Abstract
The article examines the background of the emergence of printing in Arabic script in the Arab world in the context of its development in Western Europe and attempts of its introduction in the Ottoman Empire. The Arabic-speaking Christians of the Ottoman Empire, especially the Orthodox, who, unlike other denominations, had no support in the outside world were the most interested in the possibility of printing books in Arabic letters for their needs. The implementation of this idea became possible in the early 18th century, due to the fruitful cooperation between the hierarch of the Church of Antioch Athanasios III Dabbas, the prince of Wallachia Constantin Brâncoveanu, and the outstanding printer of Georgian origin Antim the Iberian. The introduction of Arabic printing in Wallachia made it possible to continue this work in Ottoman Syria, where Athanasios III Dabbas printed in 1706 the first book in Arabic script in the Arab world. The paper presents a description of the first two Greek-Arabic prints published in Wallachia – the Liturgikon (1701) and the Horologion (1702), copies of which are kept at the Library of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest. In order to identify the linguistic features of the Arabic liturgical texts in the Liturgikon, they were compared with a manuscript version of this book dated 1612. It was concluded that the Wallachian Liturgikon actually reproduced the texts revised by the Metropolitan of Aleppo Meletios Karma (1612–1634) with minor structural, lexical, and grammatical differences. In the printed book there is a noticeable tendency to replace the Greek vocabulary with Arabic equivalents. The reader is offered a Ukrainian translation from Arabic of the prefaces and printer’s notes included in the first book printed for the Orthodox Arabs – the Liturgikon that appeared in 1701 in the Snagov monastery near Bucharest. These texts are the main source of information on the circumstances of the beginning of Arabic printing for the Orthodox Christians.
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