QMI-INS-055af · 110 AH
Inscription of Rāghim ibn Mukhlid: “Returning from the Pilgrimage”
نقش راغم بن مخلد: مقبل من الحج
Ḥismā, north-western Arabia
- مر راغمـ [زاعمـ؟] ابن مخلد الفر..قدي؟
- الجمعة مستهل المحرم سنة
- عشرة و مئة مقبل من الحج
Rāghim [or Zāʿim?] ibn Mukhlid al-Far…qadī (?) passed by, on Friday, the first of al-Muḥarram of the year ten and one hundred, returning from the pilgrimage.
A traveller’s note dated to the day: the writer records that he “passed by” ( marra ) on Friday, the first of al-Muḥarram 110 AH (16 April 728 CE), in the caliphate of Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, “returning from the pilgrimage” ( muqbil min al-ḥajj ). The Ḥajj of 109 AH had ended some three weeks earlier, so the text catches a pilgrim on his way home along the Ḥismā road towards Syria. The hand is uneven and the words are scattered rather than set on clear lines, and the writer’s name and nisba remain uncertain in the published reading: the first name may be Rāghim or Zāʿim, and the nisba is only partly legible.
One point about the date deserves notice. The Desert Team first read the year as “ten and one hundred”, and then offered a rearranged layout of the words that reads “the year one hundred”. The weekday helps here. By the tabular Hijri calendar, 1 al-Muḥarram 110 fell on a Friday, while 1 al-Muḥarram 100 fell on a Wednesday. Since months in practice began with the sighting of the new moon, a difference of a day is possible, but not of two, so the weekday given on the stone agrees with the reading 110 and not with 100.
Very few texts in this catalog name the day of the week. The closest parallel is Saʿīd ibn Sālim’s note of 127 AH, which also gives a Sunday, a day of the month and the purpose of the journey, the ʿUmrah ( QMI-INS-055q ). Other texts tie themselves to the pilgrimage in different ways: Sahm and Mukhlid ibn Abī Mukhlid ask for their ḥajj to be accepted ( QMI-INS-029 , QMI-INS-038 ), and Muḥammad ibn Abī Ṭaybah dates his text by the pilgrimage of the caliph Sulaymān ( QMI-INS-045 ). A month after this text, in Ṣafar 110, ʿAbdallāh ibn Muslim left a dated profession of faith in the same region ( QMI-INS-055aaa ).
Source: Desert Team (فريق الصحراء), “Nuqūsh wa-ḥikāyāt min zaman al-ṣaḥābah wa-l-tābiʿīn”, alsahra.org, June 2025, no. 28. Reading by ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Saʿīd. Weekday computed by the tabular Hijri calendar for this catalog.