Abstract
This article surveys the pre-Islamic Arabian inscriptions produced by the tribe of ʿĀd, introducing a hitherto unpublished Safaitic text by an ʿĀdite. We demonstrate that a southern Arabian origin for this group is not supported by the epigraphic evidence; rather, the territory of ʿĀd appears to have spanned at least from the region of Wādī Ram (ancient ʾIram) in what is today southern Jordan to the Ḥarrah in the northeast. The group inhabited this country around the turn of the era, some two-thousand years ago. The article concludes with a discussion of Quran 53:50 and 89:6 in light of the archaeological and epigraphic evidence.
The existence of the tribe of ʿĀd and the location of its territory were, for a long time, unresolved problems in the fields of the history of pre-Islamic Arabia and Islamic studies. The group is mentioned some 24 times in the Quran, often in conjunction with Thamūd. While the latter is known from pre-Islamic non-Arabic sources, including Assyrian, Roman, and Ancient North Arabian texts,1 there were no satisfying identifications of ʿĀd in Arabic sources securely pre-dating the Quran. Several Jāhilī poets mention ʿĀd as a people long gone, but the dating of these odes is notoriously difficult, and it is unclear whether the isolated lines that make reference to this tribe are later insertions dependent upon the Quran or whether they are drawing in parallel on the same earlier traditions.2 Sprenger interpreted the North Arabian tribal name Oaditai in the Geography of Ptolemy (d. 170 CE) as a reference to the Quranic tribe of ʿĀd, which poses some philological problems (1875: 144). The Greek transcription indicates that the original term began with a [w] or perhaps a laryngeal, which goes unexpressed in the Greek script, followed by an u-vowel. This would transcribe the noun pattern CuCaC, common in anthroponyms (cf. ʿumar). There are a couple of attested Arabian tribal groups that are a better fit for this transcription, wḍʾ, ʿwḏ, and a few common anthroponyms as well, that could underlie this group name, including ʿwd, wd, hwd, and ʾwd.3 A positive link between the Oaditai and ʿĀd must eliminate the possibility of transcribing a name based on the aforementioned roots or account for the initial Omicron.
The Quran associates ʿĀd with two further terms, ʾiram and al-ʾaḥqāf. While the former is a proper noun, which we shall discuss below in more detail, the latter is a common noun, the plural of ḥiqfun ‘a winding tract of sand.’ ʾIram is also attested in Jāhilī verse (Watt 2012), and there is some confusion regarding its signification among Islamic-period writers. In a thorough survey of ʾIram in Islamicate literature, Elmaz concludes that the term was more often understood as a tribal or personal name rather than a location in the earliest sources (Elmaz 2017: 527; see also Webb 2019: 118–119). Nevertheless, the interpretation of Iram as a location is sometimes found in tafsīr literature (Quranic exegesis) and becomes common in later narratives, where it is transformed into a lost city located somewhere in South Arabia (Webb 2019: 118–119). Likewise, ʿĀd was most commonly regarded as an ancient group of South Arabia, situated somewhere in eastern Yemen. Alternative opinions exist, however, which place ʿĀd in the Levant, near Damascus, or even Alexandria, usually coupling with the location of ʾIram.4 None of these claims appear to be based on any real historical memory of the group, but are drawn from later, folkloric attempts to give a broader context to the shadowy references in the Quran and early poetry. Given the legendary nature of these attestations, ʿĀd’s seeming absence in pre-Islamic sources, and the many conflicting accounts preserved in literary sources, it is no surprise that some modern scholars have cast doubt on ʿĀd’s very existence. Indeed, Wellhausen went so far to suggest that the tribal name ʿĀd arose through a misunderstanding of the expression mina l-ʿād, which originally meant ‘from ancient times,’ < ʿādī ‘very ancient’ (Wellhausen 1902: 596).
