This paper begins by introducing the project, its aims, the roles of the different panelists, and how the team is generating and improving the quality of its data (including through the development of an isnad classifier that allows us to better distinguish meaningful alignments from meaningless lists of names detached from textual transmissions). I contextualise the Sirah by Ibn Ishaq in light of what we can now see, in general, of the different ways that texts circulated in the 7th-15th centuries CE. After an overview of statistics relating to the Sirah and its circulation, I compare it to other texts - including distant “versions” of the same titles, such as the Muwatta’ of Malik b. Anas (d. 796). I argue that, with time, texts became more fixed, but there remained two general expectations that shaped the reception of the Sirah and, in general, written tradition until the arrival of print. First, readers and authors generally expected authors to reuse past works, and seem not to have been much troubled by the scope of reuse (judging firstly by the growth of books). For authors, reusing past works freed intellectual energy. Secondly, authors and readers frequently accessed texts only through other texts. This willingness to read texts through texts helps to explain the non-survival of distinct texts, like the Sirah, from the first centuries of Islam, and also the general lack of manuscript evidence for literary works prior to the 10th or 11th centuries. For the Sirah, I trace these expectations to the orality of early writing and argue that this manner of textuality generated a cultural willingness, and at times preference, for interiorizing texts and for making them one’s own, a preference that passed on into purely written practices.