Are our semitologists still reachable?
By a quirk of history, Coimbra has two extant cathedrals. The oldest one is
not even the oldest church standing, it was built not before the 1140s,
well after the two periods of arab rule (714-878 and 987-1064). Still, it’s not impossible that when it was started there were still some old people
around who had seen arab rule in their youth.
In one of the walls, in a single block located at some height, there is an
arab inscription about 1m long. It’s been known for some time, and there is
a tentative arabic reading, but for all I know everyone has been following
the same source (Alois Richard Nykl). It’s said that the inscription was
made during the construction of the cathedral, but I have no idea how one
can be sure.
It’s certainly tidy (as far as I can tell). I thought maybe someone here might have a shot at reading it. I say it’s arab because I’m not assuming the language is arabic, though that seems to be assumed by everyone. Here
it is, there are other pictures, but this one seems to be the clearest I
got from a brief search:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-J0AHGGTpIN8/XyJ0eDm_zfI/AAAAAAAAB1M/_fxcIRAn6Ik-2gQUAVZylhCM9lTpKYSVgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1596093556113915-0.png
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