The dhimma of God and His Messenger is customarily associated with the legal status of non-Muslim subjects of the Islamic polity as a “protected people” or ahl al-dhimma. Treaties that bestow a godly dhimma upon sundry entities are preserved in the Islamic sources, frequently with the claim that the literary medium is secondary to the original form. Thus, kutub issued by the Prophet and the caliphs are related through oral/written channels as traditions that purport to be be faithful renditions of the originals. In a rare instance, namely the Jerusalem 32 inscription unearthed in 1968 and recently deciphered by Moshe Sharon (2018), the contents of a dhimma treaty were commemoratively inscribed onto a building at the Temple Mount. In other cases, documents have been “preserved” as material artifacts, although literary and paleographic criteria frequently point to the forgery of such papyri, presumably by subjects of later regimes who wished to establish an authoritative precedent for certain rights or policies. Finally, we have papyri that speak of the godly dhimma enjoyed by subjects within the context of administrative correspondence of the Umayyad era, such as the Nessana papyrus 77 dated by Robert Hoyland (2015) to the 60s AH/680s CE. I presently question how two interpretive paradigms have shaped our understanding of the √dh-m-m stem and the legal significance of dhimma in the early Islamic polity, as implemented by the Prophet Muḥammad and the early caliphs. In both cases, the interpretation and treatment of the sources is colored by a form of the genetic fallacy, an implicit or explicit privileging of a perceived “original.” On the one hand, we have the tendency of jurists and traditionists at the fountainhead of the literary movement to attempt to reconcile divergent policies of the pre- and post-conquest periods through the subversion of anomalous, pre-classical texts, a feat achieved by either exegetical maneuver or editorial change. On the other hand, we have the tendency of modern scholarship on early Islam to privilege material artifacts over purely literary materials, a phenomenon that has occasionally resulted in a formally similar—if substantially different—back-projection of the post-conquest setting onto the early Medinan period. In this paper, I will take renewed account of the problems of interpretation and provenance presented by the sources at hand and offer some concrete suggestions as to how and why the concept of dhimma was developed across the first Islamic century.