QMI-INS-055ab · 105–125 AH
Inscription of the Pool of Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik
نقش بركة هشام بن عبد الملك
Unrecorded
- بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
- لا إله إلا الله وحده لا شريك
- له محمد رسول الله أمر بصنعة هذ
- ه البركة عبد الله هشام أمير ال
- مؤمنين أصلحه الله على يد عمار
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 making of this pool was ordered by the servant of God Hishām, Commander of the Faithful — may God set him right — at the hands of ʿAmmār.
An inscription ordering the making of a pool (birka) in the name of the Umayyad caliph Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik. It carries no date, but because it names Hishām as Commander of the Faithful it can belong only to his caliphate, 105–125 AH (724–743 CE). The text follows the building-inscription formula of the period: basmalah, profession of faith, then “the making of this … was ordered by the servant of God Hishām, Commander of the Faithful.” It is almost word for word the opening of the foundation text of Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-Sharqī of 110 AH (QMI-INS-055o), where the object ordered is “this city” (or, on Treadwell’s reading, “this minaret”) and the work is done by “the people of Ḥimṣ, at the hands of Sulaym ibn ʿUbayd.” Here the object is a pool, and the responsible man is ʿAmmār, named by his given name alone.
Source: Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid, Dirāsāt fī tārīkh al-khaṭṭ al-ʿArabī munḏu bidāyatihi ilā nihāyat al-ʿaṣr al-Umawī (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd, 1st ed., 1972).