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).
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.