P.12: Letter from an Anonymous Writer

This fragment has two different sets of imprints in mirrored script, both written in Hebrew; the one in the bigger script on the bottom of the recto is a letter. The original letter is not contained in the Bodleian collections, but an impression of it in mirror script has been preserved in this fragment. Both writer and addressee are unknown, but it is possible that it was sent to Moses b. Judah. The content is unclear, but it seems it was concerned with commercial affairs. The Hebrew of the writer is simple, and his spelling non-standard. He switches between ע and א (see ll. 3,4, 7), and in at least one example he writes שלו instead of שלא (l. 8). The confusion between ע and א suggests that the writer is not of local origin and that Arabic is not his mother tongue, as this distinction would have been fairly evident for a native speaker of Arabic. In the top part of the page there are few lines in different, also in Hebrew. These lines are very blurry, and it is extremely difficult to decipher them, but we can read the name אברה]ם[ (Abraham) among the words.