Resumen de People and Paper in Ninth- to Eleventh-Century Egypt

Nelly Hanna

• Medieval Egypt is at the heart of two major collections. First, the Papyrus archive which contains about 350,000 to 400,000 mul- tilingual written texts dating from Pharaonic times to the medieval period, around 50,000 of which are in Arabic. The papyrus collec- tion also includes numerous deeds written on paper, since the switch from papyrus to paper took place around the ninth to tenth century. After that date, only paper was used. Second, the Geniza archive of the Jewish community of Fustat, consisting of about 350,000 to 400,000 papers dating roughly from the seventh to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, mostly in Judeo-Arabic and Arabic. Together, they total more than 750,000 papers covering a timespan of about a millennium1 and reveal a continuum from late antique writings in Demotic or Greek to deeds in Arabic after the Arab conquest of Egypt in 642