QMI-INS-055sa · 105 AH
Inscription of Thawābah ibn ʿUthmān al-Ṣarmī, Wādī Salma
نقش ثوابة بن عثمان الصرمي، وادي سلمى
Wādī Salma, about 30 km north-east of al-Ṣafāwī, north-eastern Jordan
- اللهم غافر الذنب
- وقابل التوبة شديد العقاب
- ذو الطول لا إله إلا أنت اغفر
- لثوابه بن عثمان الصرمي ذنبه
- ما تقدم منه وما تأخر
- واجعل الجنة مآبه والمؤمنين
- أصحابه إنك أنت السميع العليم
- غفر الله لمن قرأ
- هذا الكتاب ثم
- قال آمين رب العالمين
- وكتب يوم الجمعة
- في جمادى الآخر
- سنة خمسة
- ومايه
O God, Forgiver of sin and Accepter of repentance, severe in punishment, Possessor of bounty, there is no god but You: forgive Thawābah ibn ʿUthmān al-Ṣarmī his sin, what is past of it and what is to come, and make Paradise his place of return, and the believers his companions. You are the All-Hearing, the All-Knowing. May God forgive whoever reads this writing, then says: Āmīn, Lord of the Worlds. And he wrote [this] on Friday, in Jumādā al-Ākhirah, the year five and one hundred.
A prayer of fourteen lines cut on basalt at Wādī Salma, in the desert of north-eastern Jordan, about 30 km north-east of al-Ṣafāwī. The valley lay on the route of caravans and pilgrims making for Wādī al-Sirḥān and Arabia, and Khaled al-Jbour recorded hundreds of Arabic inscriptions there, many beside small open-air mosques and cairns. This one is dated to a Friday in Jumādā al-Ākhirah of 105 AH (November–December 723 CE), in the last months of the caliph Yazīd II, and is among the longest dated prayers of its decade.
Source: Al-Jbour, Khaled Suleman. “Arabic Inscriptions from Wādī Salma.” Studies in the History and Archaeology of Jordan 7 (2001): 673–679, inscription no. 2, p. 674, fig. 2 (facsimile reproduced here). See also Lindstedt, “Early Muslim identity through epigraphy and theory,” Appendix, no. 61.