First impressions; Arabic early printed texts

UNESCO Courier, July, 1988 by Camille Aboussouan

First impressions Arabic early printed texts

ARABIC characters made their first appearance in a printed book in 1486, when a Dominican monk named Martin Roth printed at Erhard Reuwich's workshop in Mainz the famous account of the "Voyage and Pilgrimage Overseas to the Holy Sepulchre of the Holy City of Jerusalem, written and recorded in Latin by Bernhard von Breydenbach". In this original work, the narrative is interwoven with novel descriptions of scenes from urban life. Erhard Reuwich is thought to have drawn and engraved the plates in this book, which contains the first example of a complete Arabic alphabet in a printed work, together with a Latin transliteration, a map of Jerusalem and a charming engraving showing Lebanese, dubbed Syrians, in a vineyard, and wearing magnificent turbans.

This, however, was only the reproduction of an Arabic alphabet. It was not until the reconquest of Granada several years later that the need for a printed Arabic text arose in Europe. In 1492, the last Muslim kingdom of Andalusia fell to the Spanish Catholic sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella, who had by their marriage united the two powerful kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Anxious to bring the Andalusians back to Christianity, the Spanish rulers ordered missionaries to evangelize the country again. It soon became apparent that this goal could not be attained without using the Arabic language. In 1505, Archbishop Fernando de Talavera, the first prelate appointed to the new diocese, had two Arabic textbooks printed for use by missionaries who could not speak that language. The title of the first was: Arte para ligeramente saber la lengua araviga ("The art of learning the rudiments of the Arabic language"); that of the second: Vocabulista aravigo en letra castellana ("Arab glossary in Castilian characters"). Their author, the scholar Pedro de Alcala, a native of the prestigious university city of Alcala de Henares near Madrid, wrote them in Latin script, The typeface is Gothic.

The first twenty-one pages of the Arte are given over to grammar, and the next twenty-seven consist of Catholic prayers in Arabic, instructions for confession in Spanish and in Arabic, the ordinary of the mass, and instruction for votive masses, all in Arabic. By way of introduction to the vocabulary, a short three-page note explains the author's method of transcription: the vocabulary is in alphabetical order, but under each letter three separate categories contain first verbs, then nouns and lastly adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions. The verbs are given in three forms: present, perfect and imperative; nouns are given in both the singular and the plural.

This work, which is a curiosity in the history of both linguistics and typography, is also the first and perhaps the most practical of all attempts to transcribe Arabic into Latin characters. The alphabet on the twentieth page is in north African script, and the language taught in both of Pedro de Alcala's works is the vernacular, which the Spanish missionaries needed to communicate with the converted Moors. In a few places, the author indicates differences between this and the written language.

As in Breydenbach's book, the Arabic alphabet is thus reproduced, together with its Latin pronunciation, but it is transcribed from the Maghrebian calligraphy also found in Agostino Giustiniani's magnificent Psalterium Hebraeum, Graecum, Arabicum, et Chaldaicum, the first polyglot Psalter, which was published in 1516 at Genoa (then a major printing and paper manufacturing centre) in five languages: Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Chaldean (Syriac) and Latin.

Agostino Giustiniani (1479-1536) belonged to the Genoese branch of the Giustiniani, one of the great families of northern Italy. A Dominican who became the bishop of Nebbio in Corsica, he was a learned student of Oriental languages and a friend of great humanists such as Pico della Mirandola, Erasmus and Sir Thomas More.

Giustiniani was the author of an audacious project to publish a polyglot edition of the Bible in Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Syriac and Latin, which would make known all existing versions of the Bible and enable them to be compared, while also serving as an instrument for studying these languages. He began with the Psalter, and when this was not a commercial success, the project was abandoned. Even so, it was a remarkable achievement for the time.

The preparation of this masterly work was an arduous task, as Giustiniani noted in his dedication to Pope Leo X, who had written the preface. "Our work has been long...". This can easily be imagined. At that time no matrices or fonts of Arabic type existed; the alphabets in the books of Breydenbach and Pedro de Alcala were printed from woodcuts, and there were few Hebrew typefaces. Moreover, the work had to be revised by several proof-readers with knowledge of at least three non-European languages.

It seems that Giustiniani had already ordered and transcribed the texts to be published as early as 1506. It is more than likely that the design and casting of the characters had been done long before the publication of the Psalter, which thus pushes back even further the creation of the first printed text in movable Arabic type.