 (1964; L. A. Mayer Memorial Volume), 80.

lections. He had pro-Alid leanings, and died in Alexandria during the

governorship of Abd al-Aziz b. Marwan, in about 80/699.18 Abu Salim’s
hadith was transmitted, among others, by his son, Salim, about whom
we know less than about the father.19 He must have been a judge around
the year 100–101/719 since a notebook (kitab) containing his legal deci-
sions was found in the third/ninth century in the diwan al-qada# at Suq
al-Ahwaz in southern Iraq.20 He died in Damanhur, Egypt, in the first
decade of the second/third decade of the eighth century.
18) For the biography and hadiths of Abu Salim Sufyan b. Hani# al-Jayshani,
see Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Futuh Misr wa-akhbaruha (The History of the Conquest of
Egypt, North Africa and Spain), ed. Charles C. Torrey (New Haven, 1922), 63,
280, 284, 286; Nuaym b. Hammad, Kitab al-fitan, ed. Samir Amin al-Zuhayri
(Cairo, 1412/[1992]) 1:34, 127, 193, 292; al-Bukhari, al-Tarikh al-kabir (Hydera-
bad/Beirut, 1360–64/1941–44), 4:88; Muslim, Sahih Muslim, ed. Muhammad
Fu#ad Abd al-Baqi (Beirut, 1955), 3:1351 (no. 1725); al-Nasa#i, Sunan al-Nasa#i,
ed. Abd al-Fattah Abu Ghudda (Aleppo, 1986), 3:417, 4:112 (nos. 5806, 6494); Abu
Dawud, Sunan Abi Dawud, ed. Muhammad Muhyi l-Din Abd al-Hamid (Beirut,
n. d.), 1:20, 3:114 (nos. 37, 2868); al-Fasawi, al-Marifa wa-l-tarikh, 2:463: Ibn Abi
Hatim al-Razi, al-Jarh wa-l-tadil (Hyderabad/Beirut, 1952), 4:219; Ibn Yunus al-
Misri, Tarikh Ibn Yunus al-Sadafi, First Part: Tarikh al-Misriyyin, collect. and ed.
Abd al-Fattah Fathi Abd al-Fattah (Beirut, 2000), 214; al-Samani, al-Ansab
Beirut, 1408/1988), 2:144; Ibn al-Athir, Usd al-ghaba (reprint of the Hyderabad
edition, Beirut, n. d.), 2:322; al-Mizzi, Tahdhib al-kamal, ed. Bashshar Awwad
Maruf (Beirut, 1400–1408/1980–87), 11:199–200, 33:338; al-Dhahabi, Siyar
alam al-nubala#, ed. Shuayb al-Arna#ut et al. (Beirut, 1981–88), 4:74; idem, Tarikh
al-Islam, 2:894; al-Safadi, al-Wafi bi-l-wafayat, 15, ed. Bernd Radtke (Wies-
baden/Beirut, 1979), 177; Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, al-Isaba, ed. Ali Muhammad al-
Bajawi (Beirut, 1412/1992), 3:260; idem, Tahdhib al-tahdhib (Hyderabad/Beirut,
n. d.), 4:108, 12:114; al-Suyuti, Husn al-muhadara (Cairo, [1904]), 1:98. See also
Ibn Asakir, Dimashq, 1:241–42. Al-Zabidi, the author of the famous dictionary Taj
al-arus, says (j.y.sh) that he authored a short treatise describing his affairs.
19) See the biography and hadith of Salim b. Abi Salim al-Jayshani in Ibn Abd
al-Hakam, Futuh Misr, 285; Nuaym b. Hammad, al-Fitan, 1:34; al-Bukhari, al-
Tarikh al-kabir, 4:111; al-Nasa#i, Sunan, 4:112 (no. 6494); Abu Dawud, Sunan,
3:114 (no. 2868); Ibn Abi Hatim, al-Jarh wa-l-tadil, 4:31; al-Mizzi, Tahdhib al-
kamal, 10:140; al-Dhababi, Tarikh al-Islam, 3:48; Ibn Hajar, Tahdhib al-tahdhib,
3:435; al-Suyuti, Husn al-muhadara, 1:118. See also pseudo-Ibn Qutayba, al-
Imama wa-l-siyasa, ed. Khalil al-Mansur (Beirut, 1997), 2:226–27, where his son
narrates from him the encounter between Musa b. Nusayr and Abd al-Malik b.
Marwan in Damascus, an encounter which he witnessed.
20) This very interesting piece of information is found in Waki, Akhbar al-
qudat, 3:320.

208 Wadad al-Qadi
Born to this family, it is not surprising that our Abd al-Rahman b.

Salim al-Jayshani was a hadith scholar, whose hadith was transmitted by
such Egyptian luminaries as al-Layth b. Sad (d. 175/791) and Ibn Lahia
(d. 174/790). The governor of Egypt al-Hawthara b. Suhayl appointed
him judge of Egypt in the first month, al-Muharram, of 128/October 745.
At some point, this appointment was coupled with his placement
in charge of official preaching (al-qasas), a connection that was not
unknown in Egypt.21 When the Abbasids toppled the Umayyads and
Egypt’s new governor Salih b. Ali entered Egypt, Abd al-Rahman was
still judge. He was confirmed in his position by the new governor and was
still judge when Salih b. Ali left Egypt in Shaban 133/March 751. Things
changed for him when the next governor, Abu Awn Abd al-Malik b. Yazid,
arrived in Egypt. Finding some imbalance in the register of military stip-
ends (bad al-khalal fi diwan al-jund), he was told that Abd al-Rahman b.
Salim was very knowledgeable about that register. He thus dismissed him
from judgeship and appointed him head of the stipends’ bureau. He died
a decade later, in 143/760.22
Abd al-Rahman’s function as judge thus confirms his depiction as
such in the document under consideration here. At the time it was written
(2 Rabi I of the year 131/30 October 748), he was indeed still judge of
Egypt.
21) See, for examples, three cases under the Umayyads: (1) Sulaym b. Itr al-
Tujibi, who was judge of Egypt 40–60/661–79 (see Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Futuh Misr,
231; Waki, Akhbar al-qudat, 3:221 [Anz in his name is wrong]; Ibn Yunus, Tarikh
al-Misriyyin, 1:219 [see also 243]; al-Kindi, Qudat, 310, 311; Ibn Hajar, Raf al-isr,
253; al-Suyuti, Husn al-muhadara, 2:96); (2) Abd al-Rahman b. Hujayra al-
Khawlani, who was judge in 69–83/688–702 (see Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Futuh Misr,
235; Waki, Akhbar al-qudat, 3:229; Ibn Yunus, Tarikh al-Misriyyin, 1:299–300;
al-Kindi, Qudat, 315, 317; Ibn Hajar, Raf al-isr, 316; al-Suyuti, Husn al-muha-
dara, 2:97); and (3) Malik b. Sharahil al-Hamdani, who was judge immediately
after Ibn Hujayra, Muharram 83–Safar 84/702–February 703 (see Ibn Yunus,
Tarikh al-Misriyyin, 1:424). This practice continued under the Abbasids, as in
the case of Ibrahim b. Ishaq al-Qari# al-Zuhri, who was judge of Egypt in
204–205/819–20 (see Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Futuh Misr, 246; Waki, Akhbar al-qudat,
3:239; al-Kindi, Qudat, 427; Ibn Hajar, Raf al-isr, 23, 24; al-Suyuti, Husn al-mu-
hadara, 2:99).
22) For the biography and hadith of Abd al-Rahman b. Salim al-Jayshani, see
Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Futuh Misr, 240; al-Kindi, Qudat, 353–54; Waki, Akhbar al-
qudat, 3:232, 325; al-Samani, al-Ansab, 2:145; al-Dhahabi, Tarikh al-Islam,
3:914; Ibn Hajar, Raf al-isr, 232, 319–20; al-Suyuti, Husn al-muhadara, 2:97–98.

Terminology
The document contains a number of terms that are used in their tech-
nical meanings: the institution/place in which the advance was to be paid;
the employees of that institution/place who were to make the payment;
the name of the judge’s salary; and the document that the employees
ought to prepare for the judge after the payment has been made. Exam-
ining these terms against what we know about them from the documen-
tary and literary sources would help us in the authentication of the docu-
ment. Again here, the document passes examination with flying colors.
The document gives the term bayt al-mal for the institution/place
from which the money was to be paid to the judge. This is, of course, the
official name of the state’s Treasury from early Islamic times, according
to the literary sources,23 and it is also attested in the papyri from
Umayyad times, as early as the caliphates of Abd al-Malik b. Marwan
(r. 65–86/685–705) and his successor al-Walid I (r. 86–96/705–14).24 But
al-Kindi’s document does not mention the Treasury by name only; it also
23) See Cl. Cahen, EI2, s. v. “Bayt al-Mal”.

24) We find, for example, the name of the Abd al-Rahman b. Hujayra (d. 83/702)
identified as head of the Treasury in the Greek accounts of the Aphrodito papyri.
See P. Lond., no. 1412, line 12; translated by H. I. Bell in “Translations of the
Greek Aphrodito Papyri in the British Museum,” Der Islam 3 (1912), 133. Bell
has dated this papyrus to 699–705 C. E. [= 80–86 A. H.], i. e. when Abd al-Malik
was caliph. Ibn Hujayra is well known in the literary sources not only as head of
the Treasury, but also as Egypt’s chief judge and preacher; see Ibn Abd al-Hakam,
Futuh Misr, 235; Waki, Akhbar al-qudat, 3:225; Ibn Yunus, Tarikh al-Misriyyin,
1:300; al-Kindi, Qudat, 317; Ibn al-Jawzi, al-Muntazam fi l-tarikh, ed. Muhammad
Abd al-Qadir Ata and Mustafa Abd al-Qadir Ata (Beirut, 1412/1992), 6:253; al-
Mizzi, Tahdhib al-kamal, 17:55; Ibn Kathir, al-Bidaya wa-l-nihaya (Beirut and
Riyadh, 1966), 9:54; Ibn Hajar, Raf al-isr, 316; idem, Tahdhib al-tahdhib, 6:160;
al-Suyuti, Husn al-muhadara, 2:97; see also n. 21 above, under (2). From the ca-
liphate of al-Walid I onward, we begin finding in the papyri references to the “[of-
ficial] weight [established by] the Treasury (ala wazn/naqd bayt al-mal). The ear-
liest occurrence is found in one of the Qurra b. Sharik Aphrodito letters datable to
90–91/708–10; see P.Caire.Arab., no. 149, lines 25–26. For later papyri, see ibid.,
nos. 173, 182; P.GrohmannWorld, 136–38. See also Adolf Grohmann, Einführung
und Chrestomathie zur arabischen Papyruskunde I (Prague, 1954), no. 187, and
CPR XXI, nos. 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19–21, 28, 31, 32, 62–65, 67 (on several
of which Werner Diem had corrections and emendations in his “Philologisches
zu arabischen Steuerquittungen aus Ägypten (8.–11. Jahrhundert),” Wiener Zeit-
schrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 96 [2006], 55–111, esp. 88–90, 93).

210 Wadad al-Qadi
attributes to it a particular function: the payment of the salaries of at

least some of the employees of the government, namely the judges. Was
this indeed the usual procedure in the period of our document?
The involvement of the Treasury in paying the stipends of the mili-
tary is widely reported from the early days of the institution; even al-Ma-
wardi mentioned it in his legal analysis of the Treasury’s functions.25 Less
clear, and not mentioned in al-Mawardi’s statutes of the Islamic state, al-
Ahkam al-sultaniyya, is its involvement in the payment of the salaries of
the “civilian” government employees – setting aside occasional payments
known from anecdotal reports.26
In this regard we have two kinds of documentation. The first comes
from theoretical books on judgeship, the adab al-qadi/al-qada#. Several of
the authors of these books, including al-Mawardi, do associate the judge’s
salary with the Treasury,27 but they seem to think of the Treasury as an
abstract legal institution, not as a physical place.28 The second is the ad-
25) See al-Mawardi’s al-Ahkam al-sultaniyya (Cairo, 1404/1983), 185.

