The Jebel Usays inscription (orJabal Usays, Jabal Says) is a small rock graffito dating to 528 AD, located at the site of Jabal Says, an ancient volcano in the basaltic steppe lands of southern Syria. It is written in the Paleo-Arabic script. Only two other inscriptions written in the Paleo-Arabic scripts are known from Syria: the Zabad inscription, dating to 512, and the Harran inscription dating to 567–568.[1] All three are connected to the Jafnids.[2]
The inscription states the year it was written, and that year has been read in two ways by experts. In one reading, it is read as 423, and in another, it is read as 428. The era referred to is the one established at the founding of the Roman province of Arabia Petraea at 106 AD, known as the Bostran era: hence the date either corresponds to 528 AD or 532/3 AD in the Gregorian calendar.[5]
The inscription was first published in facsimile without a photograph by Muḥammad Abū ʾl-Faraj al-ʿUshsh in 1964.[6][7] In 1971, Adolf Grohmann republished it with both a facsimile and a photograph.[7]
The Jebel Usays inscription is one of six inscriptions clearly providing the name of a Jafnid phylarch (al-malik), though two more may mention them. Three were discovered in situ, whereas the other three, including the Jebel Says inscription, were discovered in a secondary position. The Jebel Usays inscription was engraved on ashlar close to the summit of a volcano. The military installation described by the inscription is not known from the context in which it was found, but despite this, the inscription is the only material evidence for territorial control by the Jafnids.[8]
The inscription claims to be written by one 'Ruqaym son of Maarrif the Awsite' dispatched by the Jafnid leader (phylarch) Al-Harith ibn Jabalah to act as a frontier guard at Jabal Says.[5]
The Jebel Says inscription has a similar syntactic form to the Harran inscription (topic (first person singular personal pronoun) / comment; "I so-and-so, I did such-and-such"), another inscription written a few decades later also in the Paleo-Arabic script.[7]
^Grasso, Valentina A. (2023). Pre-islamic Arabia: societies, politics, cults and identities during late antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 151–152. ISBN978-1-009-25296-6.
^Fiema, Zbigniew T.; al-Jallad, Ahmad; MacDonald, Michael C.A.; Nehmé, Laila (2015). "Provincia Arabia: Nabataea, the Emergence of Arabic as a Written Language, and Graeco-Arabica". In Fisher, Greg (ed.). Arabs and empires before Islam. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 412–413. ISBN978-0-19-965452-9.
^M.C.A., MacDonald (2010). "The Old Arabic graffito at Jabal Usays: A new reading of line 1". In MacDonald, M.C.A. (ed.). The Development of Arabic as a Written Language. Archaeopress. pp. 141–143.
^ abFisher, Greg (2020). Rome, Persia, and Arabia: shaping the Middle East from Pompey to Muhammad. London New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. pp. 128, 140. ISBN978-0-415-72880-5.
^Genequand, Denis (2015). "The Archaeological Evidence for the Jafnisa and the Naṣrids". In Fisher, Greg (ed.). Arabs and empires before Islam. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. pp. 175–193. ISBN978-0-19-965452-9.
