Thamud Erotic

The Thamud were an ancient Arabian people, attested from the eighth century BCE to the fifth century CE in the northwestern corner of the peninsula that is now Saudi Arabia, who then disappear from history: presumably absorbed into other tribes, and remembered chiefly as the Quran's cautionary tale of a nation that defied its prophet and was wiped out. That double existence is what makes them identifiable. Most ancient Arabian tribes left a few inscriptions and a name. The Thamud left a name that is still recited in mosques every day.

The hard evidence is thin but real. Sargon II of Assyria lists the Tamudi among desert peoples he defeated in 715 BCE. Pliny and Ptolemy locate the Thamudaei in the Hijaz. The key document is a bilingual Greek and Nabataean inscription from a temple at Rawwafa, in the Hisma desert, dated to the joint reign of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus in the 160s CE. It records the Thamud as a confederation that built the sanctuary with Roman blessing, under the governor of Arabia. Two centuries later the Roman army roster known as the Notitia Dignitatum still lists cavalry units of Thamudeni in Palestine and Egypt. Then silence. By the time the Quran was revealed in the seventh century, the Thamud were already ancient history, filed with 'Ad, Tasm and Jadis among what Arab genealogists called the vanished Arabs.

They spoke a form of Ancient North Arabian, a cluster of Semitic dialects closely related to early Arabic. Scholars later borrowed their name for Thamudic, a catch-all label for tens of thousands of scratched rock inscriptions across Arabia and Jordan, most of which were almost certainly not written by Thamud at all. Religion is the pivot of their story. The historical Thamud worshiped the North Arabian pantheon. The Rawwafa temple was a pagan sanctuary. In the Quranic telling, the prophet Salih called them to one God and presented a she-camel as a sign, to be left to graze and given her turn at the well. They hamstrung her instead. A blast, or an earthquake depending on the passage, destroyed them within three days, sparing only Salih and the few who believed.

One detail worth knowing: the Quran says the Thamud carved their houses out of mountains and calls them the People of al-Hijr. Islamic tradition identified al-Hijr with Hegra, today's Mada'in Salih, whose monumental rock-cut tombs are actually Nabataean work of the first century CE. For centuries pilgrims on the Damascus road hurried past the site as cursed ground, following a report that Muhammad himself told his companions not to drink its water. That inherited unease, more than any archaeology, is the Thamud's real legacy.