26) See, for example, the story about the caliph Abd al-Malik ordering, as a
token of appreciation, 100,000 dirhams for al-Zuhri from the head of the Treasury
(sahib al-khizana) in Ibn Asakir, Dimashq, 6:102.
27) See al-Khassaf, Adab al-qadi, ed. Farhat Ziyadah (Cairo, 1978), 109; al-
Mawardi, Adab al-qadi, ed. Muhyi Hilal al-Sarhan (Baghdad, 1392/1972), 2:298,
300; al-Husam al-Shahid Umar b. Abd al-Aziz, Sharh adab al-qadi li-l-imam Abi
Bakr Ahmad ibn Umar al-khassaf, ed. Abu l-Wafa l-Afghani and Abu Bakr Mu-
hammad al-Hashimi (Beirut, 1414/1994), 80–82; Ibn Abi l-Damm Shihab al-Din
Ibrahim b. Abdallah al-Hamawi, Kitab adab al-qada#, ed. Muhyi Hilal al-Sarhan
(Baghdad, 1404/1984), 1:315.
28) All of these books are fundamentally legal in nature and discuss the Treas-
ury as part of the discussion on whether it is permissible for the judge to receive a
salary for his work. When they declare it permissible, they seem to base their posi-
tion on the concept that the judge works for the Muslims and hence he may/must
be paid from the “house of money” (= bayt al-mal; Treasury) of the Muslims. This
is most clearly articulated by the commentator on al-Khassaf, al-Husam al-Sha-
hid, in his Sharh, 80: “[the judge must be paid a salary] because he is restricted/
devoted (mahbus) to [looking after] the rights of the Muslims, and thus his means
of livelihood for performing his duties (kifayatuhu) must be met from the financial
resources of the Muslims, that is (wa-hadha), from the Treasury (bayt al-mal);” see
also 82, 83. Al-Mawardi (Adab al-qadi, 2:198) assumes (rather than states) that the
salary of the judge comes from the Treasury, and speculates on what happens if “it
were not feasible” (taadhdhara) that this should be the case: does the judge take
his pay from “the opposing parties” (al-khusum)? His opinion (p. 300) is that it
would be preferable, in the case of “the indigence of the Treasury” (iwaz bayt al-
mal), that the people of the area concerned collectively pay the judge his salary

ministrative and historical literature. There, in periods much later than

ours – from the late third/ninth century onward – the Treasury did in-
deed handle “the salaries on the principal officers of the Government and
the Court.”29 Was this practice in Abbasid times a continuation of an
Umayyad practice about which we – at least so far – have had no docu-
mentation?
A close answer to this question comes from two interrelated reports
that deal with a judge of Egypt in very early Abbasid times, Abu Khu-
zayma Ibrahim b. Yazid, who served as judge in 144–54/761–71. The first
report states that Abu Khuzayma was so scrupulous that he used to pay
back the government portions of his salary when he spent his time not
doing his job as judge; he returned these payment to/in the Treasury
(yuiduhu ila bayt al-mal).30 The second report is more important since,
as I have shown elsewhere, it may be considered a documentary text.31 It
says that an Egyptian reported to the historian of judges Waki that he
had seen “a note on a piece of parchment (ruqa fi raqq) in the archives
(diwan)” on which was written: “Abu Khuzayma Ibrahim ibn Yazid, the
judge, returned five dirhams to the Treasury (li-bayt al-mal) for a day in
which he did not hold court (li-yawm lam yajlis fihi li-l-qada#).32 There is
thus clear evidence that the Treasury was the physical place in which pay-
ing, and keeping the records of, the salaries of the judges – and perhaps
the other civil government employees – took place in very early Abbasid
times. Since Abu Khuzayma began his term as judge only twelve years
after the fall of the Umayyads, it stands to reason to assume that the
practice of the Treasury paying the salaries of judges, in addition to the
military, had been in place already in late Umayyad times.33
rather than have the opposing parties do that. But even here al-Mawardi seems to
be thinking of the Treasury as the financial arm of the state, rather than a specific
place with employees who perform duties connected with money.
29) Cahen, “Bayt al-Mal”. The earliest documentation for that is Hilal b. al-
Muhassin al-Sabi, who died in the middle of the fifth/eleventh century (360–448/
970–1056). See his al-Wuzara# or Tuhfat al-umara# fi tarikh al-wuzara#, ed. Abd al-
Sattar Ahmad Farraj (Cairo, 1958), 89, 90, 208.
30) See Ibn Hajar, Raf al-isr, 46. There are other earlier reports about this
judge refusing to be paid for work not done for the Muslims, but they do not men-
tion the Treasury specifically; see Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Futuh Misr, 241; Waki,
Akhbar al-qudat, 3:233; al-Kindi, Qudat, 363–64.
31) See my forthcoming paper “The Salaries of Judges in Early Islam”.
32) Waki, Akhbar al-qudat, 3:233.
33) It is interesting to note that the salaries of judges as well as those of the
military shared the same name, rizq. See below, at n. 49.

212 Wadad al-Qadi
Another term that occurs in al-Kindi’s document is the term khuzzan,

which clearly means the employees of the Treasury involved in the pay-
ment of the salaries of judges (and perhaps others?): Isa b. Abi Ata# ad-
dressed his payment order to them. Were there bureaucrats with this
name in fact during the Umayyad period?
The answer is: yes, there were certainly. The word occurs in a letter on
an undated papyrus, which must go back to the year 90 or 91/709 or 710,
at the very beginning of the governorship of Qurra b. Sharik over Egypt
(in office 90–96/708–14).34 The letter consists of an order to pay up vari-
ous tax arrears carried over from the time of the previous governor of
Egypt, Abdallah b. Abd al-Malik (in office 86–90/705–709). The letter
then demands that the addressee bring a clearly written document “to
the khuzzan of Abdallah b. Abd al-Malik,” indicating what they had paid
earlier of their extraordinary taxes. The khuzzan of this text are clearly
the same as those of al-Kindi’s document in that they are bureaucrats in
the Umayyad fiscal administration of Egypt. Although the Qurra docu-
ment does not state specifically that the khuzzan are stationed in the
Treasury (and it actually did not need to state that), there is no doubt
that they were stationed there, since one of the major functions of the bayt
al-mal in the Umayyad papyri is receiving taxes, as is well known. This
must have been what the first editor of this papyrus, Nabia Abbott, had
in mind when she translated khuzzan as “treasuries”. That was clearly a
mistake, though, and Werner Diem eventually corrected it, translating
the word as “Schatzmeister”, i. e. treasurer.35
There is another difference between the two scholars which is impor-
tant for this paper since it has a bearing on the technical terminology in
al-Kindi’s document: whereas Abbott read this word in the plural (khuz-
zan; hence: treasuries), Diem read it in the singular (khazzan; hence: der
Schatzmeister). Like Diem, Guest read the word in al-Kindi’s docu-
ment in the singular, khazzan,36 in contrast to my reading of it, as khuz-
zan, so far in this paper. My reading is based on the conclusive fact that
the verb that follows the address in al-Kindi’s document is in the plural:
fa-atu (not fa-ati), and also on the observation that, so far as I know, the
term khazzan in the sense of a treasurer or bursar does not occur in early
Arabic texts. Obviously the orthographic form of the word in Arabic per-
mits the two readings, as do the contexts in which it occurs in the two
34) P.Qurra, no. 5, line 27.

35) See Werner Diem, “Philologisches zu den arabischen Aphrodito-Papyri,”
Der Islam 61 (1948), 260–61.
36) See above, n. 6.

documents. But resolving this issue allows us to ascertain what a bursar

was officially called in Umayyad times and what his function was, com-
pared to other bureaucrats, within the Treasury. The question that we
have to answer then becomes: do we have additional evidence about the
name of a treasurer in the literary and documentary sources?
There is overwhelming evidence in both kinds of sources that a (single)
treasurer or bursar was called a khazin, not a khazzan. This evidence
comes from a period after ours: this is how the word appears in two docu-
mentary sources from the third/ninth century,37 and in literary sources
from this and later centuries.38 The evidence is also strong for our period,
although it is a little more complex to make out. To start with, the early
historian Khalifa b. Khayyat (ca. 160–240/776–854) has preserved for
us the names of several bureaucrats who are identified as being “in charge
of (usually ala)” the khaza#in (coffers) of most of the Umayyad caliphs,
37) Both are undated quittances (bara#as; see below). The first (PERF, no 765),
which is fragmentary, is preserved on papyrus and must date from the caliphate of
the Abbasid caliph al-Mutazz bi-llah, i. e. 242–47/856–61. It is a quittance [bara#a]
written for Muhammad b. Wahb, “the khazin in the Treasury in Fustat Misr” (al-
khazin fi bayt al-mal bi-Fustat Misr) by the heir apparent to the caliphate, Abdal-
lah b. al-Mutazz. P.GrohmannWorld, 121. The second document (CPR XXI,
no. 66) is preserved on vellum and must date from the rule of Ahmad b. Tulun in
Egypt, i. e. 257–70/870–84. It is a quittance written for “Ahmad b. Qurra, the
client of the Commander of the Faithful, appointed khazin by the Amir Ahmad ibn
Tulun. …” See also Frantz-Murphy’s comments on p. 316, and her earlier work,
Agrarian Administration of Egypt from the Arabs to the Ottomans (Cairo, 1986;
Supplément aux Annales Islamologiques 9), 76. For Diem’s comments, see his
“Philologisches zu arabischen Steuerquittungen,” 93. Frantz-Murphy’s trans-
lation of khazin as “warehouse keeper” is certainly correct, but it is not compre-
hensive, I think; Grohmann’s translation as “treasurer” is broader and, in my
opinion, preferable. Al-Kindi’s document clearly is not talking about warehouse
keepers here.
38) Ibn Abd al-Hakam, who died in 257/870 in Egypt, mentions the expression
khazin bayt al-mal in connection with the Umayyad caliph Umar II; see his Sirat
Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, ed. Ahmad Ubayd (Beirut, 1387/1967), 53. This means
that the position was already known in the first half of third/ninth-century
Egypt. The evidence collected by C. E. Bosworth, EI2, s. v. “Khazin” and Claude
Cahen, “Contribution à l’étude des impôts dans l’Égypte médiévale,” Journal of
the Economic and Social History of the Orient 5 (1962), 269, comes from later peri-
ods. The picture becomes complicated by the fourth/tenth century, for the title
khazin could also be applied to lowly employees. See also al-Sabi, Wuzara#, 23, 30,
90, 91, 156, 184–85.

214 Wadad al-Qadi
beginning with Abd al-Malik and ending with Marwan II.39 The names
of these bureaucrats appear in lists compiled quite early by civil servants
in late Umayyad and early Abbasid times, as I have shown elsewhere,40
and hence the degree of their accuracy in indicating contemporary
usage of terminology is high. It is true that none of the bureaucrats in
these lists is literally called a khazin; but this is only because conferring
titles on any bureaucrat in the state, in any office, is simply not a charac-
teristic of these lists, and thus none of the bureaucrats mentioned in them
is given a title at all. Speculating on the name of those ala l-khaza#in-
bureaucrats from the descriptions given to them in those lists, we note,
first, that khaza#in is always used in the plural there. It stands to reason
to conclude that there would be several (many?) treasurers – khuzzan,
as in al-Kindi’s document – and that the name of the person given in
these lists is merely their chief or supervisor. Second, these lists provide
us with clear evidence about the place in which these treasurers would
be stationed, namely in the Treasury, since every single one of them
is identified as being in charge not only of the khaza#in, but also of the
buyut al-amwal (treasuries, peculiarly in the plural41). Finally, the
association between coffers and treasuries in the description of these
bureaucrats indicates that they were financial officials who handled ac-
tual monies, whether in cash or in kind. As such, they are to be seen as
being distinct from the officials who wrote letters about financial matters
or made calculations of income and expenditure – the sources’ ubiquitous
kuttab.
Outside the lists, and in the area of the less certain but still useful lit-
erary sources, we find more articulated support for our conclusions.
There, we occasionally encounter the appellation khazin in connection
39) See Khalifa b. Khayyat, Tarikh Khalifa ibn Khayyat, ed. Akram Diya#
al-Umari (Beirut and Damascus, 1977), 299 (Abd al-Malik), 312 (al-Walid I), 319
(Sulayman), 335 (Yazid II, copied in Ibn Abd Rabbihi, al-Iqd al-farid, ed. Ahmad
Amin et al. [Cairo, 1949–65], 4:441), 362 (Hisham), 367 (al-Walid II), 408 (Marwan
II).
40) See my forthcoming paper, “Is There an Iraqi, Late Umayyad, Bureau-
cratic School of History?” in Heritages Omeyyades/Umayyad Legacies, ed. Antoine

Borrut and Paul Cobb, Leiden.
41) This indicates, probably, a multiplicity of places in which the goods in cash
and kind were kept; these were, after all, the heyday of the conquests. It could also
be the result of trying to make the (single) Treasury proper (bayt al-mal) parallel
to the (multiple) coffers (khaza#in), which certainly would have been numerous,
and hence are referred to in the plural.

with a person clearly associated with the bayt al-mal,42 and in one case,
the more familiar name for the head of the treasury, sahib bayt al-mal, is
equated with khazin bayt al-mal.43 In all these usages, the word khazin
never reaches the level of a full-fledged title, as it did in later centuries.44
The word in the plural, khuzzan, though rare, is not unknown, and there
it clearly has a non-specific, non-titular meaning,45 as plurals normally
42) A person by the name of Ibn Abi Rafi is called a khazin to the caliph Ali
over his bayt al-mal; see al-Tabari, Tarikh al-rusul wa-l-muluk, ed. M. J. de Goeje
et al. (Leiden, 1879–1901), 1:3474. Slightly earlier, under the caliph Uthman,
there are in the sources two reports. In each of these reports Uthman tells the per-
son in charge of his treasury, bayt al-mal, after a difference of opinion between the
two men on a financial matter, that he, the treasurer, was nothing other than his,
Uthman’s, khazin (innama anta khazin lana), and the treasurer replies he thought
he was the Muslims’ khazin (khazin al-muslimin/li-l-muslimin), and then resigns
from his position as treasurer. In the first report, which occurs in al-Yaqubi’s
Tarikh (Beirut, 1960), 2:168–69, the treasurer is unidentified, the friction be-
tween the two men takes place in Medina, and the report is not attributed to any
authority. The second report, which occurs in al-Baladhuri’s Ansab al-ashraf,
vol. 4/1 (ed. Ihsan A bbas [Wiesbaden/Beirut, 1400/1979]), 518, is different. The
treasurer is the famous companion of the Prophet, Abdallah b. Masud (d. 32/653)
and his place of service as treasurer is al-Kufa. More importantly, the chain of
transmission that precedes the report ends with Abu Mikhnaf (d. ca. 157/774). If
it was indeed Abu Mikhnaf who transmitted this report and the words used in it
are his own, then the report may very well be contemporaneous with the late
Umayyad period we are concerned with here.
43) Abdallah b. al-Arqam is called both khazin bayt al-mal and sahibuhu dur-
ing the caliphate of Uthman; see al-Baladhuri, Ansab al-ashraf, vol. 4/1, ed.
A bbas, 579.
44) For later periods, see, for example, the case of Mu#nis al-Khazin, in Bos-
worth, “Khazin,” and the two documents from the Abbasid and Tulunid periods
mentioned in n. 37 above. It is to be noted that in the latter of these docu-
ments (CPR XXI, no. 66), the word khazin is used a second time not as a title but
clearly as a common noun: Ubayd, khazin fi bayt al-mal (“Ubayd, a khazin in the
Treasury”). The remainder of the text is illegible, so no further conclusions can be
drawn.
45) I have located one instance (and we may find more) in which khuzzan is
used in the plural. It is reported in Ibn al-Jawzi’s Sirat wa-manaqib Umar ibn Abd
al-Aziz, ed. Naim Zarzur (Beirut, 1984), 110. Al-Awzai is said to have trans-
mitted that Umar II wrote a letter to the khuzzan bayt al-mal, as in our docu-
ment. The letter, though, has nothing to do with the payment of salaries. Khuzzan
is also reported in a letter written by the caliph Abd al-Malik and addressed to his
governor al-Hajjaj; it reads: “… for money is God’s alone, and we are its keepers

