The various stages of the postulated shift in Arabic literary culture from memory to written record, that is, from the predominantly oral-aural to the increasingly writerly, were complicated and sometimes imperceptible. There is no specific point in time that can meaningfully be isolated or identified as the moment when such a transition takes place. Even at the high point of oral usage of Arabic – pre-Quranic Arabia, i.e. before c. 17/640 – writing and texts were certainly already present.1 Although writing was not unknown in that period, it was principally the privilege of Jewish and Christian scholars and of those individuals in contact with the Greek-and Persian-influenced Ghassa¯nid and Lakhmid courts, notably the Lakhmid capital of al-H ˙ ı¯rah. Indeed, scribes who wrote in Arabic already began to be employed in the Sasanian period, as a sixth-century CE inscription attests.2
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