• Ориенталистика
• 2023 год
• Vol 6, № 5

Dating is one of the most important stages of working with a document, along with its deciphering. When working with Arabic documents on papyrus and paper, we do not have information about their provenance, or whether they were part of an archive. Their often poor preservation does not increase a researcher’s chances of dating the document at least within a century as well. Conditionally dividing the dating mechanisms into “external” and “internal,” we can argue that prosopography provides the most accurate data about when the document was written, the formulas and structure of documents may indicate a certain historical period, paleographic analysis provides the least accurate data. Based on paleographic data, documents on papyrus are tentatively dated to the 3rd/9th century, and documents on paper - to the period from the 4^th/10^th to the 7^th/13^th centuries.

• Arabic papyrology
• paleography
• history of the Middle East

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