QMI-INS-055aj · c. 100–132 AH
Inscription of al-Yamān ibn Ṣadaqah, Grandson of the Caliph al-Walīd
نقش اليمان بن صدقة بن الوليد بن عبد الملك
Northern Ḥijāz, on a travel route (site unpublished)
- اللهم اغفر لليمان
- بن صدقة بن الوليد بن عبد
- الملك ومواليه : الحجاج
- وداود وسعيد ومن
- انتسب الى غير الوليد [.؟.] بالوم
O God, forgive al-Yamān ibn Ṣadaqah ibn al-Walīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malik and his clients: al-Ḥajjāj, Dāwūd and Saʿīd, and whoever is attached, other than to al-Walīd, […] bi-l-wm (?)
A prayer for a young member of the Umayyad house: al-Yamān, son of Ṣadaqah, son of the caliph al-Walīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 86–96 AH), cut on one of the travel routes of the northern Ḥijāz. Ṣadaqah is listed among the sons of al-Walīd born to concubines ( umm walad ). The prayer does not stop at the prince. It names three of his clients ( mawālī ), al-Ḥajjāj, Dāwūd and Saʿīd, so that the stone records a small Umayyad household on the road, the patron and the men who travelled with him.
The last line is not clear. It begins wa-man intasaba ilā ghayr al-Walīd and ends, after a damaged word, with the word bi-l-wm (بالوم), whose sense is not yet established. It is most likely a continuation of the prayer, extending it beyond the three named clients to those attached to al-Walīd’s house, so that the text asks forgiveness for the prince, his own clients and the wider circle of the house’s dependants.
The text carries no date, and the date given here is a broad estimate from the writer’s generation. His grandfather al-Walīd was born about 54 AH and died in 96 AH, so al-Walīd’s sons, Ṣadaqah among them, were born in the last decades of the first century, and a grandson travelling with his own clients is unlikely to be much earlier than about 100 AH. Two of al-Yamān’s uncles, Yazīd III and Ibrāhīm, sons of al-Walīd, held the caliphate in 126–127 AH. The prayer is placed before the fall of the dynasty in 132 AH, as a text of the Umayyad house written while that house still held power; a later date cannot be ruled out, since some of al-Walīd’s descendants survived it. The first publication reports that al-Yamān was among the Umayyads killed by ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAlī at Nahr Abī Fuṭrus, near al-Ramlah, in 132 AH, when some seventy to eighty members of the house were put to death after being offered safe conduct (al-Ṭabarī, Tārīkh VII, 443; Khalīfah ibn Khayyāṭ, Tārīkh , 404; Ibn Ḥabīb, al-Muḥabbar , 485). His name has not been found in the lists of the dead consulted for this entry, so the report is not used here to fix the date. The prayer is set beside the late Umayyad texts of the catalog, among them the inscription of ʿAnjar of 123 AH, the town built in his grandfather’s reign ( QMI-INS-055l ), and another prayer for a member of the house of Marwān at Khirbat Nitil ( QMI-INS-055ai ).
Source: al-Saʿīd, ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. “Nuqūsh wa-ḥikāyāt: aʿlām min al-ʿaṣr al-umawī wa-l-ʿabbāsī.” Farīq al-Ṣaḥrāʾ (alsahra.org), 18 July 2020, image 6. Photographs by the Desert Team (Aḥmad al-Dāmigh, Saʿd al-Sulaymān al-Saʿīd, Sāmī al-ʿAbd al-Muḥsin, Aḥmad ibn Ghānim al-Ayda). Reading as published.