Within the vast tradition of pre-modern Arabic literature, merchants rarely made their voices heard by authoring works of prose or poetry. Neither have they left us with many diaries or autobiographical accounts. Nonetheless, writing was for many of them part of their work routine and an indispensable tool to manage their businesses and networks. This contribution will explore a unique collection of roughly 1.600 letters exchanged between merchants based in the Egyptian port of Damietta and their partners throughout the Levant at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. These traders were of mostly Syrian origin and used Arabic which sets this corpus apart from other similar collections of letters from the period available to scholarship, such as the Armenian letters of the New Julfa trading network. The letters are meant to convey news, not only about their trade but their families and social life as well. They are also a textual vehicle for the expression of love, trust, and friendship. While a staggering amount of Arabic letters from the pre-Ottoman Levant have been discovered, edited, and researched, this corpus is the first to expand the research on Arabic epistolography into the Ottoman era. Additionally, other alternative strategies of self-narration were used by the merchants to convey their image to the public. Most importantly, literary patronage and the collection of libraries can be understood as such strategies. Some of the protagonists of this letter corpus are at the same time central figures in a vibrant but mostly overlooked translation movement at the outset of what was to become the nahḍa.