216 Wadad al-Qadi
do. And this is precisely the way in which the word khuzzan46 was used in
al-Kindi’s document, generically so to speak. The khuzzan addressed
there are the bursars of the Treasury in general – and there were un-
doubtedly several of them;47 any one of them who receives the letter of the
Finance Director may act on it and pay the judge his advance. In this
sense we ought to consider al-Kindi’s document as a most valuable addi-
tion to our corpus about the variety of employees in the Treasury in
Egypt under the Umayyads,48 and also about the form of address used for
some of them in official inter-office correspondence in that period.
Let us now examine the term used for the judge’s salary in al-Kindi’s
document: rizq. Was this the official name used in government records for
the salary of a judge? Here, once again, the evidence from the documen-
tary and literary sources is overwhelmingly in the affirmative.
In the documentary sources, rizq, alongside ata#, is the name used in
the Arabic and Greek papyri from the middle Umayyad period for the
stipends of the soldiers who were registered in the diwan.49 The literary
(fa-innama al-mal mal Allah azza wa-jalla wa-nahnu khuzzanuhu).” See Ibn Asa-
kir, Dimashq, 12:156. But in this text khuzzan has a figurative meaning and thus
has no bearing on our discussion.
46) There is no doubt that the word in al-Kindi’s document is in the plural,
with its singular being khazin, as we have seen in the above usages of the term. The
choice of Guest to vocalize it as khazzan, thus making it in the singular, is wrong,
I think. The form khazzan normally indicates a place rather than a person.
47) As we have seen above. Later, in the Tulunid period in Egypt (257–70/
870–84), this is certain from the above-mentioned receipt published in CPR XXI,
no. 66, where there are two named persons called khazin: Ahmad b. Qurra and a
certain Ubayd. The latter is identified as “a khazin in the Treasury,” thus conclu-
sively indicating a multiplicity of bursars there. See above, nn. 37 and 44.
48) The best source for this is the accounts in the Greek papyri, such as
P. Lond., nos. 1412, 1413, 1414, 1433, 1434, 1441. For translations of some of these
documents, see H. I. Bell, “Translations of the Greek Aphrodito Papyri in the
British Museum,” Der Islam 3 (1912), 133–40; 369–73; 4 (1913), 87–96; 17 (1928),
4–8. These documents, however, have still to be analyzed specifically for under-
standing the activities of the Treasury’s employees.
49) See P.Heid.Arab. I, no. 3, lines. 13–14, 38–39 (dated Shawwal 91 [= June
710]), no. 13, line 7 (dated 90 [= 708–709]); P. Lond., no. 1435, line 120 (translated
in Bell, “Translations of the Greek Aphrodito Papyri in the British Museum,” Der
Islam 4 [1913], 96). Ata# is a more common word for the soldiers’ stipends. It oc-
curs, in addition to the literary sources, in the Aphrodito papyri; see P.Heid.Arab.
I, no. 1, lines 8–9, 24–25 (dated Rabi I 91 [= January 710] and P.BeckerNPAF, no.
2, lines 4 and 22 (undated), also published as P.Caire.Arab., no. 148, lines 8 and 26.
For rizq and ata# in the papyri, see the classic works of C. H. Becker in P.Becker-

sources also mostly use rizq for the judge’s salary. In the theoretical lit-
erature on judgeship, this is clearly the technical term for it,50 alongside
the far less frequent and decidedly generic term ajr, meaning “compen-
sation”.51 In the biographical literature, rizq and ajr are both used to de-
note a judge’s salary, when this salary is given any name at all, and this
does not occur frequently.52 In all these occurrences, the texts clearly in-
dicate that the fundamental basis for calling the salary rizq is that it
would be sustained and paid regularly as long as the judge remains in of-
fice.53 Overall, we can thus say that the name that appears in al-Kindi’s
document for the judge’s salary is consonant with what is known about it
from both the literary and documentary sources.
The monetary amount mentioned in al-Kindi’s document and iden-
tified as the judge’s rizq for two months is 20 dinars. This means that his
salary was ten dinars per month. Is this figure plausible? A reading of the
available books on judges in the early Islamic period indicates that this
PAF, 93, and Adolf Grohmann, “Aperçu de papyrologie arabe,” Etudes de Papyro-
logie 1 (1932), 61, nn. 1 and 2 and the literature cited there. Philip Mayerson’s
more recent and analytical works explore the meanings of rizq and the Greek word
from which it was taken, rouzikon, also roga, especially in the Greek post-conquest
papyri from both Egypt and Palestine; see his “ and
in Post-Con-
quest Egypt,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie and Epigraphik 100 (1994), 126–28;
idem, “An Additional Note on (Ar. Rizq),” ibid., 107 (1995), 279–81. See
also Cl. Cahen, EI2, s. v. “Ata#”, and C. E. Bosworth, ibid., s. v. “Rizk” (3. In mili-
tary terminology). The main feature about rizq is its character as a regular pay-
ment; see below, at n. 53. It would be interesting to find out whether, or how fre-
quently, this term is used for other employees of the early Islamic state.
50) All the books on this subject use rizq in the titles of the sections on the
judge’s salary; in the texts of those sections, they use mostly rizq and only occa-
sionally ajr. See al-Khassaf, Adab al-qadi, 109, 110, 111; al-Mawardi, Adab al-qadi,
2:298, 299, 300; al-Husam al-Shahid, Sharh adab al-qadi, 80, 81, 82; Ibn Abi
l-Damm, Adab al-qada#, 1:315, 316. See also Émile Tyan, Histoire de l’organi-
sation judiciare en pays d’Islam (Beirut, 1938), 504.
51) al-Husam al-Shahid, Sharh, 81, had an interesting explanation for the
term ajr. He said: “It was called ajr because compensation is money that is earned
by the hired person in return for his work. This situation is found in the rizq of the
judge; hence he called it ajr”.
52) See a list of judges whose salaries are called rizq in the biographical litera-
ture in my forthcoming study “The Salaries of Judges” mentioned above.

53) Hence the frequent use of the verb ujriya/ajra (alayhi) with rizq: his sus-
tenance was made to “flow” [over time] for him. Tyan (Histoire, 504) has a differ-
ent but interesting interpretation: the reason for the salary being called rizq is
that rizq is “moyen assurant la subsistence”.

218 Wadad al-Qadi
was indeed the case, as I have shown in my study “The Salaries of

Judges”. My analysis of the salaries of judges in Egypt in particular has
allowed me to conclude that the salaries of judges there in late Umayyad
and early Abbasid times were somewhere between ten and sixteen dinars,
being probably closer to the ten-level than to the sixteen. It was only a
good two decades into Abbasid rule that these salaries showed real in-
crease in Egypt, doubling to 30 dinars per month. The salary of the judge
in al-Kindi’s document thus tallies well with what we know about judges’
salaries in the period under discussion.
The last term related to terminology and used in al-Kindi’s document
is the term bara#a. According to the document, the bursars of the Treas-
ury must write a bara#a after the judge has received his advance. What is a
bara#a, and was writing a bara#a common practice in late Umayyad times?
Here the answer is a resounding yes: writing bara#as was indeed com-
mon practice in Umayyad times by the testimony of actual bara#as that
have survived on papyrus from Umayyad (and later) times;54 in fact, the
54) Examples from the Umayyad period are P.BeckerPAF, no. 10 (dated
Ramadan 90 [= June–July 709]); P.Khalili I, no. 9 (two documents dated 104

[= 722]); Michaelides P., no. 744 B, of Cambridge University Library, published in
Geoffrey Khan, “An Arabic Legal Document from the Umayyad Period,” Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series, 4 (1994), 357–68; it is dated Rajab 88
[= June–July 707]; and PERF, no. 585, published under no. 01 in CPR XXI,
89–90; it is dated 75/694–95, and is thus the earliest known quittance (it is, though,
a bilingual quittance). The word bara#a appears in all of these documents, as it
does in a trilingual papyrus from the second/eighth century (P.Caire.Arab., no.
167, line 99). It also appears, in nominal, verbal, or (mostly) both forms in 23 docu-
ments from early Abbasid times, less than two decades after the fall of the
Umayyads (147–58/764–75), in the eastern part of the empire (P.Khurasan, nos.
1–23; see also no. 32, line 7). The same word occurs on numerous quittances from
the later second and third/late eighth and ninth centuries. See, for examples,
P.Berl.Arab., nos. 4, 5, 7; P.Caire.Arab. nos. 116–18, 181–97; P.Khalili I, nos. 10, 11;
P.Hamb.Arab. I, no. 39; P.Philad.Arab., nos. 9–10, 12; Chrest.Khoury, nos. 40, 49.
CPR XXI contains editions and re-editions of many post-Umayyad bara#as: nos.
39, 40, 43, 44, 48, 51–53, 55, 60, 62, 64, 66 (on which see further above, at nn. 37,
47), 74; they are dated between 213/828 and 293/905; see Werner Diem’s comments
and emendations on them in his “Philologisches zu arabischen Steuerquittungen,”
75–91. For the occurrence of bara#a in third/ninth- and fourth/tenth-century pa-
pyri, see CPR XXVI, nos. 37, 39, 41. There are also useful lists of bara#as in CPR
XXI, 84–87, 91, and 93.
For the latest and most thorough study of the various forms of bara#as until
the middle of the second/eighth century and beyond, see Khan’s study in P.Khu-
rasan, 25–31, 54–55, 56–57, 62–63, 64.

use of the term bara#a becomes less frequent with the passage of time, as
Gladys Frantz-Murphy has shown.55 These documents inform us di-
rectly and indirectly about both the function and form of a bara#a. In
terms of function, the bara#a is basically a receipt signed by a receiving
party of goods, in cash or kind, to attest to the receipt of such goods – in
other words, a quittance. The feature that distinguishes a quittance from
other receipts is that in it the receiving party absolves/acquits/releases
the paying party (barra#a) from any obligation connected with the re-
ceived payment.56 This specific function is expressed textually in quit-
tances, thereby distinguishing them from the run-of-the-mill receipts.
Thus, in the surviving papyri, whereas both the receipts and quittances
share basically the same “to:/ from:/ concerning:” form of address, and
bara#as, like receipts, often use the generic verbs adda (“to deliver”)57 or
In the literary sources, the occurrence of bara#a in the technical sense as it

has been discussed here is infrequent but not unknown. For an example, see
Ibn Asakir, Dimashq, 10:104–105. There, the Umayyad governor of Khurasan,
Yazid b. al-Muhallab, brings camel-loads of booty to the crown prince, Ayyub
b. Sulayman b. Abd al-Malik, and asks the crown prince to “write a bara#a” for
him about them. The crown prince first procrastinates then “he wrote for me a
bara#a.”
55) Frantz-Murphy, in CPR XXI, 91, 93, has observed that the term bara#a
opens 11 out of the 13 intact individual receipts written between 75/694 and
218/833, whereas after 218/833, when receipts become more numerous, the term
bara#a opens only 15 out of 77 intact documents that date between 226/840
and 316/928. Her observation is not invalidated, I think, by the newly discovered
23 baraas from early Abbasid Khurasan that were recently published in P.Khu-
rasan.
56) Frantz-Murphy has argued repeatedly for the basic meaning of “re-
moval”, in addition to other meanings for bara#as, basing her conclusions on textual
and cross-linguistic analyses. See her valuable studies in CPR XXI, chapters 2
and 3, esp. 64–68, 89–94, and, “A Comparison of Arabic and Earlier Egyptian
Contract Formularies, Part IV: Quittance Formulas,” Journal of Near Eastern
Studies 47 (1988), 269–80. See also the valuable studies of Geoffrey Khan, “An
Arabic Legal Document,” 362–68, and “The Pre-Islamic Background of Muslim
Legal Formularies,” Aram 6 (1994), 194–96.
57) Examples of receipts using adda are found in P.Caire.Arab., nos. 181–90,
192–95; P.Berl.Arab., no. 6; CPR XXI, nos. 41 (p. 568), 42, 45–50, 54, 56–57, 59,
61, 63, 65, 68, 69, 71–73, 81, 83, 85, 87–89 (to which see Diem, „Philologisches zu
arabischen Steuerquittungen,” 76–108); P.Khurasan, nos. 8–23. See also the next
note.

