Letter: BL OR 10656.16

Description

Letter from Barakāt b. Manṣūr, unknown location, to Eliyyahu the Judge, in Fustat. In Arabic script, with the address on verso written once in Arabic script and twice in Judaeo-Arabic. The Arabic hand is reminiscent of a chancery hand. Fragment (top part of recto). The address reads, "to Fustat, the Market of the Perfumers, to the judge Eliyyahu b. Zekhariya known as Ibn al-Rayyis al-Iskandarānī (of Alexandria) from his slave Barakāt." Eliyyahu served at the beginning of the 13th century (dated documents in Fustat range from 1222–36; his dated documents including those from Alexandria range from 1204–41.) For this judge, see also T-S AS 151.153 (a letter apparently from his wife) and the cluster of letters from Manṣūr b. Sālim (incl. T-S 10J16.14 addressed to Eliyyahu himself) about a runaway son (an internal Jewish affair, not the kind of thing about which one would approach the state, even if you knew how to write like a chancery official), and also Motzkin's dissertation on him and his family. The sender's full name in the tarjama is difficult to read; he is probably identical with the sender/scribe of ENA NS I.1.