QMI-INS-055q · 127 AH
Inscription of Saʿīd ibn Sālim
نقش سعيد بن سالم
Jabal al-Aqraʿ, north of al-ʿUlā, al-Madīnah region
- نزل سعيد بن سالم تحت هذه
- الصخرة يوم الأحد لثلث ليال
- بقين من جمادى الآخر سنة سبع وعشرين ومئة و
- هو متوجه للعمرة يسل ربه الجنة وحسن
- الصحابة والمنقلب
Saʿīd ibn Sālim alighted beneath this rock on Sunday, with three nights remaining of Jumādā al-Ākhir, in the year one hundred and twenty-seven, and he was on his way to the ʿUmrah. He asks his Lord for Paradise, and for good companionship and a good return.
A traveller’s note of rare precision: Saʿīd ibn Sālim records that he “alighted beneath this rock” — camped in its shade — on a Sunday, three nights before the end of Jumādā al-Ākhirah 127 AH (late March 745 CE), while on his way to perform the ʿUmrah. Few inscriptions give the weekday, the day of the month, the month and the year together, and fewer still tell us where the writer was going. His prayer asks for Paradise and for “good companionship and a good return” (ḥusn al-ṣaḥābah wa-l-munqalab), words that echo the traveller’s supplication in which God is called upon as the companion on the journey and refuge is sought from an evil return. It was written in the first months of the caliphate of Marwān ibn Muḥammad, during the turmoil of the third civil war, and comes from the same site at Jabal al-Aqraʿ, north of al-ʿUlā, as the inscription of 132 AH (no. 55p). The verb “yasʾal” is written without its hamzah seat (يسل), as in other inscriptions of the period. Compare the pilgrim’s note of Friday, 1 al-Muḥarram 110 AH, which likewise names the day of the week (QMI-INS-055af). In Dhū al-Qaʿdah of the same year a Rāfiʿ ibn Sālim cut a prayer for himself, his parents and his siblings in the same region; the two may have been brothers (QMI-INS-055qa).
Source: al-ʿAbbūdī, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad, Fuʾād ibn Ḥasan al-ʿĀmir, and Kāmil ibn ʿAlī al-Ghānim. “Nuqūsh Islāmiyyah muʾarrakhah min Jabal al-Aqraʿ shamāl muḥāfaẓat al-ʿUlā bi-minṭaqat al-Madīnah al-Munawwarah.” Majallat al-Siyāḥah wa-l-Āthār 29, no. 1 (Riyadh: King Saud University, 2017/1438 AH): 25–58, at 50, pl. 5.