220 Wadad al-Qadi
qabada (“to receive”),58 the quittances mostly (but not always) begin with
bara#a li-/ min (“a release/ quittance to so-and-so/from such-and-such”)
after the basmala. The early Abbasid quittances in P.Khurasan have
slightly varying openings after the basmala: hadhihi bara#a min... li...
(“this is a release/ quittance from so-and-so to so-and-so”), or, less fre-
quently, hadha kitab... bara#a (“this is a document... of release/quit-
tance”), or simply hadha kitab (“this is a document”).59
Having thus a clear legal function, quittances were used by both indi-
viduals and the government for indicating the receipt of anything con-
sidered valuable, from milch-ewes to taxes.60 The government, however,
used them not only to absolve the taxpayers from further obligation to-
wards the payment of their taxes, but also for keeping its accounts in
order, i. e. for bookkeeping.61 Thus, when the governor of Egypt instructs
the taxpayers of Aphrodito to have the government employees at the gra-
naries write them a bara#a once they have delivered their food tax there, as
an Umayyad papyrus informs us,62 he wants not only to release the Aph-
roditans from further tax obligation, but also to have Egypt’s tax records
correct and his budget balanced. His instructions, in fact, are not funda-
mentally different from the instructions of the Finance Director in our
al-Kindi document, except that the roles are reversed: the government
in the latter document is the payer not the recipient of funds. The judge
58) Examples of receipts using qabada are found in P.Caire.Arab., nos. 117,
118; P.Khalili I, no. 11; CPR XXI, nos. 70, 84 (on which and no. 77, see Diem,
“Philologisches zu arabischen Steuerquittungen,” 99, 103–105). The verb appears
in all 23 of the Khurasan documents (P.Khurasan, nos. 1–23; and see no. 32). CPR
XXVI, nos. 41–45 show the usage of qaba da in late papyri, from the fourth/tenth
to the ninth/fifteenth century. See also P.GrohmannWorld, 130–32. Other verbs
are occasionally used, like wasala/awsala, dafaa, but this is infrequent. See
examples in P.Berl.Arab., nos. 4, 5, 7; Chrest.Khoury, nos. 72, 73; CPR XXVI, nos.
38, 40.
59) See the papyri mentioned at the beginning of n. 54 above. See also
P.Caire.Arab., no. 191 (from the third/ninth century). For details on the various
bara#a forms, see Khan, “An Arabic Legal Document,” 362–68; idem, P.Khurasan,
25–31.
60) The two quittances in P.Khalili I, no. 9, deal with milch-ewes. Most of the
remainung quittances concern various kinds of taxes.

61) The Greek accounts of Aphrodito give us a picture of painstaking book-
keeping. For examples, see P.Lond., nos. 1412, 1413, 1414, 1433, 1434, 1441 and
their translations in Der Islam 3 (1912), 133–40, 369–73; 4 (1913), 87–96; 17
(1928), 4–8.
62) P.BeckerPAF, no. 10 (dated Ramadan 90 [= June–July 709]), lines 4–5.

therefore needs to write a quittance immediately after receiving his

monies in order, first, to release the government from further obligation
to pay his salary for the two identified months, and second, to make sure
that the government’s accounts remain in order.63
The bara#a reference in al-Kindi’s document is thus absolutely in ac-
cord with bureaucratic practice in Umayyad times.
Form and Style
We now proceed to examine al-Kindi’s document from the perspective

of form and style, to see whether this examination confirms its authentic-
ity or not. Here we have to keep in mind from the outset a very important
point, namely that this document is both unexceptional and unique. As
a letter,64 it is quite ordinary, and we might thus expect it to be similar
to other contemporary letters that have survived in documentary form,
especially in the Qurra corpus.65 There are, however, several aspects to it
that make it extraordinary: it is written by the Finance Director of the
province; it is addressed to the bursars of the Treasury; it concerns the
salary of an official of the government; and the salary is an advance pay-
ment, not a regular one. In all these aspects, this document differs from
all of the letters that have survived on papyrus, as none of them come
from inter-office correspondence in the capital of the province, and none
of them deal with salaries of Muslim government employees, let alone
advances on these salaries, ordered by the highest financial authority in
the land. This is why we must expect some differences in form between
this document and the corpus of letters from Egypt that has survived on
papyrus in the Umayyad period.
63) What is not clear from the document is whether writing bara#as was a rou-
tine practice at the Treasury – that employees (like judges, as in this case) signed
quittances whenever they received their salaries every month, or whether this par-
ticular judge’s case – involving the unusual payment of an advance, and for two
months – was a special one that required the writing of a special receipt.
64) For the possibility of this document being an “official payment order”
rather than a “letter” proper, see the last two paragraphs of this section.
65) Comparison with contemporary letters in the literary sources is not pos-
sible, except in exceptional cases, not only due to the issue of authenticity, but also
to their sheer volume. The Qurra corpus is useful in particular because there are
many letters that have survived from it.

222 Wadad al-Qadi
Let us begin with the broad outline of the document’s form. It opens
with the basmala, then identifies the sender and the recipient, in this
order, then discusses the subject matter, and ends with the date of the
writing of the letter. In all of these respects, it follows generally, though
not fully, the lines of the contemporaneous letters on papyrus (when they
are fully preserved). It is also identical to them in some points of detail.
The identification of the letter’s date is accomplished with the verb ka-
taba/ kutiba (wrote/ was written) preceded by the conjunction wa. More
significantly, as in most of the Qurra letters in Arabic, the sender is ident-
ified by name only, thus simply “Qurra b. Sharik”/“Isa b. Abi Ata#”,
without any title, despite the fact that (or maybe because?) both Qurra
and Isa are the highest authorities in the land in the administrative/fi-
nancial spheres. The addressee, by contrast, and as in the Qurra letters, is
identified by his/their position, thus sahib Ashquh (pagarch of Aphrodito)
in many of the Qurra papyri, and khuzzan bayt al-mal (the bursars of the
Treasury) in al-Kindi’s document. But here there is a difference: the ad-
dressee’s name in the Qurra papyri is almost always mentioned: Basil/
Basilus, then his position as sahib Ashquh is added. This leads us to the
areas in which al-Kindi’s document differs from other letters from the
same period.
Beginning with the differences in the document’s broad outline, we
notice, first, that the document does not include a salutation to the ad-
dressee, following the identification of the sender and the addressee.66
This salutation, which is found in most of the Qurra letters in Arabic,
comes in the formulaic form fa-inni ahmadu ilayka Allah alladhi la ilaha
illa huwa (“Unto you I praise God, besides whom there is no god”). Its ab-
sence from al-Kindi’s document is probably due to the fact that the ad-
dressee there is not a particular named person or persons, but rather an
anonymous group identified only by the line of work its members have in
the government. It could also be due to the sender’s sense of distance in
rank between himself and the group addressed, or to his desire to be brief
and quick – to get to the point without delay. The omission of this rather
long salutatory formula is clearly the cause of the next omission in al-
66) It is to be noted that early official documents, such as the famous demand
notes, or entagia, of Qurra to the inhabitants of various villages and tax receipts,
do not contain the salutation formula while they do contain the names of the
sender and the addressees (from X to Y). This feature makes them similar to al-
Kindi’s document. However, clearly this document is neither a demand note nor a
receipt, although it does request the writing of a receipt.

Kindi’s document: the formulaic amma bad (translated variously as:

“thereafter”/“as to the matter at hand”/“now to proceed”/“now then”),
the connecting phrase that marks the end of the letter’s introduction and
the beginning of its subject matter. In the absence of the salutation, there
is no need to introduce the topic with a transitional formula, no matter
how short.
Proceeding to the end of the document, two broad omissions quickly
catch one’s eye. The first omission is that there is no concluding salu-
tations, comparable to Qurra’s occasional wa-l-salam ala man ittabaa al-
huda (“peace be upon those who follow righteousness”), expected to be
adjusted when addressing a Muslim. This is explainable, in my opinion,
with the same explanation as the second omission, namely that at the end
of the letter the scribe is not identified by name, as he normally is in con-
temporary correspondence, and instead of the use of the verb to write in
the active voice (e. g. wa-kataba fulan, “and so-and-so wrote”) we have the
passive (wa-kutiba, “it was written”). The reason for this is that the Fi-
nance Director wrote the letter himself, with his own hand. Why should
he have done so when he certainly had several scribes at his beck and call?
Probably because he is dealing with an unusual financial situation,
namely the immediate payment of a rather large amount of cash (20 gold
dinars) from the government’s coffers, for services as yet unrendered, by
a rather important though non-bureaucratic employee of the government
(a judge), and for a rather long period of that service under normal cir-
cumstances (two months). And there is no question that the writer of the
letter is aware that he is asking for (in fact, ordering) something very un-
usual, since he specifically follows the order of payment with the separate
order of writing a quittance for the transaction. The situation being both
extraordinary and costly to the government, the order to pay must have
come from a high authority, and the Finance Director is the highest fi-
nancial authority in the realm; even if he were to have one of his scribes
write the letter, he will probably have to countersign it in some way, such
as a seal. The shorter way is to write it himself. This way the bursars at
the Treasury, recognizing his hand, would carry out his orders immedi-
ately without asking questions. Thus, with him, the Finance Director,
writing in person to rather lowly bureaucrats in the Treasury, and in
haste, no salutations are needed. In the final analysis, this is swift, busi-
ness-like inter-office correspondence from boss to employees, for which
salutations are too formal and time-consuming and identification of the
writer completely unnecessary.
If this is indeed the case, and I think it is, then this explains other fea-
tures in the document: its omission of the salutations at the beginning of

224 Wadad al-Qadi
the letter and the following amma bad; its address to no specific person,
but rather to a group specialized in the disbursement of funds in the
Treasury; and its overall brevity – where the subject matter is covered in
less than two lines, making it noticeably shorter than the Qurra letters. It
also helps to explain another feature of the document, namely its specifi-
cation of the day on which the letter was written.
Naming the day of the week is uncommon, though not unknown, in
the letters preserved on papyrus from Umayyad and later times.67 Nor-
67) The earliest official papyri on which the name of the day is mentioned are
two letters from the Umayyad governor of Egypt Qurra b. Sharik to Basilius the
pagarch of Aphrodito, requesting urgently the payment of taxes/arrears; they are
P.BeckerNPAF, no. 2, republished by Grohmann as P.Caire.Arab., no. 148; and
P.Qurra, no. 4. Although the date (month, year) is missing from both, it is clear
that they go back to Qurra’s governorship, in 90–96/708–14. The first mentions
that a certain Yazid wrote it on Friday (wa-kataba Yazid yawm al-juma; lines
28–29/32–33), and the second that a certain Khalifa wrote it on Monday (wa-ka-
taba Khalifa yawm al-ithnayn; line 33). There is another official Umayyad papy-
rus, but this one is fortunately dated “Saturday, seven nights remaining of the
month of Rabi I of the year six and one hundred” [= 19 August 724]. It requests
the transfer of taxes and personal information on farmers and workmen, probably
in preparation for the census that Ubaydallah b. al-Habhab eventually carried
out in 106/724. See Nabia Abbott, “A New Papyrus and a Review of the Admin-
istration of Ubayd Allad b. al-Habhab”, in Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor
of Hamilton A. R. Gibb, ed. George Makdisi (Leiden, 1965), 21–35; the date is on
p. 23. There are also four papyri containing four letters to a certain Ammar:
he seems to have been a tax official who had confiscated some items from people
who were delayed in paying their taxes, and now that they have paid them, he
is given instructions to release what he had confiscated. The first two are dated
Friday 9 Dhu l-Hijja (yawm al-juma li-tis layalin khalawna min Dhi l-Hijja
[101]) [= 21 June 719]; the third is dated Thursday 18 Rabi I 102 (yawm al-khamis
li-ithnatay ashrata layla baqiyat min Rabi al-Awwal sanat ithnatayn wa-mi#a) [=
26 September 720]; and the fourth is dated Thursday 15 Jumada I 102 (yawm al-
khamis li-l-nisf min Jumada l-Ula sanat ithnatayn wa-mi#a) [= 21 November 720].
See Werner Diem, “Vier Dienstschreiben an Ammar. Ein Beitrag zur arabischen
Papyrologie,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 131 (1983),
239–60.
Early papyri recording private transactions and naming days of the week have
also survived. There are the two quittances of P.Khalili I, no. 9, mentioned above
(see n. 54), both of which say they were written yawm al-sabt (Saturday) of the year
104, with the latter only adding partially the month, making it date to 3 or 26
Shawwal 104, i. e. 16 March or 8 April 723.

mally those letters mention the month and the year, and occasionally the
day of the month, like “the beginning of the month of …”, “the end of the
month of …”, “two nights before the end of the month of …”, “three
nights having passed of the month …”.68 But naming the day of the
month (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) is rare.69 We mostly find it in situations
In the literary sources, naming the day in the early period is exceedingly rare.
I have found one letter that does that; it has been recorded by al-Kindi in his Qudat
(pp. 336–37). The letter is the reply of the Umayyad caliph Umar II (r. 99–101/
717–19) to the letter of Egypt’s judge lyad b. Ubaydallah (in office twice,
99–101/717–19), in which the judge asked the caliph about three legal issues.
Umar II’s letter ends with: wa-kutibat/katabtu li-sabah yawm al-khamis li-arba
khalawna min Dhi l-Hijja tis wa-tisin (written/I wrote on the morning of Thurs-
day 4 Dhu l-Hijja 99 [= 7 July 718]). The mention of the time of the day, in addition
to the name of the day, makes this a remarkable letter. I shall return to it in the
conclusion below.
For examples from the post-Umayyad period, see P.Philad.Arab., no. 3, lines
1–2: Thursday 22 Dhu l-Hijja 146 [= 1 March 764]; CPR XXI, no. 44, lines 10–11:
Thursday 2 or 3 Ramadan 226 [= 26 or 27 June 841] – although neither is a Thurs-
day. A late papyrus from the fourth/tenth century, P.Caire.Arab., no. 137, goes
into even greater detail in identifying the time. It is a certificate of discharge,
which specifies not only the name of the day but the hours as well, thus: ala kham-
sat [sic] saat baqiyat min yawm al-sabt li-arba ashra baqiyat min Shaban al-jari
fi sanat thaman wa-arbain wa-thalathmi#a (7 p. m. on Saturday 16 Shaban 348 [=
22 October 959]). Grohmann (Chrestomathie, 223, 224 n. 5) mentions other late
papyri.
There is another system for naming the day in the Arabic papyri from Egypt
after 238/852, as in CPR XXI, nos. 9 and 51, and P.Caire.Arab., nos. 185, 194, and
196, which are tax receipts written in Arabic with Greek-Coptic number-letters in-
terspersed with the text in the first line. In this system the name of the day is
written with its Greek symbol after the Arabic word yawm (day), followed by the
name of the Coptic month, the day of the month, and lastly the Hijri year. On the
use of Greek-Coptic number-letters in a third/ninth century Arabic papyrus, see
Werner Diem, “G. Rex Smith, Moshallekh Al-Moraekhi, The Arabic Papyri of the
John Rylands University Library of Manchester. A Review Article,” Journal of Se-
mitic Studies 43 (1998), 102–103. There are also useful tables in K[laus] A. Worp’s
article, “Hegira Years in Greek, Greek-Coptic and Greek-Arabic Papyri,” Aegyp-
tus 65 (1985), 107–15. For a classic work on the subject, see Grohmann, Chrestom-
athie, 224–31.
68) See the variations on such occurrences in Grohmann, Chrestomathie,
219–32.
69) See the comments of Nabia Abbott, “A New Papyrus,” 24–25, and her ear-
lier comment in P.Qurra, 52.