While verses attributed to Jāhilī poets seem to regard ʾiram as a tribe or people (Horovitz 1926: 89f), and Muslim writers even configure the name with ʾārām son of Shem of biblical genealogy, the epigraphic and archaeological exploration of Wādī Ramm has revealed that the ancient name of the site was ʾrm, a term that is compatible with Quranic ʾiram <ʾrm>. Savignac and Horsfield excavated a Nabataean temple at the base of Jabal Ramm, dated to the 1st century CE, which contained an inscription mentioning “the great goddess who is at ʾrm” (ʾlhtʾ rbtʾ dy b-ʾrm) (Savignac and Horsfield 1935). Another text from ʿAyn al-Šallālah mentions “Allātu the great goddess who is at ʾrm” (ʾltw ʾlhtʾ rbtʾ dy b-ʾrm).5 The Jebel Ramm graffito, also from the temple of Allāt, is carved in the Nabataeo-Arabic script and perhaps dates to the 4th century CE. The text consists of a simple signature and states that its author carved it with his own hand at ʾrm: ktb yd-h b-ʾrm.6 The consonantal nature of the Nabataean script conceals the precise vocalization of ʾrm, but it was likely identical to Quranic ʾiram. This is because Arabic triptotic proper nouns in Nabataean terminate in a final -w, so-called wawation (Al-Jallad 2022). Given its absence on the name ʾrm, it must have then belonged to a diptotic noun pattern, likely CvCaC. Thus, we can reconstruct with certainty the pronunciation ʾVram, maximally permitting either ʾuram or ʾiram. Given that there is no variation in the Quranic reading traditions regarding the vocalization of this word, the reconstruction of Nabataean ʾrm as /ʾiram/ is quite secure.7
The identification of ʾrm with Wādī Ram is also compatible with the description of the territory of ʿĀd as being located in a region with winding tracts of sand. While the term ʾḥqf is not encountered in Nabataean or Hismaic inscriptions from the region, this is not surprising if we take it simply as a geographic descriptor rather than a true toponym. Safaitic, however, does attest ʾḥgf as a toponym (Al-Jallad and Jaworska 2019: s.v.). Although the location of this place is not clear from its single attestation in that corpus, it may be compared to Quranic ʾaḥqāf if we permit the interchange between q and g. While this is certainly irregular, and Safaitic does not display any examples of the merger or confusion of these two phonemes, such an irregularity is encountered in the toponymy of the region between languages. An albeit late parallel can be found in the Arabic name of the Negev (< negeb), which appears as naqab, reflecting the irregular correspondence between Hebrew g and Arabic q. This is likely due to the realization of *q as [g] in the local Arabic dialects. It is, therefore, conceivable that Quranic Arabic ʾaḥqāf could correspond to Safaitic ʾḥgf in a similar way, especially if it was loaned at a time where *g was no longer realized as a voiced velar stop in the former and so q would have been the closest approximation. While tantalizing, this remains only a tentative and speculative possibility. There exist a wide variety of opinions on the location of al-ʾaḥqāf in the tafsīr literature, ranging from a mountain in Syria (al-Šām) to the Ḥismā, and indeed as far away as the land of the Mahrah in South Arabia (Al-Ṭabarī vol. 22, 122–124). The Ḥismā certainly corresponds to the location of ʾIram, but it is hard with such a wide range of opinions to know if this reflects any genuinely transmitted knowledge from pre-Islamic times or is simply the result of lucky guesses.
So then, while it has been conclusively established that ʾiram is a place name originally signifying Wādī Ram, one of the centers of the worship of Allāt, what of ʿĀd? One confounding factor in the identification of this tribal group is that in the scripts of ancient Arabia, there would have been no plene representation of the medial vowel – the ancient South Semitic scripts are purely consonantal and Nabataean did not indicate internal long ā. Thus, the name ʿād would be spelled as simply ʿd in these writing systems, which would be homographic with a number of other common names, including ʿawd, ʿīd, ʿūd, ʿayd, and so forth. So how can we be sure that we are indeed encountering the Quranic ʿād in the epigraphic record, rather than succumbing to the positivist fallacy (Anthony 2018)? Two texts from South Arabia underscore this methodological problem. The family name ʿd is attested twice, once in Minaic and once in Sabaic.8 While it is tempting to identify these attestations as references to the ancient tribe of ʿĀd referenced in the Quran, especially given Muslim tradition’s broadly South Arabian provenance for the group, there is simply no evidence to arbitrate between all of the aforementioned options of vocalization. These two examples could, in fact, refer to a family called ʿīd, a very common name after all. In fact, there is no reason at all to assume that the two texts refer to the same social group in the first place. Moreover, it should be emphasized that these texts are not found in the location given by Muslim tradition, that is, eastern Yemen between Ḥadramawt and ʾAbyan. Rather, the Minaic text, Maʿīn 79, comes from the site of Qarnaw, in Wādī Madhab south of Ṣanʿāʾ. The second text does not have a provenance and is currently housed in the Sanʿāʾ University Museum, but its textual typology suggests an origin in the Sabaic-writing regions of western Yemen. Indeed, to identify the Quranic ʿād one must configure the epigraphic consonantal sequence ʿ-d with external evidence, either a reference to al-ʾaḥqāf or ʾiram.
