QMI-INS-004 · 31 AH
Gravestone of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Khayr al-Ḥajarī
شاهد قبر عبد الرحمن بن خير الحجري
Cairo/Aswan cemeteries (findspot); Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo
- بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم هذا القبر
- لعبد الرحمن بن خير الحجري اللهم اغفر له
- وأدخله في رحمة منك وإننا معه
- استغفر له إذا قرأ هذا ا
- لكتب (الكتاب) وقل آمين وكتب هذا ا
- لكتب (الكتاب) في جمدى (جمادى) الا
- خر من سنت إحدى و
- ثلثين (ثلاثين)
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. This is the grave of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Khayr al-Ḥajarī. O God, forgive him and admit him into Your mercy. And we, together with him, ask forgiveness for him, if he reads this writing and says "āmīn." And this writing was written in the last part of Jumādā of the year one and thirty.
The oldest dated Islamic gravestone known, discovered by Ḥasan Muḥammad al-Hawārī in 1929 among a large group of inscribed marble pieces brought from Islamic cemeteries in Cairo and Aswān to the Museum of Arab Antiquities (today the Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo). The upper four lines are cut in noticeably smaller letters than the lower four, and the word "year" (sanat) is spelled with an open tāʾ — an orthographic feature inherited from pre-Islamic Nabataean script and also preserved in three places in the Qurʾanic consonantal text. The Aswān tradition continues in the gravestone of Fāṭimah bint al-Ḥasan, dated 102 AH, which opens with Q 67:1 (QMI-INS-055tb). A second Aswān gravestone, of ʿAbbāsah bint Jurayj, is dated 71 AH as written (QMI-INS-011a). The same appeal to the reader closes the text of al-Fātiḥah written by Yazīd ibn ʿAbd Allāh near al-Namāṣ in 130 AH (QMI-INS-055m).
Source: al-Hawārī, Ḥasan Muḥammad. "Aqdam Athar Islāmī." Majallat al-Hilāl 10 (August 1930): 1179–1191; El-Hawary, H. M. "The Most Ancient Islamic Monument Known Dated A.H. 31 (A.D. 652) from the Time of the Third Calif ʿUthman." Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain & Ireland 62, no. 2 (1930): 321–333.