“Hurry to send it, my lord, my love”

This article investigates politeness strategies in eight ninth-century Arabic private letters of request from the Fayyoum, in Egypt. The large corpus of Arabic letters written on papyrus that is preserved and edited so far, forms a rich resource for those interested in pragmatics. While historical Greek and Latin (Dickey 2010Dickey, Eleanor. 2010. “Forms of Address and Markers of Status”. In Egbert J. Bakker (ed.), A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language, 327–337. Chichester, UK: John Wiley. , 2012Dickey, Eleanor. 2012. “The Rules of Politeness and Latin Request Formulae”. In Philomen Probert and Andreas Willi (eds), Laws and Rules in Indo-European, 313–328. Oxford: Oxford University Press. , 2016bDickey, Eleanor. 2016b. “Politeness in Ancient Rome: Can It Help Us Evaluate Modern Politeness Theories?” Journal of Politeness Research 12 (2): 197–220. ), English (Kohnen 2008Kohnen, Thomas. 2008. “Linguistic Politeness in Anglo-Saxon England? A Study of Old English Address Terms”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 9 (1): 140–158. ; Ridealgh and Jucker 2019Ridealgh, Kim and Andreas H. Jucker. 2019. “Late Egyptian, Old English and the Re-Evaluation of Discernment Politeness in Remote Cultures”. Journal of Pragmatics 1441: 56–66. ; Jucker 2020Jucker, Andreas H. 2020. Politeness in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Groot 2024Groot, Hester E. 2024. “Developing a Standard in Lower-Class Scottish Writing: Pauper Petitions as a Source for Nineteenth-Century Lower-Class Scottish Language”. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics 10 (1): 127–155. ) and Dutch (Rutten and Van der Wal 2012Rutten, Gijsbert J. and M. Van der Wal. 2012. “Functions of Epistolary Formulae in Dutch Letters from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 13 (2): 173–201. , 2014Rutten, Gijsbert and Marijke Van der Wal. 2014. Letters as Loot: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dutch. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ; Rutten 2019Rutten, Gijsbert. 2019. Language Planning as Nation Building: Ideology, Policy and Implementation in the Netherlands, 1750–1850. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ) have received the attention of scholars for their potential to shed light on interactional norms and politeness in historical societies, the pragmatic features of historical Arabic letters have not. This article will focus on the politeness strategies employed in eight letters by two members of the same household who lived in the Fayyoum, asking their brother for material and/or financial support. This will demonstrate that these letters, similar to general trends in the wider corpus, display a preference for the use of direct imperatives to make requests. Two important mitigating strategies were employed and can be found in the use of vocatives, and the general framing of the letter through its structure and the use of formulaic elements; these are crucial to communicate the tone of the letter and establish the relationship between the initiator and the addressee. Besides these general strategies, this article also considers how the gender of the initiator of the letters contributed to the strategies that are employed in the letters, showing that social ties and related social obligations formed an important part of the framing of the requests.