226 Wadad al-Qadi
that are explainable,70 although there are situations that do not seem to
require it.71
The naming of the day in al-Kindi’s document falls in the category of
the explainable, I think, for two complementary reasons related to
bureaucratic considerations. The first is that writing the name of the
day of the week makes the bursars of the Treasury immediately recog-
nize the date and not hesitate in complying with the order in the letter;
it also allows the accountants of the Treasury to document their entries
in the accounts of the government with the highest accuracy possible,
and accuracy (and its attendant, detail) is a clear characteristic of
the accounts of the Aphrodito papyri. The second reason is a little more
speculative. This letter represents inter-office correspondence. One
would assume that the volume of such correspondence was quite heavy
in Umayyad and later times. Dating a letter by a named day would be
the most effective and meaningful manner of dating – at times perhaps
the only needed identification of the date – since confusion about it
is completely unlikely, business about things being not likely to occur in
more than a week – and there is only one Saturday, Sunday, etc. in a
week.72
The conclusion that emerges from the study of the document’s form
and style is that it conforms overall to the norms of letter-writing in late
Umayyad times, and that the departures noted in it from these norms
arise from the special circumstances connected with its writing, including
70) Explainable situations are mainly those in which speed is needed. This
would certainly be the case of the census-related document of Ubaydallah b. al-
Habhab, since this Finance Director was doing the census on the ground with a
retinue of scribes, and thus personal information on farmers and workmen was
needed quickly. The fact that the private transactions mention the name of the day
points to the way people remembered the times of the conclusions of transactions.
This probably applies to the Ammar documents as well. The late discharge docu-
ment, which mentions the hour of the day, does that probably for the legal impli-
cations of the discharge. For all these documents, see n. 67 above.
71) Abbott (P.Qurra, 52) believes that the mention of the name of the day in
the two Qurra letters demanding taxes/arrears (see n. 67 above) is explainable:

“The reason … may be that they are urgent admonitions to be dispatched at once
by special messenger and delivered within a week so that results might be obtained
with the least possible delay.” I am not sure this is the case, since all the rest of the
Qurra letters – and most of them are tax-related – do not mention the name of the
day. Was that mention a scribal idiosyncrasy?
72) That is, this usage is similar to that of the modern manager, who sends a
note to a subordinate in his office, saying: “I need this by Tuesday!”

its subject matter, its probable writer, and its circulation within the
bureaucratic offices of the government. These are three situations for
which there is no counterpart in our surviving corpus of letters on papy-
rus and elsewhere, and hence comparing al-Kindi’s document with them
is not possible.
There remains one more matter to consider before closing the dis-
cussion on the form and style of our document, namely whether it should
be considered an “official order of payment”, as a number of Arabic pa-
pyri have been identified by several papyrologists. Al-Kindi’s document
certainly fits into this category in terms of content, and, in fact, some of
its stylistic features are similar to those of payment orders. Out of some
29 orders preserved on papyrus that I have examined,73 the vast majority
begins, like letters, with the basmala; about half deal with payment of
money (dinars [or portions thereof] or dirhams) in particular; and about
a third use the word wa-kutiba, in the passive, at the end of the documents
(when the end is preserved) without mentioning the name of the scribe, as
in al-Kindi’s document. Furthermore, like al-Kindi’s document and un-
like letters, they include no salutations at the beginning or at the end of
the text, nor obviously the transitional phrase amma bad, and they are,
like it, brief. On the other hand, there are substantial differences between
al-Kindi’s document and the surviving payment orders. For one thing,
unlike al-Kindi’s document, the sender’s name is not mentioned in the
text of any of the payment orders,74 and the addressee is identified in the
text of the orders only very rarely – in three cases out of 29 – and mainly
73) Grohmann conveniently published 21 such payment orders in P.Groh-

mannWorld, 139–51. See also P.Berl.Arab., no. 8; P.Caire.Arab., no. 113; P.Mar-
chands II, nos. 13, 23; P.Marchands V/1, no. 1; P.QusairArab., nos. 9, 23. See also
Diem, Arabische Briefe aus dem 7.–10. Jahrhundert, no. 21 (wajjih … adfaha,
“send … so that I pay it”).
74) The sender’s name sometimes appears in the address of the orders, as in
P.GrohmannWorld, 145 b and 150. The latter document is important since it dif-
ferentiates clearly between the document’s text and its two addresses: the text is
written upside down (lines 3–7, or, more correctly, 7–3) and the two addresses are
written normally (lines 1–2 and 8–10). This should help us re-read some other pay-
ment orders which have been reproduced with the lines of the address(es) and the
texts numbered consecutively, as if the address(es) were part of the text (see in par-
ticular P.GrohmannWorld, 149 b). This being the case, the sender’s names that ap-
pear to be part of the texts of the payment orders are in fact part of the address(es)
of these orders. The sender’s name in P.GrohmannWorld, 145 b, occurs only on the
seal.

228 Wadad al-Qadi
for “non-formal”, accidental reasons.75 In all of the payment orders, the

verb used for the request to pay/deliver is idfa, unlike al-Kindi’s docu-
ment’s more generic atu (“give”). This may have to do with the fact that
many – about half – payment orders request the delivery of items other
than money – such as meat, bread, cheese, oil, barley, wheat, a ram – and
that by far most of them deal with private rather official requests, unlike
al-Kindi’s document. And there are also other differences in the dating of
most payment orders (whenever these are preserved). The day of the week
is identified in only three orders, in one of which it is written in a Coptic-
Greek symbol76 and in two in Arabic words.77 The day of the month is
identified in eleven orders, in ten of which it is written in Coptic-Greek
symbols and in only one in Arabic words.78 Of the twelve orders in which
the month is identified by name, the Coptic month is by far mostly used
(eleven cases out of the twelve).79 And while only the Hijri year is used in
all eleven payment orders, this year is written in all cases in Coptic-Greek
symbols.80
Overall, thus, it seems not a straightforward matter to call our al-
Kindi document an “official order of payment”, although there are in-
deed formal and stylistic aspects of it that make it qualify to be identified
as such. Perhaps what brings this issue to its resolution is to note that all
the samples we have of payment orders belong to periods later than al-
Kindi’s document.
The earliest I have been able to identify so far dates to 159 [= 775],
about three decades after al-Kindi’s document, and the next earliest
75) These are P.GrohmannWorld, 141 a (where the transitional phrase amma
bad is unusually used), 148 b (where the adressee’s name occurs in the vocative [ya
Aba Humayd], hence rather accidentally than formally, and P.Caire.Arab., no. 113
(where again here the adressee’s name occurs in the informal vocative [ya Aba
Jamil]). The addressee is sometimes identified in the address(es) of the payment
orders (as in P.GrohmannWorld, 141 b, 142 a, 149 b), but this is different from their
identification in the orders’ texts, as in al-Kindi’s document.
76) P.GrohmannWorld, 141 a.
77) P.GrohmannWorld, 144 a (yawm al-arbia#) and 148 b (li-yawm al-ithnayn);
see also 139 a’s rather strange “and today is Monday” (wa-l-yawm al-ithnayn),
with no further dating.
78) In P.GrohmannWorld, 148 b (ahad ashar yawman min …) is the only one
that is written in Arabic.; the remaining eleven (141 a–145 b, 149 b–150) use Cop-
tic-Greek symbols.
79) Various Coptic months are mentioned in P.GrohmannWorld, 141 a–145 b,
149 b–150; the Arabic month Jumada I is mentioned in P.GrohmannWorld, 151 a.

80) P.GrohmannWorld, 141 a–145 b, 149 b–150.

dates to 194 [= 810]; indeed most of the corpus, both dated and esti-
mated, dates back to the third/ninth century. Had the payment order not
yet become formalized at the time when al-Kindi’s document was writ-
ten? This is possible. Alternatively, it is also possible that the payment
order was indeed formalized when al-Kindi’s document was written but
no samples of it have survived. But, even then, it would be the scribes of
the bureaucracy who would use this form faithfully. If someone else was
writing it, he may very well depart from it. This indeed strengthens the
probability I mentioned above, namely that it was the Finance Director
of Egypt, the document’s sender, Isa b. Abi Ata#, who wrote the docu-
ment with his own hand. That resulted in a hybrid kind of text, which
looks like a letter yet also exhibits some characteristics of a payment
order.
Historiographical Context
Finally, for authenticating our document, it is important to see how it

fits into the work of the historian who cited it in his book, Abu Umar al-
Kindi, and what his introduction to it further tells us about his historical
tools and writing choices. This amounts to the examination of the docu-
ment within its historiographical environment.
The outline of the biography of Abu Umar Muhammad b. Yusuf al-
Kindi has been known in Western scholarship for almost a century,
thanks mainly to the meticulous work of Rhuvon Guest, who published
al-Kindi’s Wulat and Qudat and wrote a perceptive and detailed introduc-
tion to them in 1912.81 An Egyptian Arab, al-Kindi was born in 283/897
and died at the age of 67 in 350/961. A Hanafi, he studied and transmitted
some hadith, but, having a strong interest in history and genealogy, and
having lived almost all his life in al-Fustat, his forte was Egyptian his-
tory. His contemporary the historian al-Farghani (282–362/895–972),82
81) See also F. Rosenthal’s entry on him in EI2, s. v. “al-Kindi, Abu Umar
Muhammad b. Yusuf al-Tudjibi”. For a reproduction of al-Maqrizi’s entry about

him in his al-Muqaffa, see Nicholas August Koenig, The History of the Governors
of Egypt by Abu Umar Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Kindi (sic) (New York, 1908), 1, n.
5; see also passim in the Introduction.
82) Abu Muhammad Abdallah b. Ahmad al-Farghani is the author of a supple-
ment to al-Tabari’s History that has not survived. His biography of al-Kindi has
been copied in the British Museum manuscript of al-Kindi’s Wulat and Qudat,
pp. 4–5. For more on him, see Ibn Asakir, Dimashq, 27:11–14; Yaqut al-Hamawi,

230 Wadad al-Qadi
himself a some-time resident of Egypt, considered him to be one of the

most knowledgeable scholars about Egypt’s history, geography (thughur),
administration (amal), and ethnography (ahl), including its people’s gen-
ealogies and biographies (akhbar). He was a contemporary of the other
great historian of Egypt, Abu Said Ibn Yunus (281–347/894–958), but
neither seems to mention the other in his works.83 Al-Kindi wrote several
books, all on aspects of Egyptian history, and his books were transmitted
by his students. The titles of eight of those books have been reported.84
Only two of them have survived, his Wulat and Qudat, although we do
have some citations from his Kitab tasmiyat mawali ahl Misr,85 among
others – an interesting work from the pen of an Arab.
The most outstanding feature of al-Kindi’s working style in his two
surviving books is his discipline. Al-Kindi adheres to a strict structure
and hardly ever departs from it, so that both his books are a gift to re-
searchers. In both, a simple chronological order is followed: in the Wulat,
the successive governors of Egypt are discussed chronologically, and
in the Qudat, the judges of Egypt are discussed chronologically, too.
Further clear structuring is followed in the section on each governor/
judge. At the beginning of the section comes the exact date of the ap-
pointment, and at its end the exact date of the termination of the ap-
pointment for whatever reason; in the middle of the section hardly any in-
formation not relevant to the governor/judge being discussed is mentioned,
although one often senses that al-Kindi knows much more than he is re-
vealing. The information is presented almost always, but not quite, in the
Mujam al-udaba#, ed. Ihsan A bbas (Beirut, 1993), 4:1493–94; al-Dhababi, Siyar,
16:132–33; idem, Tarikh al-Islam, 8:203; al-Safadi, al-Wafi bi-l-wafayat, vol. 17,
ed. Dorothea Krawulski (Wiesbaden/Beirut, 1981), 30. Al-Farghani’s son, Abu
Mansur Ahmad, was a resident of Egypt and a historian also; see Yaqut al-Ha-
mawi, Mujam al-udaba#, 1:294.
83) This conclusion is based on the only available parts of the two Histories of
Ibn Yunus (of the Egyptians [al-Misriyyin] and of the non-Egyptians living in
Egypt [al-ghuraba#]) which have not survived, but a reconstruction of them from
citations in the sources has been published; see the bibliographical information in
n. 18 above.
84) See an analytical list in Guest’s introduction, 2–13.
85) This is probably the same book Guest calls Kitab al-mawali (p. 10). See,
for examples of these citations, Ibn Asakir, Dimashq, 6:370; 26:135, 136; 36:116;
37:168; al-Suyuti, Tadrib al-rawi, ed. Abd al-Wahhab A bd al-Latif (Cairo,
1966), 2:382; Ibn Makula, al-Ikmal (Hyderabad, 1962–86), 2:343. The citations in
Ibn Duqmaq’s Kitab al-intisar li-wasitat iqd al-amsar and al-Maqrizi’s Khitat are
mentioned in Guest’s introduction, 10.

