P.Cair.Arab III 167: A Discussion of the Akhmīm Declaration
Multilingual documents usually are of special historical interest. Their value for the study of the linguistic situation—multilingualism, linguistic inference and the process of arabicisation—in early Islamic Egypt has recently been considered in a number of studies.1 P.Cair.Arab iii 167, a trilingual declaration, written in Coptic, Greek and Arabic, is an exceptionally rich example of such documents. In the present paper, I shall bemainly concernedwith its administrative contents and what it reveals about how the new Arab administration reacted to complaints presented against certain irregularities committed in connection with the tax collection in Akhmīm and its surrounding area. Early Arab rule tended to be practical and keen to avoid any interruption in the smooth running of the administration. It was therefore consistent with the framework of their polity to allow—for at least a century—the perpetuation of two earlier practices: the Byzantine taxation system, and the use of the Greek and Coptic languages in local administration.With regard to taxation, Ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥakam states that “ʿAmr agreed to levy the same amount of taxes as the Rūm (i.e. Byzantines).”2 Consequently, the new Arab administration in Egypt had to deal with the same causes of discontent that had troubled the Romans and the Byzantines before them. Although fiscal pressure had often caused Egypt’s tax-payers to rise in revolt already in the pre-Islamic period, the end of the first/seventh and first half of the second/eighth centuries especially saw tension rising, with more conflicts
The multilingual experience in Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the Abbasids
Introduction / Arietta Papaconstantinou -- Linguistic identity in Graeco-Roman Egypt : evidence for a multilingual society : documents and archives / Sofia Torallas Tovar -- Bilingual papyrological archives / Willy Clarysse -- Coptic or Greek? bilingualism in the papyri / Sarah J.Clackson ; edited by Arietta Papaconstantinou -- Multilingual archives and documents in post-conquest Egypt / Petra Sijpesteijn -- Case studies in language use in a multilingual society. What's in a sign? translating filiation in the demotic magical papyri / Jacco Dieleman -- Early Coptic epistolography / Malcolm Choat -- Toujours honneur au grec? A propos d'un papyrus greco-copte de la region thebaine / Anne Boudhors -- Language choice in the Qurra archive / Sebastian Richter -- Aristophanes son of Johannes: an eighth-century bilingual scribe? A study of graphic bilingualism / Jennifer Cromwell.
Linguistic Contacts Between Arabic and Other Languages
L'A. examine differents cas d'emprunts lexicaux de la langue arabe quand la communaute arabophone est en contact avec d'autres langues a travers le monde, comme c'est le cas en Afrique, en Iran, en Turquie et en Asie du sud-est. Il propose une typologie de ces emprunts en fonction du niveau d'integration de l'emprunt et du type de mot emprunte. Il tente d'eclairer l'influence que ces emprunts peuvent avoir sur la culture arabe