Legal document: ENA 2558.30c

Description

Legal query addressed to Avraham Maimonides. In Judaeo-Arabic. Concerning a group of people who share an underground(?) storage room of wheat in a single courtyard; some have stored less, some have stored more. One of them lives in the same house. Then, a government representative "attacked" the majority of the houses in the city, demanding the harvest stores "for the strengthening of the lands." (There is a tricky phrase at the beginning of this section: this representative appears to be called בליל, which could be Bulayl and a diminutive of Bilāl; it is faintly possible that בליל חמס refers to "the one sodden with discord/oppression"; it is also possible that there is a pun or code for בעל המס, tax collector, and the querier did not wish to put that phrase in the document.) It seems that the one who lived in the house handed over some of the wheat, and now there is a legal question about how the losses should be distributed.