Shamela: A Large-Scale Historical Arabic Corpus
Table 1: Average date and total number of texts for example genres.
['Genre', 'Date (H/CE)', 'Texts']
The texts are almost exclusively in formal Arabic, due to the religious focus, with a small number of contemporary texts showing colloquial elements. They are dated based on the author’s date of death (DOD), with the earliest text dated to 41/661 Hijri/CE. As literacy has become more widespread, popular religious writing has become a major genre. Thus there is an interaction of date and genre, though overall the genres of the corpus are relatively similar in their religious focus — i.e. there are few of the modern secular texts that one finds in corpora based on media.