Papyrus
Not on view
This papyrus provides rare historical documentation of the early years of Islamic rule in Egypt. Transitions can be slow, and the concerns of everyday people during turbulent times were often mundane. The letter concerns a donation offered by a monk named Moses to the Monastery of Saint Paul the Anchorite. The bulk of Moses’s letter is written in Coptic, the vernacular language of much of the Egyptian population in late antiquity. The text also opens with an invocation to God in Greek and Arabic, and names the governor of Egypt at that time, Abd al-Aziz, in Arabic.
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