The inscription of Zuhayr, the oldest Islamic inscription (24 AH/AD 644–645), the rise of the Arabic script and the nature of the early Islamic state1

Abstract

This article provides an edition, translation and analysis of an inscription dated 24 AH (644 AD) discovered recently in north‐west Saudi Arabia. It is an immensely important find, since it is our earliest dated Arabic inscription; it apparently contains a reference to the caliph ‘Umar I and shows evidence of a fully‐fledged system of diacritical marks. The latter aspect is of great significance for our understanding of the development of the Arabic script and of the writing down of Arabic texts, especially the Qur’an. The text is compared with others composed in the decades shortly before and after the rise of Islam.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 50 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.