QMI-INS-055al · c. 105–125 AH
Inscription of Bayt Jibrīn: Prayer for Hilāl and the Lord of the House
نقش بيت جبرين: دعاء لهلال ولرب هذا المنزل
Bayt Jibrīn, Palestine, in a cave house
- اللهم اغفر لهلل (لهلال) ولرب هذا المنزل
- ولي [؟] ولمن قرأ هذا الكتب (الكتاب) ثم قال آمين ثم آمين رب العالمين
- ابن ربعية الخثعمية
O God, forgive Hilāl and the lord of this dwelling, and … (?), and whoever reads this writing and then says āmīn, then āmīn, Lord of the Worlds. Ibn Rabʿiyyah al-Khathʿamiyyah.
A prayer cut into the plastered wall of one of the cave houses of Bayt Jibrīn, the ancient Eleutheropolis, in the hills west of Hebron. It asks forgiveness for Hilāl, for “the lord of this dwelling” ( rabb hādhā al-manzil ), that is, the owner of the house, and for anyone who reads the writing and says āmīn . The writer signs at the end as Ibn Rabʿiyyah al-Khathʿamiyyah. The feminine nisbah appears to belong to the woman named, so that he is known by his mother, a woman of Khathʿam. Two words are written without the long alif , hll for Hilāl and al-ktb for al-kitāb , as often in early texts.
Most of the prayers in this catalog were cut on rocks along roads; this one was written inside a house, and it remembers the owner of the place alongside the writer’s companion. The appeal to the reader to say āmīn has a near neighbour in the Negev, in the text of Ward ibn Sālim of 119 AH ( QMI-INS-055ka ). The tribe is also met before: ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿĀbid al-Khathʿamī, who calls himself one “of the people of Palestine”, left his name at Ḥismā in 100 AH ( QMI-INS-055j ). The two texts together point to men and women of Khathʿam settled in the district of Filasṭīn in the Umayyad period.
The text carries no date, and it is placed here by its script. The clearest witness is the word hādhā , written twice. Its initial hāʾ is a large triangle divided by an inner diagonal stroke, followed by a long, low dhāl along the line. The same form stands in hādh- and in the name Hishām in the inscription of the Pool of Hishām, which names the caliph and so belongs to his reign, 105–125 AH ( QMI-INS-055ab ). In that text, as here, the inner stroke is given only to the hāʾ that opens a word, while the final and isolated hāʾ stays a small closed triangle. On this ground the inscription is placed in the reign of Hishām, c. 105–125 AH; the comparison rests on letter forms and remains open to revision.
Source: Published on Twitter (X) by Taysīr Khalaf, 8 June 2022, with the caption Naqsh maḥfūr fī aḥad al-manāzil al-kahfiyyah fī Bayt Jibrīn, Filasṭīn (“An inscription carved in one of the cave houses of Bayt Jibrīn, Palestine”). Reading by Ahmed W. Shaker. We have not found the inscription published in the scholarly literature.