In 1996–1997, the Jordanian Department of Antiquities began restoration work on the temple of Allāt at ʾiram, which uncovered an inscribed stone bearing writing in the Ḥismaic script. Zayadine and Farès-Drappeau produced an edition of this text in 1998, which they read and interpret as follows (Zayadine and Farès-Drappeau 1998):
ZFWI 1
l ġṯ bn ʾslh bn ṯkm w-bny bt lt ḏ ʾl ʿd
By Ġawṯ son of Aws-Allāh son of Ṯkm and he built the temple of Allāt of the tribe of ʿĀd
The syntax of the final phrase ḏ ʾl ʿd ‘of the lineage of ʿĀd,’ is ambiguous. Does the relative pronoun ḏ refer back to the author Ġawṯ? If so, then it is somewhat unexpected that the narrative portion of the text has interrupted the genealogy. It is also possible that the referent of ḏ is the temple itself, and that the text commemorates the author’s involvement in the building of a temple commissioned by the tribe of ʿĀd. Given that tribal affiliation is almost universally a component of the genealogy, I am inclined to adopt the former interpretation, which may be supported by another attestation (see below).
Inscription BES15 161
Citation: Athīrat: Journal of Ancient Arabia 1, 1-2 (2025) ; 10.1163/30504880-12340015
Photo courtesy the Badia Epigraphic Survey Project (BES)Tracing of BE15 161 (by the author).
Citation: Athīrat: Journal of Ancient Arabia 1, 1-2 (2025) ; 10.1163/30504880-12340015
Photo courtesy the Badia Epigraphic Survey Project (BES)There is a second Hismaic inscription, known at the time but not mentioned by Zayadine and Farès-Drappeu, that mentions the tribe ʿĀd: TIJ 4, which reads: l zhy bn ʿmr ḏ ʾl ʿd ‘by Zhy son of ʿmr of the lineage of ʿĀd’ (Harding and Littmann 1952). It is impossible to determine how large or prolific the tribe was in the region. The OCIANA corpus contains 3691 Hismaic inscriptions, but only 74 of these texts express a tribal affiliation and of these, 47 record unique tribal groups. The most frequently mentioned tribe is mzn, which occurs 5 times. The tribes qḥl and ḫlʾl are mentioned thrice. And finally, rwḥ, śklt, tnn, wly, zydt, ʿmt, ḥdd, along with ʿd, are each mentioned twice. It is possible, and indeed likely, that many other Hismaic inscriptions, which do not overtly mention a tribal affiliation, were composed by men of ʿĀd.
Zayadine and Farès-Drappeau convincingly identified the tribal group ʿd with Quranic ʿĀd based on its location – this text was carved at ʾiram, and the collocation of these two names could not be a coincidence. Thus, unlike the aforementioned South Arabian examples, the ʿd of this inscription, and indeed TIJ 4, is very likely one and the same as the Quranic legend. Thus, as has been widely recognized in recent literature, the historic ʿād and ʾiram were originally located in what is today southern Jordan, in the region of Wādī Ram. Moreover, the temple of Allāt appears to have been constructed in the 1st century CE, and the Ḥismaic script, while undated, attests to features that place its usage in this period as well.9 We can, therefore, date the activity of ʿĀd in the region to the turn of the era, some two thousand years ago.
To the two attestations of ʿd in Hismaic, we may now add a Safaitic witness from the Syro-Arabian Ḥarrah. The text was documented in 2015 by the Badia Survey Project near the mouth of Wādī Salmā in the northeastern Syro-Arabian Ḥarrah.10 The short Safaitic text (inscription BES15 161) is carved in the Common Script variant and reads (Fig. 1):
l msk bn zmhr bn yzr bn tʾm w wgm ʿl-ʾb-h w ʿl-ʾḫ-h {ḏ} ʾl ʿd
By Msk son of Zmhr son of Yzr son of Tʾm and the grieved for his father and for his brother, of the lineage of ʿād.
