In 2017, a team of Jordanian epigraphists discovered a remarkable inscription in the vicinity of Qasr Burqu’, a Roman/Umayyad fort in northeastern Jordan. The four-word text was carved in an archaic form of the Arabic script, not immediately comparable to any known inscription so far. Accompanied by a cross, the inscription reads:  “May God be mindful of Yazīd the king”.. Drawing on the disciplines of archaeology, epigraphy, history, and linguistics,  I will make the argument that this Yazīd is most likely Yazīd son of Muʿāwiyah, the second Umayyad Caliph, and that the text is composed in an early variety of Christian Arabic, related to the Arabic inscriptions of the 6^th c. CE. As such, this short text has huge implications for our understanding of the development of the Arabic script and writing traditions as well as the relationship between Christian Arabs and the Umayyad state.

Ahmad Al-Jallad specializes in the early history of Arabic and North Arabian. He has done research on Arabic from the pre-Islamic period based on documentary sources, the Graeco-Arabica (Arabic in Greek transcription from the pre-Islamic period), language classification, North Arabian epigraphy, and historical Semitic linguistics. He has written the first grammar of Safaitic, a corpus of Ancient North Arabian inscriptions from northern Jordan and southern Syria; its second edition, with a dictionary of more than 1400 entries, will appear in 2018. His is currently a Lecturer at the University of Leiden.