QMI-INS-055ae · 105–125 AH
Inscription of Umm Salamah bint Hishām
نقش أم سلمة بنت هشام
Desert route, north-western Arabia (exact site not named in the publication)
- اللهم اصحب أم
- سلمة ابنت هشام
- أمير المؤمنين صحبة
- دائمة … سهل؟ … الله …
O God, accompany Umm Salama, daughter of Hishām, Commander of the Faithful, with a companionship lasting … (uncertain) … God …
A short prayer by a woman who names herself by her father: Umm Salamah, daughter of Hishām, Commander of the Faithful. It asks God to accompany her with a lasting companionship ( ṣuḥbah dāʾimah ), a travelling prayer of the kind cut along the desert routes. The last line is badly eroded and is read only in part. The word “daughter” is spelled ibnat , with a final tāʾ , an archaic spelling. The text carries no date. Because it names Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik as Commander of the Faithful it belongs to his caliphate, 105–125 AH (724–743 CE).
The Desert Team, who published it, suggest that the writer is Umm Salamah, daughter of the caliph, and that she carved it on the pilgrimage road in 124 or 125 AH, after the Ḥajj of 124 AH led by her husband and cousin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn al-Ḥajjāj (an account in Ibn Kathīr, citing al-Ṭabarī). That identification and date are an inference from the sources, not from the stone. The carving is shallow; the team connect this with a female hand. The text is a rare surviving woman’s inscription from the caliphal family; compare QMI-INS-011 , the text of ʿĀʾishah at Umm al-Quṭayn.
Hishām is named in this catalog as the servant of God in his building texts ( QMI-INS-055o , QMI-INS-055ab ), as the awarder of a meadow ( QMI-INS-055ad ), at Baysān ( QMI-INS-093 ) and as the father of the emir Muʿāwiya in the Andarīn tax letter ( QMI-INS-055ac ); here he appears as the father of the writer.
Source: Desert Team (Farīq al-Ṣaḥrāʾ), “Nuqūsh nisāʾiyyah ʿalā ṭuruq al-qawāfil”, alsahra.org, 5 September 2016 (updated). Reading by Muḥammad Shafīq al-Bayṭār.