THE NEWLY DISCOVERED PERSIAN INSCRIPTION OF THE XII CENTURY IN THE FORTRESS OF BJNI

Abstract

In 2007 during its excavations within the citadel of Bjni fortress the expedition of the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the National Academy of Sciences of Armenia discovered a stone with an inscription in Arabic characters. We have read this Persian inscription in five lines sculpted on a stone fragment showing missing parts from all sides. The first line is damaged and is unreadable, the second line mentions the name of some Isfahsalar Muhammad/Mohammad طوسي... Tusi محمد سلار] سفه ا ....[ The third line is also unclear, except for the guessable word ‘Islam’. The fourth line reads ‘May the God bless all’ in Persian. The fifth line communicates the date, which is ... [ئه [ما خمس و عين ...The date is incomplete, however it is definitely the 500th year of Hijra or the XII century AD. To define the decade we need to offer numbers ending with عين ..These are forty اربعين seventy سبعين or ninety تسعين . From these figures we prefer seventy سبعين because of a few considerations: if it is forty اربعين horizontal line of alif would be visible even if it is damaged; there is a dot over عين... even though ‘ba’s dot has been put over and not under the letter. سبعين or ninety also has no dots. So by choosing seventy, we can date the inscription to the period of 1175-1183. We can’t offer a more precise date as the first number before seventy is lost. We also believe that this inscription is not an epitaph as there are no Islamic formulas for the deceased put right before the name; also the sculpted characters are too big for a gravestone and in addition they are positioned perpendicularly to the stone unlike Armenia’s Muslim gravestones. Therefore, this must be a fragment of an inscription commemorating some construction or maybe a repair or strengthening of the Bjni fortress or citadel executed by the order of Isfahsalar Muhammad Tusi. Unfortunately the inscription does not communicate the dynasty to which it belongs. However, there is another Arabic inscription of 1174 by Shaddadids carved on a citadel of Nerkin Talin/Dashtadem (Aragatsotn region of Armenia). The newly discovered Persian inscription is evidence that Muslim military had some presence during the last decades of the XII century in the Armenian fortress of Bjni.