by Kyle Longworth
How much did it cost to be remembered in stone? Thousands of Arabic tombstones survive from the early and medieval Islamic world, preserving the names of the dead alongside prayers, Qurʾanic verses, dates, and occasional glimpses into the lives of otherwise unknown individuals. However, remembering someone in stone required more than engraving an epitaph. The stone itself had to be acquired, shaped, and inscribed—all processes that required materials, labor, and costs. Someone had to pay for the stone and the labor required to transform it into a tombstone. But did the purchaser choose the inscription? or even what the monument itself would look like?
Our surviving evidence makes it difficult to determine what any of these choices actually cost. But price is only one way of thinking about the economics of commemorating the dead. Economics shaped both the purchase and production of a tombstone. For the purchaser, an inscribed monument represented an investment in remembrance; however, for the craftsmen who produced it, tombstones required decisions about materials, labor, time, and efficiency.
Templates offer one glimpse into how economic considerations may have shaped the production of tombstones. As Teresa Bernheimer has recently discussed, one ninth-century Egyptian tombstone does not name the deceased at all but identifies her generically as fulāna bint fulān al-fulānī—“so-and-so, daughter of so-and-so.”1 Bernheimer suggests that the generic placeholder, rather than an actual name, indicates that the stone may originally have served as a model or template, with the formula marking where a deceased’s name would be inserted when producing another tombstone. When the template was eventually used for a woman named ʿAfīra bt. Ḥafṣ, her name was awkwardly squeezed below fulāna bint fulān al-fulānī.
Template tombstone TEI 21124, detail showing the later insertion of the name ʿAfīra bt. Ḥafṣ. Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo, inv. 13346. Public domain; reproduced from Gaston Wiet, Catalogue général du Musée arabe du Caire: Stèles funéraires, vol. X (Cairo, 1942), pl. VII.
Other tombstones may also preserve evidence of similar use of templates and models. In a study with Lorenz Korn, Bernheimer and Korn point to another possible example in which the deceased’s name is unusually elongated across a line, perhaps indicating that the surrounding inscription had been laid out according to a pre-existing template and the name was stretched to fit the space.2 In another, Bernheimer points to an Egyptian tombstone whose date ends simply with the year “two hundred and twenty_____,” leaving the final numeral blank.3 The unfinished date raises the possibility that at least part of the inscription had been prepared in advance, with the precise year intended to be added when the stone was needed.
Such practices make economic sense from the producer’s perspective. A template meant that each new inscription did not have to be composed and laid out from scratch: craftsmen could reproduce familiar texts and arrangements, modifying only those elements particular to the deceased. Advance preparation could likewise save time. Although the organization of this labor remains difficult to reconstruct, these practices suggest that efficiency may have influenced how funerary inscriptions were produced.
But working in stone presented a different problem when things went wrong. Errors that would have been simple to correct in ink could become permanent when inscribed in stone. Another tombstone for a woman published by Gaston Wiet, for example, appears to forget part of the date. Although Wiet dates the monument to 284 AH/897 CE, the inscription itself gives only “the year eighty-four,” apparently omitting “two hundred” from the date.4 We cannot know whether the mistake was noticed, much less whether the cost or difficulty of correcting it explains why it survived. But the error highlights a basic constraint of the medium: once a mistake was carved, considerable labor and cost had already been invested in an object that could not simply be erased or replaced.
However, textual perfection may not have been essential to an inscription’s success or purpose. Errors were not confined to funerary monuments alone. Mehdy Shaddel has recently identified mistakes in monumental inscriptions commissioned by the early ʿAbbāsid caliphs in Mecca.5 Errors in caliphal monuments are significant because limited resources would seem less likely to explain why a mistake went uncorrected or an inscription was not replaced. Such mistakes remind us that the words themselves were only one part of how an inscription functioned as a monument.
After all, a tombstone’s meaning did not come from its words alone. Its physical presence within the funerary landscape also shaped how the deceased was remembered. Just like visitors to cemeteries today, medieval visitors likely passed many tombstones without stopping to read each inscription. Some monuments recede into the larger funerary landscape, while others draw attention through their size, decoration, or prominence. Seen this way, the money invested in a tombstone purchased more than words carved in stone: it gave the deceased a physical presence within the landscape of the dead.
- Teresa Bernheimer, “Template Funerary Inscriptions: Scribal Building Blocks and Funerary Inscriptions in 9th-Century Egypt,” Invisible East, August 20, 2025,“Document of the Month 8/25”. ↩︎
- Teresa Bernheimer and Lorenz Korn, “Eleven Islamic Tombstones from Egypt: A Window into the Histories of Early Islamization and of Modern Dislocation,” Der Islam 102, no. 1 (2025): 77-78. ↩︎
- Teresa Bernheimer, “Zwei Grabsteine aus dem früh-islamischen Ägypten im SMÄK: ÄS 7943 und ÄS 7944,” MAAT 34 (2025): 8. ↩︎
- Gaston Wiet, Catalogue général du Musée arabe du Caire: Stèles funéraires, vol. 10 (Cairo, 1942), 4, no. 3604. ↩︎
- Mehdy Shaddel, “Power, Memory, and the Sacred: The Early Abbasids and the Islamicisation of the Meccan Landscape,” Early Medieval Europe (2026): 4. ↩︎