The Arabic Papyrology Database

1. Pecularities of the Arabic Writing System
The Arabic writing system in general and the writing conventions in papyri in particular require special display formats. As in most Afro-Asiatic writing systems, short vowels are not represented by letters, but there exist vocalisation marks (harakāt), written above or below the letters . Further, one-letter-words and the article are written together with the following word and the clitical pronouns are attached to the preceding word. In transliteration these words are separated by a hyphen. Finally, 15 letters (al-ḥurūf al-muʿjamah) are distinguished by diacritical pointing from letters with the same basic form 1. However, these dots are only occasionally found in early Arabic documents. Most modern editions of early and classical Arabic texts do not account for these pecularities of the Arabic writing system and normalize the texts according to modern orthographical rules without using vowel-signs. While this established practice may be appropriate for literary texts, a more elaborate procedure is needed for documentary texts.

2. The Data
There are two main groups of premodern Arabic documents: Inscriptions and papyri in the broder sense. The second group consists of about 150‘000 documents written on different material such as papyrus, parchment or paper during the period from the 7th to the 16th centuries, of which about 2‘500 have been edited 2. Another 10‘000 unpublished documents are described or mentioned in papyrological publications. All these documents provide information on almost every aspect of Islamic history. Despite their importance, they still do not receive a high level of attention in historical research 3.

3. Methodology
Two leading ideas were at the beginning of the Arabic Papyrology Database (APD) [www.ori.uzh.ch/apd]: On one hand it should be a research tool which makes metadata and full texts of all edited documents easily accessible, and on the other it should overcome the limitations of printed editions. As already mentioned, modern editions present the texts in a normalized form according to modern Arabic orthography. Some high quality edition describe the diacritical pointing and vocalisation marks in the critical apparatus, and a limited number of editions provide word indices in transliteration.

For the APD a entirely new approach of organizing Arabic text was developed. Instead of the single text level approach used in print and in other database projects, the APD presents texts in five levels. This approach is unprecedented in the entire field of Arabic studies. On the the first level only diacritical dots found in the document are written and all observations of gaps, deleted texts and redundant words are indicated by sigla and brackets [orientw.uzh.ch:8080/apd/requisits3c.jsp]. On the second level these marks are removed and the text is broken into single words. On the third level missing diacritical dots are added, as it is common in text editions. On the fourth level vowel marks are added in providing a full phonological representation. On the fifth level the text is latinised with segmentation of the elements written together in Arabic script [orientw.uzh.ch:8080/apd/requisits2.jsp]. Further, each element of the fifth level is connected to a lexicon and a list of grammatical forms. The levels of text are hierarchically organized, and variant readings and remarks are attached to their appropriate level. Search is not only possible along each level, but othogonal searchs across levels for the corresponding or neighbouring word in another level can be carried out as well.

4. State of the Project
The APD was initiated by Andreas Kaplony and Johannes Thomann at Zurich University in 2004. Today it is a joint project of the Universities of Zurich, Munich (LMU) and Vienna. The APD was online and freely accessible from its beginning. A PhD project by one of its collaborators was based on the APD 4, and another research project would have been impossible without the advanced search capabilities across text levels in the APD 5. At present, 1563 full text documents are available, and during the next two years the remaining edited documents will be entered into the APD. There are mutual references in the APD and the Trismegistos database, and soon texts of the APD will be imported by the Papyrus Navigator, made possible by the XML export engine of the APD in EpiDoc format.

References
1. Gacek, A. (2009). Arabic Manuscripts: A Vademecum for Readers. Leiden: Brill.

2. Sijpesteijn, P. M. (2005). Checklist of Arabic Papyri. Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists. 42: 127–166. Updated version (last accessed 1 November 2013): www.aoi.uzh.ch/islamwissenschaft/forschung/isap/isapchecklist.html

3. Sijpesteijn, P. M. (2009). Arabic Papyri and Islamic Egypt. The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology. Oxford: University Press, pp. 452–472.

4. Grob, E. M. (2010). Documentary Arabic Private and Business Letters on Papyrus: Form and Function, Content and Context. Berlin: de Gruyter.

5. Kaplony, A. (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): 91–112.