QMI-INS-055l · 123 AH
Inscription of ʿAnjar
نقش عنجر
ʿAnjar, Biqāʿ valley, Lebanon
- ترحم الله على القاسم بن هلال المج[...]
- ورضي عنه وعافاه من شر يوم ا
- لحساب وصلى الله على عامة ا
- لمسلمين وأدخلهم جنات ا
- لنعيم وكتب في رجب سنة ثلاث
- وعشرين ومائة
May God have mercy upon al-Qāsim ibn Hilāl al-Muj[...] and be pleased with him, and keep him from the evil of the Day of Reckoning. And may God bless the generality of the Muslims and bring them into the Gardens of Bliss. And [this] was written in Rajab of the year one hundred and twenty-three.
An inscription from ʿAnjar, the Umayyad palace-city in the Biqāʿ valley of Lebanon begun under al-Walīd ibn ʿAbd al-Malik. It is dated Rajab 123 AH (May 741 CE), in the caliphate of Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik, and shows the town still in use under the later Umayyads. After a prayer for mercy for al-Qāsim ibn Hilāl, whose nisbah is only partly preserved, the writer widens his prayer to “the generality of the Muslims” and asks that they enter the Gardens of Bliss (jannāt al-naʿīm, a Qurʾanic phrase) — a communal prayer like that for the people of Taymāʾ (no. 55e). The writer carries words over the line end four times (ā-/l-ḥisāb, ā-/l-muslimīn, ā-/l-naʿīm). A prayer for al-Yamān, grandson of al-Walīd, the builder of ʿAnjar, was cut on a Ḥijāzī route, probably in the early second century AH (QMI-INS-055aj). An undated early prayer from Najrān also names the community as “the Muslims” (QMI-INS-055ak).
Source: Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid, Dirāsāt fī tārīkh al-khaṭṭ al-ʿArabī munḏu bidāyatihi ilā nihāyat al-ʿaṣr al-Umawī (Beirut: Dār al-Kitāb al-Jadīd, 1st ed., 1972). Reading and facsimile drawing as published there.