Udhruh (Arabic: اذرح; transliteration: Udhruḥ, Ancient Greek Adrou, Άδρου), also spelled Adhruh, is a town in southern Jordan, administratively part of the Ma'an Governorate.
[3] Udhruh was inhabited by the Nabateans as early as the 1st century BCE and later became the site of a fortified Roman military camp used as the headquarters of Legio VI Ferrata.
Although the area surrounding Udhruh today is barren, archaeologists surmise that the site sat on a lush oasis during the early centuries of its settlement.
[5] Udhruh remained a place of some importance under Byzantine rule, which saw significant demolition and reconstruction of existing military structures in the town.
[6] The town passed to the control of the Byzantines' Arab federates, the Ghassanids, when Emperor Justinian I removed the legionnaires who manned the fortifications of the Limes Arabicus in 530.
[5] In a 6th-century list of sites mostly located in the province of Palaestina Tertia, known as the Beersheba Edict, Udhruh was recorded as paying the second highest amount of taxes.
[8][9] The town held a strategic position overlooking the road between Arabia and the Balqa region and controlling access to the iron ore mines of Wadi Musa.
[10] Peake suggested that Jews from Udhruh (as well as Maqna and Jarba) may have resettled in Petra, converted to Islam, and their descendants now comprise the Bedul Bedouin.
[11] Udhruh gained fame in Islamic history for hosting the summit that arbitrated the end of the First Muslim Civil War between Caliph Ali (r. 656–661) and his opponents in 658.
[8][12] The 10th-century geographer al-Muqaddasi notes that Udhruh's townspeople possessed a mantle of the prophet Muhammad and the treaty of capitulation they signed with him which was written on an animal skin.
[4] The modern desert village of Udhruh was established in the late 1930s under the Emirate of Transjordan, a British protectorate that later became the modern-day Kingdom of Jordan.