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Abstract

This article investigates politeness strategies in eight ninth-century Arabic private letters of request from the Fayyoum, in Egypt. The large corpus of Arabic letters written on papyrus that is preserved and edited so far, forms a rich resource for those interested in pragmatics. While historical Greek and Latin (Dickey 2010, 2012, 2016b), English (Kohnen 2008; Ridealgh and Jucker 2019; Jucker 2020; Groot 2024) and Dutch (Rutten and Van der Wal 2012, 2014; Rutten 2019) have received the attention of scholars for their potential to shed light on interactional norms and politeness in historical societies, the pragmatic features of historical Arabic letters have not. This article will focus on the politeness strategies employed in eight letters by two members of the same household who lived in the Fayyoum, asking their brother for material and/or financial support. This will demonstrate that these letters, similar to general trends in the wider corpus, display a preference for the use of direct imperatives to make requests. Two important mitigating strategies were employed and can be found in the use of vocatives, and the general framing of the letter through its structure and the use of formulaic elements; these are crucial to communicate the tone of the letter and establish the relationship between the initiator and the addressee. Besides these general strategies, this article also considers how the gender of the initiator of the letters contributed to the strategies that are employed in the letters, showing that social ties and related social obligations formed an important part of the framing of the requests.

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2026-05-08
2026-06-07

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“Hurry to send it, my lord, my love”
John Benjamins ; https://doi.org/10.1075/jhp.00084.koo
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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keywords: private requests ; Arabic papyri ; gender ; politeness ; historical pragmatics

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