QMI-INS-009b · c. before 65 AH
Inscription of ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān, Ḥismā
نقش عبد الملك بن مروان، حسمى
Jabal Ḥismā, Tabūk region, Saudi Arabia
- أنا عبد الملك بن مرون (مروان)
I am ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān.
A single line giving the writer’s name and nothing else: “I am ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān”. The inscription was first published by the Al-Sahra Team in 2013 and republished by Frédéric Imbert in 2015. Imbert identifies the writer with the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Marwān (r. 65–86 AH), and on that reading it is the only text known so far cut by a caliph with his own hand. The text is entirely free of diacritical dots, and no other inscription stands beside it: ʿAbd al-Malik seems to have chosen a distinctive place of his own on the rock.
Al-Sahra Team. “Riḥlat ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā 1434 (2): Dhikrayāt al-tābiʿīn ʿalā ṣukhūr Ḥismā.” alsahra.org, 16 October 2013, no. 25 (photograph and first publication); Imbert, Frédéric. “Califes, princes et compagnons dans les graffiti du début de l’Islam.” Romano-Arabica 15 (2015): 59–78, esp. pp. 66–67, fig. 4.