QMI-INS-055ai · c. 100 AH
Inscription of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn al-Ḥārith ibn al-Ḥakam, Khirbat Nitil
نقش عبد العزيز بن الحارث بن الحكم، خربة نتل
Khirbat Nitil, about 14 km south-east of Mādabā, Jordan
- اللهم اغفر لعبد
- العز[ي]ز بن الحرث بن ا
- لحكم ما تقدم من ذ
- نبه وما تأخر وعر
- ف بينه وبين ذريته
- في مستقر من ر
- حمتك وا[قـ]ـمه (؟) على
- حوض محمد ....
O God, forgive ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn al-Ḥārith ibn al- Ḥakam what has gone before of his sins and what has come after, and bring together him and his descendants in an abode of Your mercy, and set him (?) at the Basin of Muḥammad …
A prayer cut on a concave sandstone block built into the west wall of a barrel-vaulted room at Khirbat Nitil, about 14 km south-east of Mādabā, in the Balqāʾ. Alois Musil found it on 12 July 1896 and published it in 1908 with a squeeze and the photograph shown here. The stone is well preserved except for its lower left corner, where the ends of lines 7 and 8 have broken away. The text asks forgiveness for ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn al-Ḥārith ibn al-Ḥakam “for what has gone before of his sins and what has come after”, the wording of Q 48:2 used in other texts of the catalog from 64 to 110 AH ( QMI-INS-010 , QMI-INS-040 , QMI-INS-055ag ).
The prayer then turns to the hereafter. Wa-ʿarrif baynahu wa-bayna dhurriyyatihi fī mustaqarrin min raḥmatika , “bring him and his descendants together in an abode of Your mercy”, has a parallel in a prayer quoted by al-Ṭabarī, wa-ʿarrafa (Allāh) baynanā wa-baynaka fī jannatihi , which Karabacek pointed out to Musil. The last lines ask that he be brought to the Basin ( ḥawḍ ) of Muḥammad, from which, in the eschatology of the ḥadīth, the believers drink on the Day of Judgement; a ḥadīth in al-Tirmidhī describes the Basin as stretching “from ʿAdan to ʿAmmān al-Balqāʾ”, the district in which this stone stands. This is the only text in the catalog that names the Basin. The verb before it is damaged. Musil first proposed wa-afriṭhu , which van Berchem accepted and Goldziher did not; his second proposal, wa-aqimhu ʿalā , “set him at”, was preferred by Nöldeke and Becker. The trace that survives after the alif has a rounded head, which Musil took for qāf or fāʾ ; a wāw would look the same, and a reading wa-awridhu , “bring him down to”, the verb used of the Basin in the ḥadīth, is worth testing against a better image.
No date survives on the stone. Musil offered only a guess at the man: al-Masʿūdī lists ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz ibn al-Ḥārith ibn al-Ḥakam ibn Abī al-ʿĀṣ, a nephew of Marwān ibn al-Ḥakam, among the secretaries of Sulaymān ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (96–99 AH), and the Umayyads held estates in the Balqāʾ where Sulaymān used to stay. Musil added that the letter forms point to the first half of the eighth century CE. The long prayer for the hereafter also sits best with the texts of about 100–120 AH in this catalog rather than the short signatures of the first decades; the earliest prayer here that turns to the Prophet in this way is that of Bakr ibn Abī Bakrah, 80 AH ( QMI-INS-023 ). The date given here, about 100 AH, is therefore an estimate. The year 100 AH found in later lists is the same estimate, not a reading of the stone. A prayer for a grandson of the caliph al-Walīd and his clients, of the early second century AH, is also in the catalog ( QMI-INS-055aj ).
Source: Musil, Alois. “Zwei arabische Inschriften aus Arabia Petraea.” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 22 (1908): 81–85, figs. 1–2. Also Grohmann, Adolf. Arabische Paläographie II: Das Schriftwesen. Die Lapidarschrift . Vienna, 1971, pl. XV; Gruendler, Beatrice. The Development of the Arabic Scripts . Atlanta, 1993, p. 21.