form of akhbar-reports, each preceded by a chain of transmission. This

rule, however, never applies to the openings (appointment) and ends (ter-
mination) of entries; these are stated without attribution to any authority,
thereby indicating that they come from the author himself.86
The next most striking feature of al-Kindi’s work is his scrupulous-
ness and laborious pursuit of accuracy. When he provides a piece of in-
formation with a chain of transmission, and then follows it with another
piece reported by the same authorities, he repeats the chain, in the
manner of scrupulous hadith scholars, some of whom were his own teach-
ers. In style, too, his terminology in transmitting how he received his in-
formation remains within the standard “he told/informed us/me (hadda-
thana/akhbarana or haddathani/akhbarani)”. This terminology, as is well
known, gives the impression that the information was transmitted to the
author orally. In fact, most of al-Kindi’s information, as Guest has sug-
gested,87 must have come from written sources. This is why his statement
in only five reports,88 out of the hundreds he included in his books, that
the information he is reporting is copied from written sources, is eye-
catching and makes one wonder why he actually made that statement at
all. This is especially so since there is nothing particularly remarkable
about these five reports – two of them are actually rather sadly funny an-
ecdotes89 – and none of them would require the “validation” or authenti-
cation of a written source.90 Furthermore, while three of the reports claim
86) One wonders if this could have come from a tasmiya book now lost. How-
ever, in the absence of any evidence this remains in the realm of speculation.
87) See Guest’s introduction, 37–39.
88) I mean five reports other than our document. The five reports are in Wulat,
107 (riqa; in his handwriting); Qudat, 404 (kitab; in his handwriting); 439 (riqa; in
his handwriting, and kitab; in his handwriting), 443 (kitab). The first report has
been copied in Ibn Asakir, Dimashq, 61:198.
89) The first (Wulat, 107; Ibn Asakir, Dimashq, 61:198) is about a certain Musa
b. Kab who was one of the leaders of the Abbasid underground movement and was
thus punished by the Umayyad governor of Khurasan. When the Abbasids were
victorious, he was too weak physically to enjoy their favors. The second (Qudat,
439) cites verses of poetry in which the poet undermines the tribe of Taym.
A judge, who overhears him, tells him that if A#isha (who is from the Taym) had
heard him, she would have taught him some good manners. It is noteworthy that
these two reports are the ones in which the term riqa rather than kitab is used. Cf.
Guest’s introduction, 22.
90) The remaining three reports (in all of which the term kitab, not riqa, is used)
relate stories about three judges. In the first (Qudat, 404), a judge’s accusation of
misuse of orphans’ properties is retold; in the second (Qudat, 439), another judge’s

232 Wadad al-Qadi
they are cited from a notebook (kitab), two say they are cited from scraps
(riqa), and in all but one case the word bi-khattihi is added, meaning that
the text transmitted came from the writer’s hand. Clearly we have a
painstaking effort to be accurate. Why did al-Kindi take such trouble to
be super-accurate?
The most important thing to note about all five reports is that they
come in the same chain of transmission: al-Kindi–Ibn Qudayd–Yahya b.
Uthman b. Salih. It is Ibn Qudayd who says that he “copied” (intasakha)
or took his information from (an) the scraps (riqa) or notebook (kitab) of
Yahya b. Uthman b. Salih, written in his own hand (bi-khattihi). Now,
we know that al-Kindi was the student of Ibn Qudayd Abu l-Qasim Ali b.
al-Hasan b. Khalaf al-Azdi (229–312/844–925), and Ibn Qudayd was
the student of Abu Zakariyya Yahya b. Uthman b. Salih al-Sahmi
(210–82/826–96).91 As teachers/students of one another, we would expect
them to transmit information to/from each other, and in fact they do so
very profusely: according to Guest’s calculations, Ibn Qudayd was by
far al-Kindi’s most cited source – responsible for more than half the
Wulat’s reports and a third of the Qudat’s – and in half of those reports
Ibn Qudayd’s own source was Yahya b. Uthman b. Salih.92 This large
body of material must have been passed down from one transmitter to the
other in some form of class sessions. Those sessions would have included
the transmission of both oral and written information, the latter being
done with the teacher reading from his notes on scraps (riqa) or composi-
tions (kitab). It is also quite possible that a student should accidentally
happen upon scraps or notebooks by his teacher, say after the teacher’s
death, or to be shown those notes by the teacher on some special occasion.
relation to a plaintiff is told, but the story ends with nothing affecting the judge;
and the third (Qudat, 443) tells how a new judge arranged his court in the mosque.
91) See Guest’s introduction, 18, for Ibn Qudayd, and 21–22, for Yahya b.
Uthman b. Salih. For biographies not available to Guest on Ibn Qudayd, see Ibn
Makula, Ikmal, 7:190–91; al-Dhahabi, al-lbar fi khabar man ghabar (Kuwait,
1960–66), 2:153; idem, Siyar, 14:435–36; idem, Tarikh al-Islam, 7:255; Ibn al-
Imad al-Hanbali, Shadharat al-dhahab (Beirut, 1966), 2:265. On Yahya b. Uth-
man b. Salih, see Ibn Abi Hatim, al-Jarh wa-l-tadil, 9:175; Ibn Yunus, Tarikh al-
Misriyyin, 1:507–508; al-Mizzi, Tahdhib al-kamal, 31: 462–64; al-Dhahabi, Mizan
al-itidal, 4:396; idem, al-Mughni fi l-duafa#, ed. Nur al-Din Itr (n. p., n. d.),
2:740; idem, Siyar, 13:354–55; idem, Tarikh al-Islam, 6:850; Ibn Hajar, Tahdhib
al-tahdhib, 11:257.
92) See Guest’s introduction, 18. Gregor Schoeler has dealt with issues of
transmission such as these in his The Oral and Written in Early Islam, tr. Uwe
Vagelpohl, ed. James Montgomery (London, New York, 2006).

Keeping this in mind, we can imagine what must have happened in the
cases of our five reports. It is known that Yahya b. Uthman b. Salih never
authored a book, but that he transmitted information about Egypt that
no one else did.93 In what form this information was, the sources do not
say, but our al-Kindi text does: at least some of it was on scraps of paper
and some of it put together in the form of a “book” – a notebook, that is.
Did he use these materials in lecturing to his students? Very possibly; but
when he did so, he did it without showing the students the handwritten
notes from which he was reading or lecturing, since seeing these notes/
compositions was for the student Ibn Qudayd not the rule but the excep-
tion to the rule. When, where, and under what circumstances Ibn Qudayd
had access to his teacher’s handwritten notes and compositions remains
an open question. But this access actually took place at least in five cases.
And when it did, the student Ibn Qudayd had to note that down – as a
rarity, and in the interest of the simple (albeit unusual) truth.
It is easier to see what happened in the next stage. Ibn Qudayd trans-
mitted the large number of reports he got from his teacher Yahya b. Uth-
man b. Salih to his students, including al-Kindi, and al-Kindi included
these reports in his books. This would have taken place in teaching
sessions, but also possibly from reading the one book that Ibn Qudayd
authored, his Tarikh Misr,94 which was probably the book that the his-
torian Ibn Yunus saw in Ibn Qudayd’s own handwriting in al-Kindi’s
time.95 Our five reports almost certainly came from that book; they were
in a written form, and they quoted written notes. Whether al-Kindi read
those reports in that book or heard them read out by Ibn Qudayd in a
93) The historian Ibn Yunus first mentioned this fact (see his Tarikh al-Mis-
riyyin, 1:507–508). His statement was copied in most of the later sources cited in
n. 91 above.
94) See Ibn Yunus, Tarikh al-Misriyyin, 1:356–57. The editor noted (p. 357, n.
2) that Ibn Makula, in his Ikmal, 7:103, copied Ibn Yunus’ statement about Ibn
Qudayd’s book, albeit he misplaced it. The statement, however, is not in the Hyde-
rabad edition of the Ikmal.
95) See Ibn Nuqta, Takmilat al-ikmal, ed. Abd al-Qayyum A bd Rabb al-
Nabi (Mecca, 1987), 4:638 (“wa-haddatha fi kitab Ali ibn al-Hasan ibn Khalaf ibn
Qudayd bi-khattihi”); Ibn Asakir, Dimashq, 18:32 (“qara#tuhu fi kitab Ali ibn al-
Hasan ibn Khalaf ibn Qudayd bi-khattihi”); Ibn Nasir al-Din, Tawdih al-mushta-
bih, ed. Muhammad Naim al-Irqsusi (Beirut, 1986–93), 9:106 (“Qala Ibn
Yunus: ra#aytu fu kitab Ibn Qudayd an Yazid ibn Abi Habib …”). See also Ibn
Makula, Ikmal, 2:472, 3:213. Note also that Ibn Yunus was the first person to men-
tion this book in his biography of Ibn Qudayd in his Tarikh al-Misriyyin (see the
previous note).

234 Wadad al-Qadi
class session is unclear. I am inclined to believe that the latter was the
case, since in no case does al-Kindi specifically use a verb indicating
physical firsthand seeing (like ra#aytu, “I saw”; see below), but rather
uses the formulaic “he informed/told me/us”.
This was a rather long detour to show how scrupulous and precise al-
Kindi’s reporting was. It also shows that his manner of historical report-
ing was actually a continuation of the manner used by his teacher Ibn Qu-
dayd, who, in turn, had taken it from his own teacher Abu Zakariyya
Yahya b. Uthman b. Salih. The latter two being hadith scholars, they
brought to the field of history, albeit not for the first time, what was su-
premely important in the study of hadith, namely painstaking precision,
especially in terms of identifying sources. Al-Kindi may not have turned
out to be a great hadith scholar. But, as the beneficiary of a two-gener-
ation tradition in this field, he could not but introduce into his own writ-
ing methods learned from teachers in that field – hence the five special re-
ports that we have encountered in his works.
Al-Kindi might have followed in the footsteps of his teachers, but he
most certainly was not servile to them. This brings us to the identifica-
tion of another feature of his historical writing, namely his independence
and caution in his choice of sources. One sees this feature at work in his re-
porting about the agreement that was concluded during the governorship
of Abdallah b. Sad b. Abi Sarh between the Muslims and the Nubians, fol-
lowing the battles that reached Dongola in 31/651. Al-Kindi chose to
transmit his teacher Ibn Qudayd’s short (three-line), straightforward,
skeptical report about this incident. The report asserts that “there was
no pact (ahd) between the Egyptians and the blacks (al-asawid); rather,
there was only a truce (hudna), a mutual safe conduct (aman badina min
bad), whereby we give them some grain and lentils and they give us slaves
(raqiq).”96 This assertion contradicts in every respect another report
about the same incident which was reported by Abu Zakariyya Yahya b.
Uthman b. Salih, Ibn Qudayd’s teacher whom we have just encountered.
It has survived, though, not through Ibn Qudayd or al-Kindi, but
through the later historian al-Maqrizi (d. 845/1442).97 The report is quite
long (over a page), has an elaborate setting, and asserts that a written
pact (“baqt”) was actually concluded between the Muslims and the Nu-
bians: the former would give the latter annually specific amounts of
96)al-Kindi, Wulat, 12–13.

97)See al-Maqrizi, Kitab al-mawaiz wa-l-itibar bi-dhikr al-khitat wa-l-athar,
known as al-Khitat al-Maqriziyya (Bulaq, 1870), 1:200. It has been translated by
Guest in his introduction, 26–27.

grain, barley, wine, and clothes, in return for a specific number of slaves
from the latter.98 After citing the text of the pact, al-Maqrizi quotes a
transmitter who says that he took the text of the pact not from any
written book but from Abu Zakariyya (i. e. Yahya b. Uthman b. Salih),
who narrated it as he had memorized it from his own father Uthman.
This father (who is often Yahya’s source, even in al-Kindi’s works), Yahya
said, had transmitted the text in al-Fustat in the presence of Egypt’s gov-
ernor Abdallah b. Tahir in 211/826, and Ibn Tahir found his transmission
to be accurate to the letter when he compared it with the text of the ac-
tual pact found “in the archives (diwan) [kept] outside the grand mosque
of al-Fustat (bi-zahr al-masjid al-jami bi-Misr)”. Now, any historian
would be impressed by a report claiming that its piece of pride had passed
the examination of comparison with a documentary text, especially if
that report came from a well regarded and normally accurate narrator
such as Yahya b. Uthman b. Salih. But Yahya’s student, Ibn Qudayd, who
must have known this prominently situated report, chose not to transmit
it, preferring to it a report skeptical of the Islamic arrangements during
the early conquests, one coming from a unique and particularly strong
source: a great Egyptian scholar who himself was the son of a Nubian
prisoner of war, namely Yazid b. Abi Habib (53–128/672–745).99 By trans-
mitting only Ibn Qudayd’s report, al-Kindi was not blindly following his
teacher’s judgment, since, as we know from elsewhere in his books, he does
transmit different reports about one incident,100 and thus could have
transmitted the “documentary” report of Yahya b. Uthman and put it
side by side with Ibn Qudayd’s more prosaic one. His decision not to do so
thus indicates his independence in judgment and overall caution in ac-
cepting special claims of sources, including documentary status.
98) On an evaluation of this baqt and the scholarship on it, see Martin Hinds
and Hamdi Sakkout, “A Letter from the Governor of Egypt to the King of Nubia
and the Muqurra Concerning Egyptian-Nubian Relations in 141/758,” in Studia
Arabica et Islamica: Festschrift for Ihsan Abbas, ed. Wadad al-Qadi (Beirut,
1981), 209–29.
99) See al-Kindi, Wulat, 12, 13. For the biography of Yazid b. Abi Habib, see
al-Bukhari, al-Tarikh al-kabir, 8:324; Ibn Abi Hatim, al-Jarh wa-l-tadil, 9:267;
Ibn Yunus, Tarikh al-Misriyyin, 1:509; al-Mizzi, Tahdhib al-kamal, 32:102–107;
al-Dhahabi, Siyar, 6:31–33; idem, Tarikh al-Islam, 3:562–63; Ibn Hajar, Tahdhib
al-tahdhib, 11:318; al-Suyuti, Husn al-muhadara, 1:134.
100) See, for an example, his two varying reports on the accusations of misman-
agement of orphans’ funds to the judge Abd al-Rahman b. Abdallah al-Umari in

Qudat, 404. It is noteworthy that the second of those reports actually comes from
Yahya b. Uthman b. Salih and is one of his kitab … bi-khattihi reports.

