Newly “recovered” Arabic papyri of the early Islamic period from Nessana

(Israel/Palestine)

Robert G. Hoyland (ISAW-NYU)

Posted to academia.edu on 9/9/2021

Until recently it was thought that the only Arabic texts in the papyri from Nessana, in modern
southern Israel, were eight bilingual Greek-Arabic demand-notes (P. Nessana 60-67) and one
bilingual Greek-Arabic contract (P. Nessana 56).1 The latter is dated to AH 67 (CE 687), and the
earliest of the requisition orders bears the date AH 54 (CE 674), and it is assumed that most of
the Islamic-period papyri belong to these two decades (AH 50s-60s). Informed about a discovery
of one miscatalogued Arabic-only text in 2010 by Lena Libman and Hannah Cotton, I wondered
whether there might be other texts of this type and embarked upon a search. With the help of
staff at the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Morgan Library I have since ascertained that
there are at least nine Arabic-only texts from Nessana that were either forgotten about in
Jerusalem since their excavation in 1935-36 or neglected in New York because they were
deemed too fragmentary to be worth studying.2 I list below those that I have already identified.

P. Nessana Arabic 1 (= verso of P. Nessana 77, upper text); ca 60s/680s

Letter from Bayyān ibn Qays reprimanding three junior officials, including Yazīd ibn Fā’id (who
is one of the contracting partiesin P. Nessana 56), for mistreatment of local inhabitants of
Nessana.

1 E.g. David Wasserstein, “Why Did Arabic Succeed Where Greek Failed? Language Change in the Near East after
Muhammad”, Scripta Classica Israelica 22 (2003), 260: in the Nessana corpus “there are no documents only in
Arabic; all Arabic documents exist also in Greek”, and on this basis he made an argument about the relative status
of Greek and Arabic in the early Islamic state.
2 It is widely assumed that the 196 papyri from Nessana published by Caspar Kraemer (Excavations at Nessana III,
Princeton, 1958) represent the sum total of papyri in the corpus, but actually there are thousands of fragments,
mostly in Greek, but a few in Arabic (see P. Nessana Arabic 5 and 6 below) and in Aramaic (see my “The Christian
Palestinian Aramaic Papyri of Nessana”, Eretz Israel 34, 2021, 31-36*). Recently Eline Scheerlinck of Leiden
University came to New York to record the fragments in the Morgan Library so that they might be uploaded to
papyrus.info.
P. Nessana Arabic 2 (= verso of P. Nessana 77, lower text); ca 60s/680s

Letter from Bayyān b. Qays to Yazīd b. Fāʾid concerning management of a village.

P. Nessana Arabic 3 (uncatalogued in Israel since 1936, now catalogued as P1242); late 1st/7th c.

Letter concerning a consignment of cloth (or a well? bazz/bi’r) in Nessana.

P. Nessana Arabic 4 (uncatalogued in Israel since 1936, now catalogued as P1243), late 1st/7th c.

Instruction from al-Ḥārith ibn ‘Abd, governor in Gaza, concerning the Banū Sa‘d ibn Mālik.

P. Nessana Arabic 5 (= Morgan Library Inv. 350497); late 1st/7th – early 2nd/8th c.

Fragmentary; possibly a demand-note like P. Nessana 60-67.

P. Nessana Arabic 6 (= Morgan Library Inv. 350497); early 2nd/8th c.

Fragmentary; possibly a private account.

P. Nessana Arabic 7 (Rockefeller Museum Inv. 37987); 2nd/8th c.; on marble Private

letter asking for news of addressee.

This text is actually written in ink on a piece of marble revetement; I assume that this is a draft
text written prior to transfer to papyrus, and hence why I include it in this list of papyri.

P. Nessana Arabic 8-9: two three-line fragments, nos. 13361 and 13372 in the 1936
photographs, not yet located and re-photographed.
Publication of Nessana Arabic-only texts so far:

P. Nessana Arabic 1 and 2 were first published in Robert G. Hoyland, “The Earliest Attestation
of the Dhimma of God and His Messenger and the Rediscovery of P.Nessana 77”, in B. Sadeghi
et al. (eds.), Islamic Cultures, Islamic Contexts. Essays in Honor of Professor Patricia Crone
(Leiden, 2015), 51–71.

P. Nessana Arabic 1-4 are to be published in Robert G. Hoyland, “The Arabic Papyri from Early
Islamic Nessana”, Israel Exploration Journal 71 (2021). I republished P. Nessana Arabic 1-2 in
the light of the 1936 photograph of the papyrus, which I did not know about in 2015.

P. Nessana Arabic 5-7 are to be published in Iwona Gajda et al. (eds.), Arabie, Arabies:
Mélanges en l’honneur de Christian Julien Robin (Paris, forthcoming). P. Nessana Arabic 7 is
given in an Appendix prepared with Naïm Vanthieghem.