Namara Inscription, Lintel of Imru' al-Qays
Unknown · AD 328 (year 223 of the era of Bostra; museum record also gives AD 332)
A long slab of dark basalt, once the lintel above a tomb door, is engraved with five lines of angular letters inside a plain frame. The stone is one metre seventy-three wide and only forty-five centimetres high, and its surface has weathered so that you need to look closely to follow the lines. The script is Nabataean, the writing of the merchants of Petra, but the words it spells out are Arabic, the earliest lengthy text in that language known. Notice how some letters already join to their neighbours, a habit that would become the rule in Arabic writing.
The inscription is the epitaph of Imru' al-Qays son of 'Amr, who calls himself king of all the Arabs. It records his campaigns against the tribes of Ma'add and as far as Najran in the south, his settling of tribes in the service of Rome and Persia, and boasts that no king before him had achieved as much. It is dated to the seventh day of Kislul in the year two hundred and twenty-three of the era of Bostra, usually converted to the year three hundred and twenty-eight of our era. The king belonged to the dynasty later known as the Lakhmids, allies of Persia and at times of Rome.
The stone was found in nineteen hundred and one at al-Namara in the basalt desert of southern Syria by the French scholars René Dussaud and Frédéric Macler, and the Louvre purchased it in nineteen hundred and three. For historians of language it marks a birth: an Arab ruler choosing to be remembered in Arabic, three centuries before the Quran fixed the language in writing.
Did You Know? The text is written in Arabic but with Nabataean letters, showing the moment when the Arabs began to write their own language before the Arabic script existed.
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