While examining the manuscripts of the Bibliotheca Vaticana I suddenly found a pocket-size quire (Vat. Ar. 366), containing a collection of very cutting erotic songs, written in the Arabic alphabet and in a dialect which seemed Syrian as hypothesized by Levi Della Vida in his Elenco. The most original dialectological aspect of this quire was its fully vocalised idiom.
Nowhere in this manuscript any Author’s name or literary genre, date or place of provenance are mentioned.
Facing such a manuscript, the main questions an Arabist does ask himself is: why had the Author fully vocalised such vulgar and vernacular songs? Why is its calligraphy so elegant and well decorated? Where is he from?
