Opening Formula and Witness Clauses in Arabic Legal Documents from the Early Islamic Period

Abstract

Arabic legal documents from early Islamic Egypt are attested in Arabic papyrus collections. These exhibit a formulaic structure that is clearly distinct from those of the Byzantine Greek tradition of legal documents, which continued to be written in the first Islamic century. The Islamic Arabic documents reflect a legal formulaic tradition that had its origins in the Ḥ ijāz of Arabia. This article examines the background of this Ḥ ijāzī tradition, with particular focus on the opening formula and the witness clauses. Parallel features are identified in Ancient South Arabian legal texts and in texts of legal nature from Northern Arabia. clearly in the case of a few bilingual Arabic-Greek documents from the first century A.H. that are of a legal nature. 4 The Arabic versions of these bilingual documents exhibit, in particular, two of the distinctive features of the early Arabic documentary tradition that differ from the Byzantine Greek tradition, viz., the initial identificatory component and the witness formula. The well-known bilingual document PERF 558 (P.Vindob. G. 39726) (Grohmann 1952: 113-15), which is dated in the year 22h [643], is a receipt for the provision of sheep issued by the Arab commander ʿAbdullāh ibn Jābir. The Arabic document opens, after the basmala, as follows: ‫هذا‬ ‫ما‬ ‫اخذ‬ ‫عبد‬ ‫اله‬ ‫ابن‬ ‫جبر‬ ‫واصحبه‬ ‫من‬ ‫الجزر‬ ‫من‬ ‫اهناس‬ This is what ʿAbdallāh ibn Jābir and his companions have taken with regard to sheep for slaughter from Ahnās 5 The Greek version, by contrast, opens with an epistolary address formula characteristic of cheirographa: Ἀβδέλλας ἀμιρᾶς ὑμῖν Χριστοφόρῳ (καὶ) Θεοδωρακίῳ παγάρχ(οις) Ἡρακλέ(ους) The commander ʿAbdallāh, to you, Christophoros and Theodorakios, pagarchs of Herakleopolis The Arabic text in the bilingual receipt PERF 585 (P.Vindob. G. 39744) (Stoetzer and Worp 1983) dated 75h [694f.] opens, after the basmala, with the identificatory noun barāʾa "quittance