236 Wadad al-Qadi
This brings us right to the heart of our assessment of al-Kindi’s

methodology and his choice on this occasion to use a documentary source
in his reporting – the document that we are examining here. Two aspects
of the report containing this document must be discussed: its chain of
transmission and al-Kindi’s introduction to it. Together they should help
us clarify who it was that actually saw the text, and what the inclusion of
the text in al-Kindi’s book means historiographically to us.
The text of the document appears, as I mentioned above, in the entry
on Abd al-Rahman b. Salim al-Jayshani, judge of Egypt in 128–33/
745–51. It is the penultimate paragraph of the entry, followed only by the
date of the termination of the judge’s tenure. Immediately preceding it is
a short report that states: “the family (ahl) of Abu Salim al-Jayshani say
that they are from the [tribe of] Maafir.”101 This report is transmitted by
al-Kindi on the authority of Muhammad b. Musa l-Hadrami, who had
taken it from Yasin [b. Abd al-Ahad al-Qitbani], who had in turn taken it
from Yahya b. Bukayr. All of these are well-known authorities in al-
Kindi’s works. Muhammad b. Musa l-Hadrami Abu Bakr (d. 312/924)
was an Egyptian hadith transmitter who had memorized so many hadiths
in Egypt that when he travelled later to Iraq, some scholars were skeptical
about his knowledge. He was al-Kindi’s older contemporary and al-Kindi
narrated six of his reports.102 Yasin b. Abd al-Ahad al-Laythi l-Qitbani
Abu l-Yumn (192–269/807–83) came from a family of Egyptian hadith
transmitters, and some of his hadith was recorded by al-Nasa#i in his
Sunan. Al-Kindi transmitted about a dozen of his reports in both the
Wulat and the Qudat, mostly on the authority of his father.103
101) al-Kindi, Qudat, 354.

102) On Muhammad b. Musa l-Hadrami, see Ibn Yunus, Tarikh al-Misriyyin,
1:462–63; Ibn Nuqta, Takmilat al-ikmal, 4:128–29; al-Dhahabi, Mizan al-itidal,
4:51; idem, al-Mughni fi l-duafa#, 2:638; idem, Tarikh al-Islam, 7:450; Ibn Nasir
al-Din, Tawdih al-mushtabih, 6:196; Ibn Hajar, Lisan al-mizan (reprint of the
Hyderabad edition, Beirut, n. d.), 5:399: See also Guest’s introduction, 19, 55.
103) On Yasin al-Laythi al-Qitbani, see Ibn Yunus, Tarikh al-Misriyyin, 1:505;
Ibn Zabr, Tarikh mawlid al-ulama# wa-wafayatihim, ed. Abdallah ibn Ahmad al-
Hamad (Riyadh, 1410/[1989]), 2:586; Ibn Makula, Ikmal, 7:160, n. 4 (on the mar-
gin of the manuscript); al-Mizzi, Tahdhib al-kamal, 31:172–73; al-Dhahabi,
al-Kashif fi marifat man lahu riwaya, ed. Muhammad A wwama and Ahmad
Muhammad Nimr al-Khatib (Jidda, 1992), 2:360; idem, Tarikh al-Islam, 6:445;
Ibn Hajar, Tahdhib al-Tahdhib, 11:190; al-Suyuti, Husn al-muhadara, 1:131.
Guest (introduction, 25) puts him among the “relators of minor importance …
that occur at the second remove”. This is not quite accurate.

As for Yahya b. Abd Allah b. Bukayr Abu Zakariyya al-Makhzumi

(154–231/771–845), he is a towering Egyptian hafiz, who transmitted
hadith from Malik. A large number of his hadiths were recorded in the
canonical books of al-Bukhari, Muslim, and Ibn Maja, and his legal
opinions were often mentioned in law books. He had also a broad knowl-
edge of history, and actually al-Kindi mentions him as a participant
in Egyptian public affairs104 in addition to citing almost two dozen of his
reports in his two books. He is the final authority for fourteen of these re-
ports, including the report with which we are dealing here.105
Immediately following Ibn Bukayr’s statement that “the family of
Abu Salim al-Jayshani say that they are from the Maafir,” al-Kindi’s text
has: “And among what I found in the archives of the Umayyads was a quit-
tance from the time of Marwan b. Muhammad, which states”, followed by
the text of our document. Al-Kindi’s editor, Rhuvon Guest, clearly
thought this sentence was a continuation of Ibn Bukayr’s report and had
it printed such that it does not signal the start of a new paragraph. In his
introduction, too, Guest indicated that he understood the introductory
sentence to be Ibn Bukayr’s, although there he was less certain.106 The
identity of the person responsible for this sentence, however, is no insig-
nificant editorial matter, for it actually decides the identity of the person
who saw and reproduced the Umayyad document we are studying here. If
Guest’s reading is correct, then it was Ibn Bukayr who saw the docu-
ment and reproduced it, as he says. If, however, the sentence were not a
continuation of Ibn Bukayr’s report, then it would be nobody else’s other
than al-Kindi’s, and the editor of the Qudat should have started a new
paragraph with it. In what follows I would like to argue that the introduc-
tory sentence of our document must have come from al-Kindi, not Ibn
Bukayr, and that on the basis of al-Kindi’s normal writing style when he
deals with his authorities and on the basis of general Arabic stylistics.
It must be stated at the outset that the distinguishing feature of the
sentence is that it starts a new topic within an entry on a particular sub-
ject: there is no relation whatsoever between the Jayshanis being from the
104) See al-Kindi, Qudat, 395, 404, 433.

105) For Ibn Bukayr, see Ibn Yunus, Tarikh al-Misriyyin, 1:507; al-Nawawi,
Tahdhib al-asma# wa-l-lughat (reprint of the Cairo edition, Beirut, n. d.), 2
[1/2]:155; al-Mizzi, Tahdhib al-kamal, 31:401–404; al-Dhahabi, Siyar, 10:612–15;
idem, Tarikh al-Islam, 5:963–64; Ibn Hajar, Tahdhib al-tahdhib, 11:190; al-Suyuti,
Husn al-muhadara, 1:162. See also Guest’s introduction, 24, 58.
106) Guest’s paragraph on this issue was cited at the very beginning of this
paper. There he uses the expression “appears to be”.

238 Wadad al-Qadi
tribe of the Maafir and between someone finding a document from the
Umayyads’ archives.107 What we should ask, then, is: what style does al-
Kindi usually use when he starts a new topic within an entry and this
topic has been reported by the same authority that had reported the pre-
vious topic? In other words, how would al-Kindi normally write, or pres-
ent, the introductory sentence of our document if it was Ibn Bukayr who
had transmitted it, just as he had transmitted the previous statement on
the Jayshanis being from the Maafir?
There are at least three passages in al-Kindi’s Wulat and Qudat, all of
which we have encountered before, in which this phenomenon occurs. In
the first (Qudat, 439), in the entry on the judge Ibn al-Munkadir (in office
212–14/827–29), al-Kindi is transmitting from Ibn Qudayd, who is report-
ing from the kitab of Yahya b. Uthman in his handwriting.108 The report
consists of short stories about the turbulent relationship of this judge
with two named people, Ibn Abi l-Mada# and Ibn Abd Rabbihi, and in the
middle of the report, Ibn al-Munkadir’s dismissal from office is men-
tioned. The text ends after five lines, and al-Kindi immediately writes
qala (“he said”) and cites a report on Ibn al-Munkadir’s habits when he
used to carry out his duties: “He used to hold court (yajlis) in the morn-
ing in the mosque, then he would go home (yaruh) and would hold court
[there] (yajlis li-l-qada#) too”. What we have here clearly is a change in the
topic. Al-Kindi indicates this change by inserting the marker “he said”.
The reason for the insertion is clear: it is to alert the reader that the
authority who had transmitted the first report (Ibn Qudayd) was the
same authority who narrated the second. When a change in the topic oc-
curs, al-Kindi wants his authorities distinctly re-identified.
In the second, more complex report (Wulat, 12–13), in the entry on
the governor Abdallah b. Sad b. Abi Sarh (in office 25–35/645–55), al-
Kindi is even clearer in re-identifying his authorities. The report al-Kindi
is transmitting here comes from Ibn Qudayd, and Ibn Qudayd is trans-
mitting, via two other people, from [Abdallah] Ibn Lahia (d. 174/680),
who narrates on the authority of Yazid b. Abi Habib. The report consists
of two lines on the agreement (not pact) between the Muslims and the Nu-
bians, following the battles at Dongola, whereby the blacks give the Mus-
lims slaves in return for grain and lentils.109 Once this report is finished,
107) In addition, the Maafir sentence is about the family of Abu Salim al-
Jayshani, and the document is not about Abu Salim but about his grandson, Abd
al-Rahman b. Salim al-Jayshani. See above, nn. 18, 19, 22.
108) See above, at n. 90.
109) See above, at nn. 96–99.

al-Kindi, wanting to start a new but related topic, identifies clearly his
authority: qala Ibn Lahia (“Ibn Lahia said”). Thereafter he states the
opinion of Ibn Lahia regarding the permissibility of buying the slaves of
the blacks and others. There is here a shift in the topic, and also a shift in
the authorities – this part of the narration is not from the same chain of
transmission that introduced the previous report, and therefore the ever-
conscious and careful al-Kindi inserts the new authority responsible for
the new topic. But the matter does not stop here. A third topic is intro-
duced on the same overarching entry of the Nubian slaves, and for this al-
Kindi enters still another identification of his authority. The new topic
here is the statement of Yazid b. Abi Habib that his own father was among
the prisoners of war of Dongola. Al-Kindi introduces this statement by
qala Ibn Lahia: wa-samitu Yazid ibn Abi Habib yaqul (“Ibn Lahia said:
I heard Yazid b. Abi Habib say”). This is truly remarkable scrupulous-
ness: after all, Ibn Lahia–Yazid b. Abi Habib were actually the last auth-
orities of the first report in this section, and thus al-Kindi did not have
to mention them again. But he did so because he had inserted the legal
opinion of Ibn Lahia on the permissibility of buying slaves and wanted
his reader to be clear that he was going back to the first chain of trans-
mitters. Clearly al-Kindi did not like to leave any room for ambiguity
where his authorities were concerned.
The third report (Wulat, 107–108), in the entry on the governor Musa
b. Kab (in office 141/758), is also one of the reports al-Kindi transmits
from Ibn Qudayd, who is copying from the riqa of Yahya b. Uthman b.
Salih;110 Yahya himself starts his report by saying: “our teachers (ashya-
khuna) told us.” The report consists of an anecdote. The Umayyad gov-
ernor of Iraq Asad b. Abdallah al-Bajali suspected that Musa b. Kab had
secret leanings towards the Musawwida (= the Abbasids) and had his
teeth broken. When the Banu Hashim (= the Abbasids) overthrew the
Umayyads, they rewarded Musa profusely. So he used to say: “We had
teeth and no bread [in the past]; when the bread came, the teeth had
gone!” At this point, when the report has come to an end, al-Kindi starts
a new one by saying: “And the Egyptian teachers mentioned” (wa-dha-
kara ashyakh Misr), clearly in order to identify the authorities from
whom he was taking the following new report, namely the text of the
letter which the caliph al-Mansur wrote to the governor Musa b. Kab
when he dismissed him from office (less than two lines). Were those ash-
yakh Misr of al-Kindi the same ashyakhuna of Yahya b. Uthman b. Salih

240 Wadad al-Qadi
mentioned at the beginning of the first report? Almost undoubtedly.111

That is, al-Kindi repeated the identification of his authorities because of
the change in the topic.
The above three examples show unmistakably how painstakingly
careful al-Kindi is to re-state who his authorities are when the topic
changes within an entry if these same authorities are responsible for the
new topic in addition to the old. This did not happen in the entry on Abd
al-Rahman b. Salim al-Jayshani, when there was a change in topic, from
the tribal affiliation of the Jayshani family to the text of an inter-office
document written in Umayyad times. This means that the authority
responsible for the tribal affiliation report (ending in Ibn Bukayr) is not
the one responsible for the second. And since the second starts with a
verb in the first person (wa-fima wajadtu, “and among what I found”),
the speaker must be al-Kindi.
The same conclusion can be reached by approaching the text from the
perspective of general Arabic stylistics. It sounds quite extraordinary
that a speaker (in this case Ibn Bukayr, according to Guest) would go
from one report to a totally different one without some indication that he
is conscious of the change and somehow confirming that it is still he who is
speaking. Next, why should we assume that Ibn Bukayr (the last author-
ity in the previous chain) is the authority for the second report? Could it
not be the last authority that did the communication (haddathana) to al-
Kindi, i. e. Muhammad b. Musa l-Hadrami? And lastly, there is the issue
of the words wa-fima (“and among”) with which the sentence starts (wa-
fima wajadtu, “and among what I found”). These words stylistically sig-
nal the beginning of something new in the text. They, however, water
down to some extent the identity of their authority since they relegate to
a third position in the sentence the verb identifying this authority – in
this case, the first person singular in wajadtu. This is why, I think, when
Ibn Hajar was copying this part of the entry on al-Jayshani, and clearly
believing that al-Kindi was the speaker, he simply dropped al-Kindi’s
first two words wa-fima (“and among”) and started what amounts to a
new paragraph beginning with wajadtu (“I found”).112 Stylistically, in
Arabic in general, this is the norm.
111) Note the use of the very unusual plural ashyakh instead of the usual
shuyukh.
112) See above, p. 203.

