QMI-INS-055r · 109 AH
Inscription of Sulaymān ibn Maḥmūd
نقش سليمان بن محمود
Danqūr al-Khaznah, Petra, southern Jordan
- [الل]هم اغفر لسليمن (لسليمان) بن محمود
- ذنبه وكتب في شهر ربيع الاخر (الآخر)
- [س]ن[ت] (سنة) تسع وماية
[O God], forgive Sulaymān ibn Maḥmūd his sin. And he wrote [this] in the month of Rabīʿ al-Ākhir, [in the] year one hundred and nine.
A prayer for forgiveness dated Rabīʿ al-Ākhir 109 AH (July–August 727 CE), in the caliphate of Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik. Sulaymān ibn Maḥmūd, a man otherwise unknown, asks God to forgive his sin and records the month and year in which he wrote. It is one of seven early Islamic inscriptions recorded by Zeyad al-Salameen in 2005 at Danqūr al-Khaznah, an ancient quarrying area at the northern edge of al-Madras, south-east of the Treasury (al-Khaznah) in Petra, and it is the earliest dated Islamic inscription yet known from Petra; two others at the same spot are dated 173 and 193 AH. The three lines are cut neatly in a plain Kūfic without diacritical dots, and the broken right edge of the stone has taken some of the opening letters. The name Sulaymān is written without its medial alif (سليمن), as is usual in inscriptions of the period, and the final yāʾ of “fī” takes a form that recalls Nabataean. It was cut in the same year as the inscription of Wādī Shīreh (no. 55f), further south in the Ḥismā, some five months before it.
Source: al-Salameen, Zeyad. “Early Islamic Inscriptions from Danqūr al-Khaznah at Petra.” Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy 21 (2010): 71–79, at 73–74, figs 3–4.