volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

Circular Baked Clay Tablets. 273
by the Three Separatists (Al-Khawarij) 'Abd^ ar-Rahmani
ibn Muljam, Barak, and 'Amr ibn ai-'As. The
mark of 'Alt's hand on a column in the mosque was
pointed out tor a century or two. Al-Kufah was famous
in the eighth and ninth centuries as the abode of learned
men, and a large Muslim college existed there.'
The town was a miserable place, and even the houses
in which people were living were in a tumble-down state.-
The country round about the town was waste and
barren, and it was impossible to conceive that the
gardens of Al-Kufah /had reached to Najaf, seven mUes
distant. The men I met eyed me with hostility, and
when I saw them collecting in little groups, and discussing
me angrily, and remembered the fanaticism of
the district, I felt uncomfortable. But Hasan and his
The Town of Al-Kfifah.
friend soon came back, and I went off with them to a
group of tents pitched to the south of the town, and when
we reached them, after about an hour's walk, we found
there the man with the round tablets. Whilst coffee
was being made by an old woman, bags filled with rice
were dragged forward and the rice emptied out on the
ground, and with it there came a number of objects
which looked like large, round buns, tied carefully in
ragged coloured handkerchiefs. I unpacked these quickly
and found that nearly all the cuneiform characters on
both sides were filled with a hard deposit of lime
though this made the attempt to decipher any part of
the text impossible, it nevertheless guaranteed their
antiquity and the genuineness of the inscriptions, and
^ It is said that one of the first four copies of the Kur'an was
preserved in Al-Kufah, and the oldest form of Arabic writing is called
" Kuf i," or " Kufic " to this day.
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