I asked, “How long had he been dead when you discovered him?”
He replied, “Three hundred years.”

I said, “Had anything of him changed?”
He answered, “No—apart from a few hairs at the back of his neck. The flesh of the prophets is neither worn away by the earth nor devoured by wild beasts.”

The chain of transmission to Abū ʿĀliyah is sound. Yet if the date of death—three centuries earlier—is correct, the man could not have been a prophet but rather a righteous servant, for the ḥadīth recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī states explicitly that there was no prophet between Jesus son of Mary and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and the interval between them was four hundred years. Other reports say six hundred, or six hundred and twenty years. It is also possible that his death occurred eight hundred years earlier, which would place it close to the era of Daniel—if, in fact, the corpse was Daniel himself. Still, he might have been another individual, prophet or saint; the balance of opinion favored Daniel because, as noted above, the Persian king had once taken Daniel captive and kept him imprisoned.

A sound chain reaching Abū ʿĀliyah relates that the man’s nose measured a span. A good chain from Anas ibn Mālik puts it at an arm’s length—Allah knows best. On that basis, he could have been one of the very early prophets who lived long before the periods just mentioned. Allah knows best.

Abū Bakr Ibn Abī al-Dunyā, in his work “Rulings on Graves,” recounts: Abū Bilāl Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥārith ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Abī Burdah ibn Abī Mūsā al-Ashʿarī told us—Abū al-Qāsim ibn ʿAbd Allāh told us—from Abū al-Ashʿath al-Aḥmarī, who said: The Messenger of Allah ﷺ declared, “Daniel prayed to his Lord, exalted is He, that the community of Muḥammad might bury him.” When Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī conquered Tustar he found Daniel in a coffin, the veins and arteries of his neck still seen to pulse. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ had also said, “Whoever directs us to Daniel—give him the glad tidings of Paradise.” The one who located him was a man named Ḥurqūṣ. Abū Mūsā wrote to ʿUmar with the news, and ʿUmar replied, “Bury him, and send Ḥurqūṣ to me, for the Prophet ﷺ has promised him Paradise.”

This report is mursal in this recension, and its preservation is open to question. Allah knows best.