QMI-INS-002a · c. 24 AH
Inscription of al-Ḥārith ibn Būlī: “the Time the Commander of the Faithful Was Killed”
نقش الحارث بن بولي: زمن قُتل أمير المؤمنين
Outskirts of Medina
- انا الحـ[ا]ـرث ا
- بن بولي غلـ[ا]ـم ابن
- سبع [سباع؟] وكتبت هذا
- الكتب زمن قتل
- امير المؤمنين
I am al-Ḥārith i- bn Būlī, the young man (ghulām) of Ibn Sibāʿ, and I wrote this writing at the time of the killing of the Commander of the Faithful.
The second graffito of al-Ḥārith ibn Būlī, found on the outskirts of Medina by Muḥammad al-Mughadhdhawī. It names him in full (al-Ḥārith ibn Būlī) and confirms that the writer of the Ḥismā texts was a man of Medina ( QMI-INS-000a , QMI-INS-004b ).
He dates it “at the time of the killing of the Commander of the Faithful” without naming the caliph. The Desert Team take this to be ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, stabbed at the end of Dhū l-Ḥijjah 23 AH, because al-Ḥārith still calls himself a ghulām here, as in the Abū Masʿūd text, whereas by 35 AH he is a mawlā . ʿUthmān, killed in 35 AH, is the other caliph who was killed in this period, so the identification rests on that argument. The same event dates the inscription of Zuhayr ( QMI-INS-001 ), “at the time ʿUmar died, the year four and twenty”; compare also the curse on ʿUthmān’s killers in QMI-INS-004a .
The spelling al-kitāb without alif ( al-ktb ) and the dropped alif in al-Ḥārith and ghulām are normal in Ḥijāzī texts of the period.
Source: Desert Team (Farīq al-Ṣaḥrāʾ), “al-Taʾrīkh bi-l-ḥawādith fī al-nuqūsh al-islāmiyyah al-mubakkirah”, alsahra.org, 4 May 2018. Reading and dating by ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Saʿīd. Discovered by Muḥammad al-Mughadhdhawī.