Arabs and Muslims in Greek papyri from the Vienna collection

In the year 639 an Arab army led by the commander Amr ibn al-As entered Egypt and over the next couple of years took control of the whole country. From this time Egypt shared the fate of the other southern and eastern areas of the Mediterranean world and became part of the newly established Arab empire. However, the transition to the new political, social, religious and cultural system, took place over a much longer period. For a long time Christianity remained the religion of the great majority of the population, and Greek-Coptic culture in the broadest sense continued to be the prevailing one. Greek, and especially in certain fields Coptic, continued to be the written languages long after the conquest. From the first one and a half centuries of Arab rule a large quantity of Greek texts on papyrus have been preserved. These texts are mostly documents of public administration, such as letters, orders and communications, administrative and tax accounts, lists, etc. The Austrian National Library contains one of the richest collections of Greek texts from the early Arab period, but these late papyri, falling outside traditional academic specialisations, remain to a large extent unpublished. Nevertheless, these documents are historically extremely important: being the only contemporary and direct testimonies from the time of the great Arab expansion, they are fundamental for our understanding of the transformation of the eastern and southern parts of the ancient/Christian world into Islamic/Arab areas. Among the numerous texts from this period still unpublished in the Vienna papyrus collection, more than 200 have been identified mentioning people with Arabic names or titles, for a total of more than 800 people. The project aims to prepare a volume with complete editions (transcription, translation, commentary and historical framing) of ca. 60 of these documents, and put the remaining ones in the online catalog of the collection, with images and descriptions. The publication of these documents will drastically increase the source basis for the study of the interaction between Arabs and Christians in the 7 th-8th-century Egypt, including the integration of Arabs in the life and activities of the indigenous population, and the conversion of part of the Egyptian population to the new religion and culture. More generally, by making these important material accessible for historical research, the project intends to contribute to a better and more thorough understanding of this epoch-making historical phase and its long-lasting consequences.