PERF 558

PERF 558, recto
PERF 558, verso

PERF 558 is the oldest surviving Arabic papyrus,[1] found in Heracleopolis in Egypt, and is also the oldest dated Arabic text using the Islamic era, dating to 643.[2] It is a bilingual Arabic-Greek fragment,[3] consisting of a tax receipt,[4] or as it puts it "Document concerning the delivery of sheep to the Magarites and other people who arrived, as a down-payment of the taxes of the first indiction."[5]

After excavation, the papyrus was collected by Archduke Rainer Ferdinand of Austria, who donated it to the Austrian National Library in 1899. The museum authority put it in the Erzherzog Rainer Papyrus Collection.[2] This text was published in 1932 by Adolf Grohmann and in 2009 by Demiri and Römer.[5]

  1. ^ Jones, Alan (1998). "The Dotting Of A Script And The Dating Of An Era: The Strange Neglect Of PERF 558". Islamic Culture. LXXII (4): 95–103.
  2. ^ a b Donner, Fred M. (1984). "Some Early Arabic Inscriptions from Al-Ḥanākiyya, Saudi Arabia". Journal of Near Eastern Studies. 43 (3). University of Chicago Press: 181–208. doi:10.1086/373079. ISSN 1545-6978. JSTOR 544460. S2CID 161232698.
  3. ^ Bell, H. I. (1953). "An Arabic Chrestomathy". The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology. 39. JSTOR: 115–116. doi:10.2307/3855327. ISSN 0307-5133. JSTOR 3855327.
  4. ^ Kaplony, Andreas (2008). "What Are Those Few Dots for? Thoughts on the Orthography of the Qurra Papyri (709-710), the Khurasan Parchments (755-777) and the Inscription of the Jerusalem Dome of the Rock (692)". Arabica. 55 (1). Brill: 91–112. doi:10.1163/157005808X289331. ISSN 1570-0585. JSTOR 25162268.
  5. ^ a b Larcher 2010.