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.
The two other caliphal texts in this catalog use the same title: “the servant of God ʿAbd al-Malik” at ʿAqabat Fīq ( QMI-INS-014a ) and “the servant of God Muʿāwiyah” at Ṭāʾif ( QMI-INS-009 ); Hishām’s market at Baysān ( QMI-INS-093 ) is a further public work of his reign. The closing prayer aṣlaḥahu Allāh (“may God set him right”) is a common blessing on the ruler in Umayyad texts. The words are split across the line ends twice ( hādhi-/hi and al-/muʾminīn ). Nothing about where the pool stood, or where the stone is now, is recorded in the material available to the catalog, so the site is left open.
The same reign and the same circle: a tax letter written for Hishām’s son, the emir Muʿāwiya, in the province of Qinnasrīn, found at Andarīn ( QMI-INS-055ac ).
Another text naming Hishām as ruler, this time recording an award of a meadow at al-ʿUlā to a man named ʿAwsajah: QMI-INS-055ad .
His daughter Umm Salamah left a travelling prayer naming him as Commander of the Faithful ( QMI-INS-055ae ).
The triangular mīm of this text is compared with that of the inscription of Salamah ( QMI-INS-000c ).
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).