Advantages and pitfalls of using material evidence as a means to identify apographs in the Arabic textual tradition: The case of the Egyptian historian al-Maqrīzī (d. 1442)

If material evidence has been used as a means to identify models and copies in the European textual tradition for some time now, it remains largely unknown to editors of Arabic texts who, when they detail their method, still give precedence to the stemmatic approach despite its par- tial inadequacy for texts in Arabic script as Witkam stressed more than 30 years ago. In the Ara- bic textual tradition, particularly in the Mamluk period (roughly Egypt and Syria between the 13th and the 16th c.), the preservation of many manuscripts in the author’s hand (holographs) is remarkable. The case of the Egyptian historian al-Maqrīzī (d. 1442) is quite exceptional given that 24 holograph volumes totalling 5,000 leaves are held in various libraries around the world. Al- Maqrīzī is known to have copied with own hand the various stages of each of his works (prepar- atory notes, drafts, fair copies), though he had recourse to a scribe in a single case at the end of his life: the production of a collection of small texts of his that also includes some of his auto- graph notes. The existence of such a large number of witnesses allows to dwell on the issue of the material evidence as a discriminatory argument for the identification of apographs. In this paper, I propose to review the various physical elements that can be invoked to select or exclude copies but also draw special attention to the pitfalls of exclusively relying on these elements.