Description

A marble headstone with thirteen lines of inscriptions in Kufic script without diacritical marks inside a simple frame decorated with baseless triangles, reading: “In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful. This testifies that Abu Aisha ibn Muhammad believes that there is no God but Allah the one, who has no partner; that Muhammad peace be upon him is his bondman and messenger; that doomsday is inevitable; and that God will resurrect everyone in the graves. That was how he lived; that was how he died; and that is how he will resurrect. May God be merciful on he who wishes him mercy.” The headstone is undated. However, it may go back to the year 835 AD/220 AH according to the date of death of that same person mentioned on another headstone found by excavations in the same location.

Headstones

Islamic Egypt has a large number of headstones, either stone or marble slabs erected over the grave, which state the name of the person lying under them. Islamic Jurists (Fuqaha) do not condone building graves or caring for them or writing on them, but people have not adhered to their opinion. Hence, headstones include the "Basmala", words about the deceased, the praise and glory to Allah, extolling His Prophet, and the two "Shahadas" as well as the date of the person's demise.

The Importance of Headstones

The value of headstones across the ages lies in the fact that they shed light on the development of the Arabic script engraved on them. Arabic scripts exceed one hundred styles, however, the ones most used are the Kufic script, the Thuluth script, the Naskh script, the Farsi script and the Riq'a script.

Where headstones add value is that they allow the student of history to follow the Arabization of Islamic Egypt. In most of the headstones discovered in Aswan and Fostat pertaining to the first two centuries Hejira, it was observed that the name of the deceased person included his tribe. By the third century Hejira, however, we find the name of the tribe replaced by the name of the place or city or the province in which the deceased lived, e.g., So and So, the Egyptian. This may indicate that by the third century Hejira, the Arabs living in Egypt were not differentiated from the natives.

 

• Etienne Combe, “Inscriptions Arabes du Musée d’Alexandrie”, Bulletin de la Société Archéologique d’Alexandrie 30 (1936): 60-61, no. 5.
• Mona Serry, ed., Bibliotheca Alexandrina: Antiquities Museum, introduction by Ismail Serageldin (Alexandria: Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Antiquities Museum, 2015): 229, 330.
• مصطفى عبد الله شيحة، دراسة تاريخية وأثرية لشواهد القبور الاسلامية المحفوظة بمتحف قسم الآثار بكلية الآداب - جامعة صنعاء (القاهرة: مكتبة الجامعة، 1984).
• خالد عزب، وشيماء السايح، معدون، شواهد قبور من الإسكندرية، تقديم إسماعيل سراج الدين، وزاهي حواس، حوليات المشروعات البحثية 2 (الإسكندرية: مكتبة الإسكندرية، 2007).