QMI-INS-000c · 23 AH
Inscription of Salamah
نقش سلمة
North-west of Yanbuʿ al-Nakhl, Saudi Arabia
- كتب سلمة
- بثلاث وعشرين
Salamah wrote [this] in three and twenty.
A signature and a date and nothing more: the writer gives his name, Salamah, with no father, tribe or prayer, and dates the text to [the year] twenty-three. If the date is to the Hijrah, it falls in 23 AH (643–644 CE), the last year of ʿUmar’s caliphate, a year before the inscription of Zuhayr ( QMI-INS-001 ). The Saudi Heritage Commission counts it among the earliest dated Islamic rock inscriptions.
The text was first read kataba Salamah thalāth wa-ʿishrīn . The new photograph shows a bāʾ before the number, so the reading given here is kataba Salamah bi-thalāth wa-ʿishrīn , “Salamah wrote in three and twenty”.
One feature of the dating formula should be noted. The date is introduced by the preposition bi- directly, without the word sanah (“year”). The other dated texts of the first decades in this catalog name the year: Zuhayr, “the year four and twenty” ( QMI-INS-001 ); Yazīd al-Sulūlī, “of the year nine and twenty” ( QMI-INS-003 ); Shurayḥ, “of the year three and forty” ( QMI-INS-006 ). Later texts do the same and write out the hundred, as at ʿAnjar, “of the year three and twenty and one hundred” ( QMI-INS-055l ). The short form here is unusual.
The letter forms are also worth noting. The mīm of Salamah is drawn as a pointed triangle standing on a long horizontal baseline. In the other dated inscriptions of the first decades in this catalog the mīm is a small rounded loop, as in the texts of al-Ḥārith ibn Būlī ( QMI-INS-000a , QMI-INS-002a ), of al-Sulūlī ( QMI-INS-003 , QMI-INS-003b ) and of Shurayḥ ( QMI-INS-006 ). A triangular mīm of this kind appears in the facsimile of the Pool of Hishām ( QMI-INS-055ab ), in amara and ʿAmmār . The long, evenly spaced horizontal strokes are also closer to the later formal hand than to the compact Ḥijāzī of the 20s AH.
These are observations, not a conclusion. The formula without sanah and the triangular mīm are unusual for a text of 23 AH; on the other hand, the bare name-and-date form is that of the earliest graffiti, and no hundred is written. The date is given here as it reads on the stone.
Source: Saudi Heritage Commission (photograph). Earlier reading kataba Salamah thalāth wa-ʿishrīn as published in announcements of the Commission’s list of the earliest dated inscriptions (e.g. CNN Arabic, 11 June 2022). Revised reading as supplied for the catalog. First published in Kawatoko, M. “Archaeological Survey of Najran and Madinah 2002.” Atlal: The Journal of Saudi Arabian Archaeology 18 (2005), pp. 51–52, pl. 8.13(A), as a graffito from Muthallath near Yanbuʿ, translated “Salmah wrote / in three and twenty”. See also Hoyland, Robert G. “New Documentary Texts and the Early Islamic State.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 69.3 (2006), p. 411, n. 76.