QMI-INS-000d · Before 59 AH
Inscription of Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ
نقش سعيد بن العاص
Northern Arabia (site unpublished)
- أنا سعيد بن العص (العاص) ربي اله (الله)
I am Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ. My Lord is God.
A signature of five words: the writer gives his name and declares rabbī Allāh , “my Lord is God”. The Desert Team identify him as Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ ibn Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ ibn Umayyah, the Qurashī who was a boy when the Prophet died, was among the men ʿUthmān charged with writing out the copies of the Qurʾan, governed Kufa under ʿUthmān and Medina under Muʿāwiyah, and died in 57 or 59 AH. If the identification holds, this is the hand of a man the sources place at the copying of the muṣḥaf , and the text must have been cut before his death. Nothing in it gives a date, so the year shown here is only that upper limit.
The divine name is written with a single lām , ālh (اله) for Allāh . The catalog already has this spelling in the two texts of Yazīd ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Sulūlī, one of them dated Jumādā 29 AH, where ʿAbd Allāh is written ʿbd ālh and Allāhumma is written ālhm ( QMI-INS-003 , QMI-INS-003b ), and again in the prayer of ʿAbdallāh ibn Dīrām dated Muḥarram 46 AH, which writes li-ʿAbd ālh ( QMI-INS-007 ). It is found in papyri of the same years as well: the bilingual Greek–Arabic receipt PERF 558, written at Heracleopolis in Jumādā I 22 AH (April 643 CE) and kept in the Austrian National Library in Vienna, writes the divine name with a single lām . The Desert Team suggest that Qurashī scribes accepted the one- lām spelling until about the middle of the first century, and that the doubled lām of the ʿUthmānic copies followed Medinan practice. The name of the father is also written without its long ā , al-ʿṣ (العص), as long ā is often left out in Ḥijāzī texts of the period.
The words are spread over the rock in short broken lines, a layout common in early graffiti; the Desert Team give it as anā / Saʿīd ibn a- / rabbī ālh / -l-ʿṣ , with a crack in the stone under the alif of the father’s name. A man who called himself a client of this Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ prayed for forgiveness at Medina in 110 AH, half a century after the patron’s death ( QMI-INS-055ag ).
Source: al-Saʿīd, ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. “Riḥlat naqsh Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ, al-juzʾ al-awwal.” Farīq al-Ṣaḥrāʾ (alsahra.org), 7 April 2026. Photograph by the Desert Team (Aḥmad al-Dāmigh and Ziyād al-Saʿīd). Reading as supplied for the catalog.