“Hurry to send it, my lord, my love”

Abstract This article investigates politeness strategies in eight ninth-century Arabic private letters of request from the Fayyoum, in Egypt. The large corpus of Arabic letters written on papyrus that is preserved and edited so far, forms a rich resource for those interested in pragmatics. While historical Greek and Latin ( Dickey 2010 , 2012 , 2016b ), English ( Kohnen 2008 ; Ridealgh and Jucker 2019 ; Jucker 2020 ; Groot 2024 ) and Dutch ( Rutten and Van der Wal 2012 , 2014 ; Rutten 2019 ) hav