QMI-INS-004d · c. 35–61 AH
Inscription of Saʿīd ibn ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān, Ḥismā
نقش سعيد بن عثمان بن عفان، حسمى
Darb Ḥismā, north-western Arabia; same rock as no. 4b
- أنا سعيد
- بن عثمن (عثمان) بن عفان
I am Saʿīd ibn ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān.
A signature of five words on the Ḥismā road in north-western Arabia, cut on the same rock as the graffito of al-Ḥārith ibn Būlī dated “at the time of the rebellion of Egypt” ( QMI-INS-004b ). The writer gives his name with two generations of ancestors and nothing more: no prayer and no date. ʿUthmān is written ʿthmn , without the long alif , as is usual in the early Ḥijāzī hand, while ʿAffān keeps its alif . The text is reduced to the bare signature, without the prayers and dating formulae that fill the inscriptions of the later first and second centuries, and the hand is upright, plain and undotted; both features belong to the earliest stratum of Islamic rock writing, as in the signature of Saʿīd ibn al-ʿĀṣ ( QMI-INS-000d ).
The full name points to Saʿīd, son of the caliph ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān by Fāṭimah bint al-Walīd of Makhzūm. Muʿāwiyah gave him command of the conquests in Khurāsān in 56 AH; he crossed the Oxus, received the submission of Bukhārā and laid siege to Samarqand, and was recalled the following year. After Muʿāwiyah’s death he was killed in Medina, about 61 AH, by Sogdian captives he had brought back from the East (al-Ṭabarī; al-Balādhurī). If the identification holds, the text must have been cut before his death, about 61 AH; and since he led an army in 56 AH, he was a grown man by the time of his father’s death in 35 AH or soon after. The inscription is therefore placed at c. 35–61 AH. The rock itself bears texts of the same decades, those of al-Ḥārith ibn Būlī, dated by events of about 22–35 AH on the reading of their publishers. The identification rests on the name alone, but a son of ʿUthmān named Saʿīd is attested, and the three names together are rare. The Ḥismā road joined the Ḥijāz to Syria, the seat of Muʿāwiyah, and a man of his standing would have travelled it more than once.
Source: Reading by Ahmed W. Shaker, from a photograph of the rock that also bears the graffito of al-Ḥārith ibn Būlī (Darb Ḥismā). Biographical data: al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh , years 56–57 AH; al-Balādhurī, Futūḥ al-buldān .