Arabic · Image to Text
Thirteen centuries of Arabic, hand by hand
Arabic has been written continuously since the seventh century, and for much of that time the alphabet withheld the very marks a modern reader depends on. Evidano treats each period on its own terms: a bare consonantal skeleton on papyrus, a Kufic page whose vowels were added a hundred years later, a Maghribi leaf where the dots follow the opposite rule, and a nineteenth-century gazette with two languages in one script.
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Early Islamic Arabic Papyri and Administrative Handsc. 640–900Transcribe seventh- to ninth-century Arabic papyri and documents: undotted rasm, fiscal formulae and Greek alongside Arabic, with checked readings.
Early Qurʾanic and Kufic Codicesc. 700–1000Transcribe hijāzī and Kufic Qurʾan folios: bare rasm, red and gold vowel points added later, verse rosettes and stretched line-ends.
Mashriqi Naskh and Related Book Handsc. 1000–1500Transcribe eastern Arabic book hands: naskh codices, ligatures and vowel signs, catchwords, colophons and margins packed with glosses.
Maghribi and Andalusi Manuscriptsc. 1000–1800Transcribe western Arabic hands from al-Andalus, Morocco and Timbuktu: fāʾ dotted below, qāf dotted above, coloured vowels and crowded margins.
Ottoman-Era Arabic Naskh and Ruqʿah Documentsc. 1600–1950Transcribe Arabic from 1600 to 1950: careful naskh copies, fast ruqʿah notes and drafts, and the first printed books, gazettes and magazines.
Transcribing Arabic across the centuries
What survives runs from tax receipts and letters written on Egyptian papyrus within a decade of the conquests, through parchment Qurʾans in ḥijāzī and Kufic, to the great manuscript libraries of Cairo, Istanbul, Fez and Timbuktu, and on to the output of the presses at Būlāq and Beirut. Legal deeds, medical and astronomical treatises, poetry, dictionaries, reading certificates, private drafts and government gazettes all sit inside the same tradition.
The script changed less in outline than in what it recorded. Early documents give the rasm and little else, so ب, ت, ث, ن and ي share one shape and the reader supplies the rest. Consonantal dots settle in over the eighth century, coloured vowel points are added to Qurʾans afterwards, and by the eleventh century naskh has become a fully marked book hand. The west went its own way, giving fāʾ a dot below and qāf a dot above, while the Ottoman centuries set a careful naskh for books beside a fast ruqʿah for everything else.
The people who work with this material include papyrologists editing documentary corpora, specialists collating early Qurʾanic codices, cataloguers describing uncatalogued Saharan and Middle Eastern collections, historians reading court registers and endowment deeds, and archives digitising runs of Arabic newspapers. All of them need a first reading that says what is on the page rather than what the text ought to say.
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