Discovery of a vast corpus of Berber <i>arraten</i> documents

We report the discovery of a vast corpus of indigenous legal contracts ('arraten') in the Morocco Atlas Mountains. The documents comprise about 400 years of written records. A collection of this magnitude has never before been reported, and such documents have not as of yet been systematically amassed for examination, preservation and study. The amount of documents discovered by us, and remaining in situ, is likely to exceed 5000 items. This is in addition to our own private collection which is in excess of 4000 pieces. We estimate that the entire body of documents written on wood in the Anti-Atlas Mountains is likely to be no less than 100,000 pieces and may very well exceed 500,000. In addition to this, between 40,000 and 150,000 paper documents likely exist. Here we report our preliminary studies of those manuscripts. Our collection is available to anyone and donation to suitable institutions will be considered.