The inscription is, in all respects, a typical Safaitic composition. It begins with the lām auctōris introducing the genealogy and then records a grieving ritual for the author’s father and brother.11 This text clearly records a group called ʿd, but due caution is required: can we identify this group as one and the same as the tribal group in Hismaic, or is it, like the South Arabian examples, a possible false positive, only identical in consonantal garb but ultimately unrelated? This question, with the available evidence, can only be answered in probabilistic terms. While the Safaitic and Hismaic inscriptions are geographically proximate, they do reflect discrete scripts and separate writing traditions with their own formulaic conventions. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of mixed Safaitic/Hismaic inscriptions proves that users of these scripts interacted.12 How common, then, is it for tribal groups to compose texts in both writing traditions? As mentioned before, there are 47 tribal groups mentioned in Hismaic, but many times, this number is in Safaitic. Of these 47, 10 (~20%) are attested in both corpora.13 Given this significant overlap, it is more likely than not that the similarities in tribal names are not accidental coincidences, but rather reflect a relatively common phenomenon where tribes whose migratory territories spanned the Hismaic and Safaitic inscriptional zones would produce texts in both writing traditions. This is true for outside groups as well. Both the Ḥwlt and Ṭyʾ, whose territories were situated further south in Arabia, occasionally carved texts in both scripts when in their respective regions. Another irregular feature of this inscription demands discussion. Unlike most Safaitic texts, the component identifying tribal affiliation, ḏ ʾ ‘of the lineage’, terminates the inscription rather than directly following the author’s genealogy as is usually found. While it is possible that the ḏ here refers to the deceased brother and father, it is more likely that it is a component of the author’s genealogy, which the narrative has interrupted. This peculiar syntax parallels that of the ʿd Hismaic inscription from the temple of Allāt. Is it simply a coincidence that both texts mentioning ʿd also deploy this curious syntax regarding tribal affiliation? Or is this peculiarity a characteristic of ʿĀdite writing habits? While it is clearly impossible to prove this with only two texts, the combination of all of the factors discussed above demonstrates that the Safaitic ʿd can be reliably connected with the Hismaic attestations, both reflecting inscriptions by the tribe of ʿĀd referenced in the Quran.14
Quran 53:50 modifies the tribal name ʿĀd with the adjective al-ʾūlā, which is commonly translated as the “first.” As Webb notes, this translation motivated classical scholars to posit a “second” ʿĀd, for which no convincing historical or genealogical evidence was ever proffered by classical scholars, and which is not supported by a close reading of the Quranic text in the first place. Webb, rather, suggests that the correct understanding of al-ʾūlā in this context is “ancient,” a distant past era (Webb 2014: 74). But what would “ʿĀd the (most) ancient” mean in its Quranic context? Perhaps it is a reflection of Quranic chronology? The Quran appears to attest a chronological formula of past peoples destroyed by Allāh, where the listener is told to heed the news of those who have come before them, listing in order: qawm nūḥ ʿād wa-ṯamūd ‘Noah’s folk, ʿĀd, and Thamūd’ (9:70; 14:9; 22:42). The chronological indexer here, qabla-hum ‘before them’, suggests that we should understand this order as reflecting a historical succession of nations. Likewise, the same order is observed in Q 40:31, where the fate (daʾb) of Noah’s folk, ʿĀd, and Thamūd is mentioned, but this time with a reference to those who came after them, baʿda-hum. Taking al-ʾūlā in 53:50 to mean ‘ancient’ or ‘most ancient’ would appear to be difficult as ʿĀd is preceded by Noah’s folk consistently. Rather, ʿĀd and Thamūd form a pair in the Quran, often mentioned together as uniquely Arab tribes that have been destroyed by Allāh for similar transgressions (see the sequence of both tales in Q 89, for example, or 69:4–5); and the same appears to hold true in their attestations in the Jāhilī corpus. If the temporal reading of Q 9:70, etc. is correct, then it would appear that in Quranic chronology, ʿĀd preceded Thamūd and was destroyed before the rise of the latter.15 Thus, it is also possible to understand the adjective al-ʾūlā as ‘the older’ or ‘more ancient’, that is, as a comparative with regard to Thamūd, rather than the ‘most ancient’ in absolute terms or simply as a generic descriptor ‘ancient’, which could have been applied equally to any of the groups mentioned in the Quranic destruction stories.
