QMI-INS-050a · 98 AH
Inscription of Khaṭṭāb ibn Ḥajar al-Ghafqī (Cnidus)
نقش خطاب بن حجر الغفقي (قندوز)
Cnidus (Knidos), south-western Turkey; Byzantine church, nave pavement
- (١) اللهم اغفر لعبد ال[...]
- (٢) رضي الله [عن] عملك يخطا[ب] (كذا)
- بن حجر ثم الغفقي
- ثم الصخري وكتبت
- كتب[ت]ي هذا غزوة [...]
- في سنة ثمان و
- [ت]سعين
(1) O God, forgive ʿAbd al-[...] (2) May God be pleased with your work, O Khaṭṭāb, son of Ḥajar, al-Ghafqī, then al-Ṣakhrī! And I wrote this inscription of mine. The expedition of [...] in the year eight and ninety.
The only dated Arabic graffito from Cnidus, on the south-western coast of Asia Minor. It is cut into the marble pavement of the nave of a Byzantine church (5th–6th century), near the choir behind the altar. The slab carries two texts. The first is a single line, an invocation for ʿAbd al-[...] left unfinished; its baseline appears to run over the second text, which is therefore the earlier. The second is a prayer that God be pleased with the work of Khaṭṭāb son of Ḥajar, who gives two tribal affiliations joined by “then” (thumma): al-Ghafqī, then al-Ṣakhrī, of the Banū Ṣakhr, who had moved from the Ḥijāz to the Balqāʾ and the coast of Palestine. He names the campaign itself — “the expedition of [...]”, ghazwah, the word also found in a graffito of the same years on Kos — though the name of the expedition is unread. The date, 98 AH (716–717 CE), places it in the caliph Sulaymān’s great campaign against Constantinople under Maslamah ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, whose fleet sailed in 98 AH; Imbert suggests that temporary Arab camps were set up from Rhodes toward Kos and Cnidus, though no trace of Arab settlement has yet been found on either site. Imbert counts it among only about thirty Arabic graffiti dated before 100 AH known when he wrote, four of them from the Aegean. Imbert describes it as finely and deeply incised, in the archaic Umayyad Kūfic of the period.
Source: Imbert, Frédéric. “Graffiti arabes de Cnide et de Kos: premières traces épigraphiques de la conquête musulmane en mer Égée.” In Constructing the Seventh Century, ed. Constantin Zuckerman, Travaux et Mémoires 17 (Paris, 2013), 731–758, at 734–736, graffito C1, photo 1, fig. 1. Earlier: V. Ruggieri, “I graffiti umayyadi a Cnidos,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 58 (1992): 549–551, at 550, no. 1; F. Özgümüş, “Knidos’taki bizans eserleri,” Sanat Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi 11 (1992): 12. The nisba is read here as al-Ghafqī; Imbert’s edition reads al-ʿAmmī.