QMI-INS-055la · 123 AH
Inscription of Khālid ibn Ghannām, Najrān
نقش خالد بن غنام، نجران
Najrān region, Saudi Arabia
- رحم الله خالد
- بن غنم (غنام) أمين و
- كتب شِهر سنة
- ثلاث وعشرين
- ومئة
May God have mercy on Khālid ibn Ghannām. Āmīn. And Shihr wrote [this], in the year three and twenty and one hundred.
A short prayer for mercy from the Najrān region, dated 123 AH, in the last years of the caliph Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik. It asks God’s mercy for Khālid and closes his name with āmīn before the record of writing. The father’s name, Ghannām, is written ghnm without the long alif , as usual in this hand. In line 3 the writer names himself, wa-kataba Shihr , “and Shihr wrote [this]”, so the text keeps apart the man prayed for and the man who cut the stone; the date gives the year alone, without a month. The hand is broad and pecked into the dark patina, with tall alif s and long joining strokes.
Najrān has yielded several early Islamic texts in this catalog: the second inscription of Yazīd ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Sulūlī, placed at about 29 AH ( QMI-INS-003b ), the two inscriptions of the brothers al-Rammāḥ and al-Mufaḍḍal ibn al-Ṣalt of 110 AH ( QMI-INS-055z , QMI-INS-055aa ), and the undated prayer for “the Muslims” ( QMI-INS-055ak ). The present text adds a dated witness from the end of the Umayyad period.
Source: Published by Mālik al-Sulaymī (Āthārī) on X (formerly Twitter), 23 May; discovered by @hamad_najran. Reading as published.