What Are Those Few Dots For? Thoughts on the Orthography of the Qurra Papyri (709-710), the Khurasan Parchments (755-777) and the Inscription of the Jerusalem Dome of the Rock (692)

Three of the oldest corpora extant in the tradition of Arabic scribe culture -- the official letters of Qurra, the Khurasan parchments, & the mosaic inscription inside the Jerusalem Dome of the Rock -- are analyzed to determine the purpose & function of diacritic dots & dotted characters in writing. It is observed that while dots are used now widely to facilitate readers' reception of the text, ancient scribes used dots sparingly & reluctantly. In the three corpora investigated here, the same word occurs with & without dots between one out of seven & one out of ten times; dots cooccurring with affixes, particles, nouns, verbs, & non-Arabic names & terms & misplaced dots are identified in the corpus. The spare use of dots made writing quick, & reading the exclusive business of professional scribes. An outsider had no chance of deciphering an undotted word unless had advanced knowledge what its meaning was. Ancient scribes used dots to mark affixes & grammatical categories & focused their spare use of dots on a small choice of individual words, mostly prepositions, a few frequently used verbs & nouns, & some occasionally used foreign terms. Appendixes. Z. Dubiel