The situation was to change in the first half of the 7th century, a pivotal period in the Arabization of Egypt, when the relationship between Greek and Arabic was reversed in favor of the latter, which would irreversibly triumph in the Abbasid era.
For the first three decades of the seventh century, we have a collection of papyri that is exceptional in terms of its volume and the information it provides on language use in the Umayyad period: the archives of Basilios, dioecete (= pagarch) of Aphroditô. While these archives bear witness to continuities with the previous situation, they also reveal a number of novelties, principally the use of Arabic for letters (and not just entagia) sent by the governor to the pagarch. These archives have yielded around forty governor's letters in Arabic, compared with more than twice that number in Greek. Since H. I. Bell (1910), it seemed to be taken for granted that each Arabic letter from the governor was accompanied by a Greek version on a separate sheet, and that both versions were sent together to the pagarch. Such a procedure, however, is astonishing. Moreover, the mixture of languages within each letter is striking (the Greek ones contain Arabic in the form of a minute in the upper margin, and the Arabic ones contain Greek in the form of a note of receipt on the reverse), making them linguistically complex objects, just as the system of bilingual double dispatch seems complex or unusually complicated. The most serious objection to the bilingual double mailing theory is that we have only one preserved pair of letters that Bell considered certain. Examination of the two texts has shown us that they were indeed sent together. But the possibility that the letters were not always sent in pairs, and that they were sometimes sent in Arabic, sometimes - more often - in Greek, seemed to us to be worth serious consideration. It implies that pagarchic offices like that of Basileios were able to handle letters written in Arabic, which the papyri confirm by alluding to the presence of "Arab secretaries".
A comparative study of the two letters has above all highlighted the great differences in tone and phraseology between the Greek and Arabic versions. The latter is rather dry and factual, content to be injunctive, whereas the former is comminatory and moralizing in a more prolix style. These strong discrepancies show that the governor's chancellery abandoned the translation system in force for entagia: accounting precision explains why, in these, the Arabic and Greek versions were concordant. Letters, on the other hand, are not limited to their accounting content, but also have a psychological dimension, expressed through a whole relational rhetoric that strengthens the bond between the State and its agents, and corrects any incidents that might alter or distend this relationship.
