Underlying Hamama's Late Ottoman and British Mandate toponymy, is a limited stratum of pre-Ottoman village names.

To this pre-existing stratum, residents added new place names referring in cases to families living in or around the village.

The great importance of land as the main means of production in Hamama’s agrarian society, is reflected by many place names relating to the soil and its characteristics.

[13] Mandatory archaeologists documented a marble slab (0.3x0.95 m) located on the western wall of the mosque of Ibrāhīm Abū ʿArqūb.

This slab featured a nine-line Arabic inscription, now unfortunately lost, which was dated to 700 AH/1301 AD, and the content of which remains unrecorded.

[7] By 1333/4 CE (734 H.) some of the income from the village formed part of a waqf of the tomb (turba) and madrasa of Aqbugha b. Abd Allah in Cairo.

[18] Marom and Taxel have shown that during the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, nomadic economic and security pressures led to settlement abandonment around Majdal ‘Asqalān, and the southern coastal plain in general.

[7] In 1863, the French explorer Victor Guérin visited the village, and noted a mosque constructed with ancient materials.

They are divided by living fences of huge cactus pears, and are planted with olive, fig, pomegranate, mulberry and apricot trees.

[27] British Mandate Ḥamāma had pre-planned new communities erected around the original village nucleus, with crisscrossed pathways separating the new residential quarters.

Its inhabitants engaged primarily in fishing and agriculture, cultivating grain, citrus, apricots, almonds, figs, olives, watermelons, and cantaloupes.

[27] In addition to agriculture, residents practiced animal husbandry which formed was an important source of income for the village.

[7] According to reports published by the newspaper Felesteen, Hamama was first drawn into the 1948 Arab-Israeli War after a group of workers from the town laboring in the adjacent fields were struck by Jewish residents from Nitzanim on January 22, 1948, leaving fifteen Arabs wounded.

[34] At the end of November 1948, Coastal Plain District troops carried out sweeps of the villages around and to the south of Majdal.