QMI-INS-014a · 73 AH
Road Inscription of ʿAbd al-Malik at ʿAqabat Fīq
نقش تسهيل عقبة فيق (عبد الملك)
ʿAqabat Fīq, Golan, above the Lake Tiberias
- بسم الله [الرحمن]
- الرحيم لا إله إلا
- الله وحده لا شريك
- له محمد رسول الله أمر
- بتسهيل هذه العقبة عبد
- الله عبد الملك أمير المؤ
- منين وعملت على يدي يحيى بن
- الحكم في المحرم من سنة ثلث
- وسبعين تقبله الله منه آمين
In the name of God, [the Most Gracious], the Most Merciful. There is no god but God alone; He has no partner; Muḥammad is the messenger of God. The servant of God ʿAbd al-Malik, Commander of the Faith- ful, ordered the levelling of this mountain pass, and it was made at the hands of Yaḥyā ibn al-Ḥakam, in Muḥarram of the year seventy- three. May God accept it from him. Amen.
The oldest known Islamic inscription commemorating the building of a road. It records that the caliph ʿAbd al-Malik ordered the “levelling” (tashīl) of this pass — the steep ascent of Fīq, by which the road from the Lake Tiberias climbed to the Golan on the way to Damascus — and that the work was carried out under Yaḥyā ibn al-Ḥakam, brother of the caliph Marwān I and so ʿAbd al-Malik’s uncle, in Muḥarram 73 AH (May–June 692 CE). It belongs to the same years as the Dome of the Rock (72 AH, nos. 12–14) and to the same programme: alongside the milestones of ʿAbd al-Malik on the roads to Jerusalem, it shows the caliph opening the communications of Syria and Palestine while the second civil war was ending, and it opens, as his official texts do, with the profession of the oneness of God and the mission of Muḥammad. After the dome, it is the second-longest inscription of ʿAbd al-Malik’s reign. The closing prayer, “may God accept it from him”, presents the public work itself as a pious deed.
Source: Sharon, Moshe. “An Arabic Inscription from the Time of the Caliph ʿAbd al-Malik.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 29, no. 2 (1966): 367–372.