Conclusions
The above investigation has shown that al-Kindi’s text leaves no room
for doubt that he is the speaker in the introductory statement to his
document, and that it was he who found our document and copied its text
firsthand into the manuscript of the book he was writing on Egypt’s
judges, from an official Umayyad register – on papyrus, one assumes. Be-
cause of that, it is one of the most valuable pieces of evidence that we have
from the early period, one that must be treated exactly as one treats an
original papyrus, for the hazards of the transmission process do not seem
to have left their mark on it. Among the thousands of papyri that have
survived, it occupies a unique position since it is the only document that
has survived that I know of that shows how inter-office correspondence
was carried out in Umayyad times. It is also a unique document in that it
deals with an issue not discussed anywhere else so far as I know, namely
the possibility that employees of the government receive advances on
their salaries. It also provides unequivocal information that the judges
(and perhaps the rest of the state’s civil employees) were paid their sal-
aries in the Treasury, and that the Treasury’s bureaucrats who handled
such transactions under the Umayyads were called khuzzan, or bursars.
Its identification of the amount of the salary that a judge in Egypt re-
ceived in late Umayyad times is also extremely valuable, having a level of
authenticity higher than any other information we have on the salaries of
judges in early Islam in the sources.
But inasmuch as our document advances our knowledge of early Is-
lamic bureaucratic and historical documentation, it also, together with
its introductory sentence, raises new questions for which there are as yet
no answers. One such question is the meaning of the expression diwan
Bani Umayya, which al-Kindi uses in a peculiar way. The expression
occurs very rarely in the sources, and when it does, it means the register
containing the names of people from the clan of Umayya and their
clients, drawn for the purpose of assigning stipends to each of them.113
But this is certainly not the meaning of the term in al-Kindi’s introduc-
113) I have found two such occurrences. The first occurs in Ibn Abd al-Barr,
Kitab al-tamhid, ed. Muhammad al-Ta#ib and Said Ahmad Arab (Morocco,
1974), 4:115 (… wa-jamaa min al-ulama# kanu fi diwan Bani Umayya wa-Bani
l-Abbas fi l-ata#); the second in Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi l-tarikh (Beirut,
1965–66), 5:272, sub anno 125 (wa-akhadha Abu Muslim diwan Bani Umayya wa-
arafa minhu asma# man hadara qatl Yahya [ibn Zayd] …). The latter text is not
found in al-Tabari’s Tarikh.

242 Wadad al-Qadi
tory sentence. There it clearly means the official government registers –

including a letter from the Director of Finance to the bursars of the
Treasury in 131/749.
Another question comes from al-Kindi’s usage of the word fima
(“among”) when identifying the source in which he found our document:
the usage clearly indicates that there were other papyri/documents in the
register. This means that at least some of the public records of the
Umayyads were available in their original form in the first half of the
fourth/tenth century, almost two centuries after they were written. This
obviously is not impossible, since thousands of Umayyad Egyptian pa-
pyri have reached us, over a millennium after they were written. But the
question that we have no answer to is: what were the other registers that
al-Kindi found in diwan Bani Umayya? Al-Kindi has nothing to say on
that, and in fact our report is the only place in his two surviving books
and in the citations from his lost books where these original documents are
cited. We have a sense, of course, that the documentary aspect of a source
is not enough for al-Kindi to make him rush to record it; we have already
seen him ignore a documentarily validated report on the pact with the
Nubians from a frequent authority in his book, Yahya b. Uthman b. Salih,
in favor of a skeptical report by Ibn Qudayd, a student of this Yahya. The
case is obviously different with our document: al-Kindi saw the document
(by accident?) somewhere in al-Fustat, was convinced of its value, and
hence transcribed it. But did he choose to transcribe it only because it
was documentary? Maybe; but maybe also because he saw in it a rare kind
of letter, perhaps a “curiosity item”: inter-office correspondence within
the Umayyad administration in the capital of the province, and one deal-
ing with the payment of an advance – another rarity in the history of the
judges (and governors) of Egypt. So, were all the other documents – pa-
pyri – he found in the diwan Bani Umayya run-of-the-mill documents?
This is quite unlikely.
Still more puzzling is the observation that the document that at-
tracted his attention did not become a source of information for him, say,
for example, on the amount of the salary of Abd al-Rahman b. Salim al-
Jayshani, or about this al-Jayshani having possibly had close relations
with Egypt’s Finance Director at the time, Isa b. Abi Ata#. Such valuable
pieces of information do not enter al-Jayshani’s biography outside of the
document in al-Kindi’s Qudat. Did al-Kindi opt for brevity, finding it re-
petitive to mention separately information that can be easily gleaned
from the text of a document?
Despite all of this uncertainty, we must realize that it is quite possible
that al-Kindi did indeed use original documents as sources in his books

without explicitly saying so, and for that we do have some evidence. For
example, he used terms that have the same technical meanings as they
do in the papyri, like the word mazut, for the village head,114 or the word
tuqubbila, in the sense of “leased/contracted”.115 He also mentioned some
unique information about the settlement of the Arab tribes in Egypt and
the Umayyad administration’s successive efforts at updating its records
about them,116 in addition to its relocating 3,000 people of the tribe
of Qays in parts of Egypt following the census and land survey of
106/724–25.117 This kind of information seems closely tied to official
state records, and its records would certainly fall under the broad appel-
lation diwan Bani Umayya as used by al-Kindi. There is also another text
in al-Kindi’s Qudat which may very well have come from government rec-
ords, namely the letter of Umar II to the judge Iyad b. Ubaydallah that
was mentioned above.118 As we have seen there, its last sentence identify-
ing the date and the scribe is quite peculiar. Not only is the name of day
mentioned there (Thursday), but also the time of day is as well (sabah,
“morning”); and although it looks as if the scribe’s name is missing
(wa-k.t.b.t.), there is nothing to prevent us from reading the word not as
“was written” (wa-kutibat), which is very unusual, but rather as “I wrote”
(wa-katabtu). This reading would mean that the caliph himself wrote the
letter with his own hand – just like our Isa b. Abi Ata# in the document we
have been studying. Such an attribution with katabtu to the caliph would
be unlikely to occur in a literary source; but in a documentary one, it is
quite possible it should occur. This, in principle, is not impossible; after
all, we do know from literary sources that Umar II used sometimes to
write his letters with his own hand.119
Yet despite all of these observations, separate research would be
needed to verify whether al-Kindi derives a fair amount of his material
from documentary sources. Such research might need different methodo-
logical tools, including a detailed assessment of al-Kindi’s attitude
114) al-Kindi, Wulat, 69. It was erroneously read mawarith by Guest. Cf. CPR
XXI, 118.
115) al-Kindi, Wulat, 125. Cf. CPR XXI, 28, 119–21. See also Diem, “Philolo-
gisches zu den arabischen Aphrodito-Papyri,” 269.

116) See al-Kindi’s famous statement about the four tadwins (census of the
Arabs) that took place in Umayyad times in his Wulat, 70–71.

117) See al-Kindi, Wulat, 76–77. See also Abbott, “A New Papyrus,” 28.
119) See Ibn Abd al-Hakam, Sirat Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, 37, 45, 60, 63, 144,
170; Ibn al-Jawzi, Sirat wa-manaqib, 60.

244 Wadad al-Qadi
towards documentary materials. Our investigation here is just a first

step in what seems to be a long road towards verification. Given the valu-
able fruits it may bear, though, it is a road that is certainly well worth
traveling.
Abbreviations List of Works of Papyri
Chrest.Khoury = Raif Georges Koury, Chrestomathie de papyrologie arabe. Lei-

den, New York, Köln, 1993.
CPR III = Adolf Grohmann, Corpus Papyrorum Raineri, Archiducis Austriae.
III Series Arabica. Vienna, 1924. Pt. 1 Allgemeine Einführung in die arabi-
schen Papyri. Pt. 2 Protokolle. Pt. 3 Protokolle Tafeln.
CPR XXI = Gladys Frantz-Murphy, Corpus Papyrorum Raineri, vol. XXI,
Arabic Agricultural Leases and Tax Receipts from Egypt, 148–427 A. H./
765–1034 A. D. Vienna, 2001.
CPR XXVI = Michael H. Thung, Arabische juristische Urkunden aus der Papy-
russammlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. Leipzig, 2006.
P.Bactrian I = Nicholas Sims-Williams, Bactrian Documents from Northern Af-
ghanistan: 1. Legal and Economic Documents. Studies in the Khalili Collection
III. Oxford, 2002.
P.BeckerPAF = C. H. B ecker, “Arabische Papyri des Aphroditofundes,” Zeit-
schrift für Assyriologie 20 (1906), 68–104.
P.BeckerNPAF = C. H. B ecker, “Neue arabische Papyri des Aphroditofundes,”
Der Islam 2 (1911), 245–68.
P.Berl.Arab. = L. Abel, Ägyptische Urkunden aus den königlichen Museen zu Ber-
lin, Arabische Urkunden. Berlin, 1896.
P.Caire.Arab. = Adolf Grohmann, Arabic Papyri in the Egyptian Library. Cairo,
1934–62.
PERF = J. Karabacek, Papyrus Erzherzog Rainer. Führer durch die Ausstel-
lung. Vienna, 1894.
P.GrohmannWorld = Adolf Grohmann, From the World of Arabic Papyri. Cairo,
1952.
P.Hamb.Arab. I = Albert Dietrich, Arabische Papyri aus der Hamburger
Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek. Reprint, Nendeln, Liechtenstein, 1966.
P.Heid.Arab. I = C. H. B ecker, Papyri Schott-Reinhardt I. Heidelberg, 1906.
P.Khalili I = Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Papyri: Selected Material from the Khalili
Collection. London, 1992.
P.Khurasan = Geoffrey Khan, Arabic Documents from Early Islamic Khurasan.
Studies in the Khalili Collection V. London, 2006 [2007].
P.Lond. = H. I. B ell, Greek Papyri in the British Museum. Volume IV: The Aphro-
dito Papyri. London, 1920.
P.Marchand II = Yusuf Rag ib, La correspondence administrative et privée des
Banu al-Mu#min. Cairo, 1985 (Supplément aux Annales Islamologiques, 5).

P.Marchand V/I = Yusuf Rag ib, La Archives de trois commissionnaires. Cairo,

1996 (Supplément aux Annales Islamologiques, 16).
P.Qurra = Nabia Abbott, The Kurrah Papyri from Aphrodito in the Oriental
Institute. Chicago, 1938.
P.QuseirArab. = Li Guo, Commerce, Culture and Continuity in a Red Sea Port in
the Thirteenth Century: The Arabic Documents from Quseir. Leiden, 2004.
P.Philad.Arab. = Giorgio Levi della Vida, Arabic Papyri in the University
Museum in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania). Rome, 1982.
P.Ryl.Arab. II = G. Rex Smith and Moshallekh al-Moraekhi, The Arabic
Papyri of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. Bulletin of the
John Rylands University Library of Manchester 78 (1996).


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200 Wadad al-Qadi

For Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti

Almost a century ago, Rhuvon Guest published the two extant

1) I am grateful to Geoffrey Khan, Li Guo, and Lawrence Conrad for reading a

El Qudâh of El Kindî (Leiden, 1912); henceforth Wulat and Qudat, respectively.

Der Islam Bd. 84, S. 200–245 DOI 10.1515/ISLAM.2007.008

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While Guest’s remark shows his sensitivity to unusual sources in al-

3) Guest’s introduction to Governors, 15. The text in al-Maqrizi’s Khitat will be

document, see below, at nn. 101–112.

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The document is, in a nutshell, an order from a high-level adminis-

Examining how a text fared when it circulated in later sources gives us

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of no substantial consequence.10 He then drops the word bara#a in the

saw the document; it will be discussed below.

of Egyptian Umayyad administrative texts is written almost entirely on papyrus,

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Examining the document in terms of prosopography gives us another

12) Yani shahadatan alayhi, “meaning: as a testimony to that”.

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lections. He had pro-Alid leanings, and died in Alexandria during the

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Born to this family, it is not surprising that our Abd al-Rahman b.

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23) See Cl. Cahen, EI2, s. v. “Bayt al-Mal”.

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attributes to it a particular function: the payment of the salaries of at

25) See al-Mawardi’s al-Ahkam al-sultaniyya (Cairo, 1404/1983), 185.

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ministrative and historical literature. There, in periods much later than

military shared the same name, rizq. See below, at n. 49.

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Another term that occurs in al-Kindi’s document is the term khuzzan,

34) P.Qurra, no. 5, line 27.

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documents. But resolving this issue allows us to ascertain what a bursar

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cratic School of History?” in Heritages Omeyyades/Umayyad Legacies, ed. Antoine

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ture in my forthcoming study “The Salaries of Judges” mentioned above.

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was indeed the case, as I have shown in my study “The Salaries of

Ramadan 90 [= June–July 709]); P.Khalili I, no. 9 (two documents dated 104

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In the literary sources, the occurrence of bara#a in the technical sense as it

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remainung quittances concern various kinds of taxes.

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therefore needs to write a quittance immediately after receiving his

Form and Style

We now proceed to examine al-Kindi’s document from the perspective

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Kindi’s document: the formulaic amma bad (translated variously as:

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lier comment in P.Qurra, 52.

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