Thamud

The Thamud (Arabic: ثَمُود, romanized: Ṯamūd) were an ancient tribe or tribal confederation in pre-Islamic Arabia[1] that occupied the northwestern Arabian Peninsula.

Prominently, they appear in the Ruwafa inscriptions discovered in a temple constructed circa 165–169 CE in honor of the local deity, ʾlhʾ.

The word Thamud appears in the Annals of the Assyrian king Sargon II (r. 722—705 BCE), inscribed at Dur-Sharrukin.

[8] As the "Ta-mu-di", the peoples are mentioned together with the Ephah, the "Ibadidi", and the "Marsimani" as part of "the distant desert-dwelling Arabs who knew neither overseers nor officials and had not brought their tribute to any king".

Eph'al instead speculates that the Thamūd and other Arab tribes may have made arrangements with Sargon to trade in Samaria, which Assyrian historians embellished as submission.

[10] A surviving letter from Nabonidus, a sixth-century BC king of Babylon, includes an order that a "Te-mu-da-a Ar-ba-a-a", apparently "Thamudi Arab", be given several talents of silver.

2nd century BCE) On the Erythrean Sea that survive in later quotations mention that the Thamud Arabs then inhabited a "stony and large shore" of the Arabian coastline, south of the Gulf of Aqaba.

[12][13] In Bibliotheca historica, Diodorus, a 1st-century BCE Greek historian, mentions Thamūd in his description of the "Arabian Gulf" (the Red Sea): "This coast, then, is inhabited by Arabs who are called Thamudeni; but the coast next to it is bounded by a very large gulf, off which lie scattered islands which are in appearance very much like the islands called the Echinades".

[14][15] In a somewhat muddled passage, Pliny the Elder, a Roman historian of the first century CE, appears to locate the Thamūd at the unidentified inland town of "Baclanaza".

[7] The Thamūd are infrequently mentioned in contemporary indigenous Arabian sources, although two Safaitic inscriptions carved some time between the first century BCE and the fourth century CE refer to "the year of the war between Gšm and the tribe of Thamūd [snt ḥrb gšm ʾl ṯmd]".

[3] Another poem, attributed to Umayya ibn Abi as-Salt, a contemporary of Muhammad, describes the story of the camel and Thamud.

Accordingly, the Thamud were a powerful and idolatrous tribe living in Hegra, now called Madāʼin Ṣāliḥ, the Cities of Ṣāliḥ—in northwestern Arabia.

When Salih began to preach monotheism, the Thamud demanded that he prove his prophethood by bringing forth a pregnant camel from solid rock.

After giving birth, the camel drank all the water from a well every two days and then produced enormous amounts of milk for the people.

[28] A hadith tradition preserved in the Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī collection narrates that the Islamic prophet Muhammad called Hegra "the land of Thamud" and did not allow his troops to drink from its wells or to use its water, and to never enter its ruins "unless weeping, lest occur to you what happened to them.

[29] Thamudic is an aggregate name for some 15,000 inscriptions from pre-Islamic Arabia, which have not yet been properly studied and categorized into their distinct languages.

[31] The name arose in the nineteenth century, when many people asserted that the Thamud tribe was responsible for the creation of these inscriptions.