Locations of the inscriptions of ʿĀd
Citation: Athīrat: Journal of Ancient Arabia 1, 1-2 (2025) ; 10.1163/30504880-12340015
Let us conclude by returning to the Quran 89:6. All canonical reading traditions agree on vocalizing ʿād in the unbound genitive, ʿādin, and taking ʾiram in opposition to it, ʾirama. This construction is ambiguous, as it permits understanding ʾiram as a group name as well, which is reflected in some exegetical works that regard ʾiram as a race of giants. Others, however, understand the relationship between ʿād and ʾiram to be one of a people and place, which is not immediately compatible with the present vocalization. Given that ʾiram is an ancient toponym, the more natural syntactic relationship between the two words would be a construct genitive, that is, ʿād of ʾiram. In a fully vocalized reading tradition, this would produce bi-ʿādi ʾirama, which is incidentally the vocalization found in the non-canonical reading of Ibn al-Zubayr.16 Such confusion in vocalization is easily explained by an unvocalized Ur-Text composed in the Old Ḥigāzī dialect lacking final-short vowels, as reconstructed by Van Putten and Stokes (Van Putten and Stokes 2018; Van Putten 2022). Since the phrase is split across verse boundaries, probably to facilitate the rhyme, most readers were motivated to understand ʿād in isolation rather than in construct. This process seems to have occurred after the relationship between ʿād and ʾiram was obscured, thus producing the confusion in the exegetical tradition and the vocalization we encounter today.
Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to Alexander Hourani, David Ross, and Michael Macdonald for their helpful comments and references. All errors remain my own.
Bibliography
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For a concise overview of Thamūd in pre-Islamic sources, see https://ancientarabia.huma-num.fr/dictionary/definition/thamud.
See the brief discussion in Buhl 2012.
Both wḍʾ and ʿwḏ are attested in Safaitic (OCIANA, s.v.). The vocalization of wḍʾ is unclear, but ʿwḏ in Safaitic appears to have been vocalized as /ʿawīḏ/; thus, if Ptolemy’s transcription is based on a group name derived from this root, it must have been vocalized differently, perhaps /ʿuwaḏ/. The name ʿwd, the vocalization of which is unclear but permits /ʿuwad/, is attested some 43 times in the OCIANA corpus, while the name wd is attested 467 times. Hwd is attested 59 times and ʾwd 26.
Webb 2019: 119; Retsö 2003: 36. Retsö argues, however, that the genealogical background given to ʿād suggests a Northwest Arabian origin.
Savignac 1932. See Healey 2001: 56–59 for a thorough description of ʾIram and its significance in Nabataean religion.
Hoyland 2010: 39–40. The full text reads: … br ʿlyw ktb yd-h b-ʾrm ‘… Son of ʿAliyy-w, the writing of his hand at ʾIram.’
Apharesis of the initial ʾV-syllable is common in the toponymy of the region; for example, ancient jebel ʾusays yields jebel says today. The toponym ʾabāyir ‘wells’, in southern Jordan, gives bāyir in the contemporary dialect. Thus, the modern name ram, sometimes transcribed with a geminated m, is the expected reflex of an older ʾiram.
Sabaic: A-20-373A and Minaic: Maʿīn 79; see https://dasi.cnr.it/ for references.
Al-Jallad 2020: 562; there are, however, two dated mixed Safaitic-Hismaic texts that mention Nabataean kings.
On this project, see al-Manaser and Macdonald 2020. The text was published first online on OCIANA but without an adequate interpretation. The final component ḏ ʾl ʿd was understood as an untranslated verb – he who ʾlʿd.
On the grieving and funerary context of the Safaitic inscriptions, see Al-Jallad 2022, §2.1.
For a discussion of this textual type, see Norris 2018.
The tribes attested in both Safaitic and Hismaic so far are: qḥl, rwḥ, frṯ, grm, gśm, sʿd, ʿbd, ṣbḥ, ḥwlt, and ṭyʾ.
Another supporting piece of evidence is the attestation of the ancient tribe Ṭasm in the Safaitic inscriptions (Al-Zoubi et al. 2023). Both ʿĀd and Ṭasm belong to the category of “extinct Arabs” ʿarab bāʾidah in the Arabic historiographical tradition, and may suggest that this package of tribal names goes back, at least in part, to groups dwelling in Northwest Arabia/Southern Levant, pushing back the horizon of Arabic historical memory, which Hoyland dates to around the 4th c. CE (2009).
This is in fact the general understanding of the chronology of these groups in classical Muslim works; see Elmaz 2017 on the various suggestions about the chronology of ʿĀd/ʾIram.
Ibn Khālawayh 2009: 173; see Webb 2019: 118–119 for a discussion of the different exegetical opinions of this line.
