  Arabic is a widely-spoken language with a rich and long history spanning more
than fourteen centuries. Yet existing Arabic corpora largely focus on the
modern period or lack sufficient diachronic information. We develop a
large-scale, historical corpus of Arabic of about 1 billion words from diverse
periods of time. We clean this corpus, process it with a morphological
analyzer, and enhance it by detecting parallel passages and automatically
dating undated texts. We demonstrate its utility with selected case-studies in
which we show its application to the digital humanities.
