State document: ENA NS 48.23

Description

Copious jottings in Arabic script. It is not clear if there is any original document here or if they are all exercises of a chancery scribe (or a would-be chancery scribe) copying phrases from prior documents. On recto (at 90 degrees to the Judaeo-Arabic text) there are notations about registering a document: "li-yuthbat bi-dīwān al-majlis in shāʾa Allāh" and underneath "athbatū al-ḥamdu lillāh waḥdah" and next to that "li-yukhraj al-ḥāl bi-dhālik." Variants of these phrases also occur several times on verso, as well as variants of "yastawḍiḥ al-ḥāl bi-dhālik" (so-and-so should investigate/clarify the matter), giving in one place the name Abū l-Faraj ʿAbdallāh Ibn al-Maghribī and in another place the name Najīb(?) al-Dawla. Seemingly unrelatedly, there is also a draft of an opening of a letter addressed to a woman (mawlātī al-sitt al-jalīla) expressing the sender's disappointment in her (mā kān amalī fī mawlātī... hādha al-amal wa-lā hādhā...").