0021-1818_islam_98-1-2-i-259

62 Jere L. Bacharach, Sherif Anwar
In 1932 the Egyptian scholar Hassan El-Hawary, who was to establish his international
scholarly reputation with volumes on Egyptian Islamic funerary inscriptions
and a volume on the stele inscriptions in Mecca, published an article
entitled “The Second Oldest Islamic Monument Known Dated A.H. 71 (A.D. 691).” 1
El-Hawary shared with the readers of the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society how
he had been sent on a special mission to Aswan by Gaston Wiet, the director of
the Museum of Arab Art (now the Museum of Islamic Art), and was told to examine
some tombstones which Wiet had heard were to be found in some of the numerous
tombs in the “ancient cemetery east of Aswan.” 2 Following this advice,
El-Hawary examined all the tombstones until he finally found the one dated 71
Hijra. He noted that “it was in a mausoleum on a hill with two domes in which 16
slabs were fixed.” 3 He asked where the tombstone had been originally found
and could only learn that it was part of a large number of tombstones found in
Aswan’s cemeteries. These were eventually sent to Cairo’s Museum of Arab Art
where this example was registered as No. 9291:
1 Hassan Mohammed El-Hawary translated Gaston Wiet’s Album du Musée arabe du Caire
into Arabic and was (next to Wiet and Hussein Rached) one of the co-authors of the CIA volume
Catalogue général du Musée arabe du Caire. Stéles funéraires. Le Caire, Imprimerie de l’Institut
Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1932. See also his Matériaux pour un Corpus Inscriptionum
Arabicarum. Quatrième partie. Arabie. Inscriptions et monuments de la Mecque. Haram et Ka^ba.
Tome I, fascicule 1. Le Caire: Imprimerie de IFAO, 1939.
2 Hassan Mohammed El-Hawary, “The Second Oldest Islamic Monument Known, Dated A.H. 71
(A.D. 691). From the Time of the Omayyad Calif ’Abd-el-Malik ibn Marwan,” Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society (JRAS) 1932 (no. 2), 289–93.
3 Ibid.