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Curses · Tomb and family curses

Hegra (Mada'in Salih) – City of a Punished People

When
since c. 630 traditional date – cannot be verified
Where
Hegra (al-Hijr), AlUla, Medina Province, Saudi Arabia
Verdict
Legend

For centuries people avoided the rock-cut Nabataean tombs of Arabia as a place of divine punishment told of in the Quran. Today Hegra is Saudi Arabia's first UNESCO site.

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26.79°, 37.95° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

Hegra, also called al-Hijr or Mada'in Salih (‘the cities of Salih’), is a former Nabataean city in the north-west of the Arabian Peninsula, second only to Petra. Between the 1st century BC and the 1st century AD more than a hundred monumental tombs with richly carved facades were cut into its sandstone outcrops; the largest, Qasr al-Farid (‘the Lonely Castle’), is over twenty metres high. In Muslim tradition the site is linked to the people of Thamud, mentioned many times in the Quran. The Thamud, who lived in houses carved into the rocks, rejected the prophet Salih's call to abandon idolatry and killed a miraculous she-camel, for which God punished them with an earthquake and a thunderbolt. According to tradition, the Prophet Muhammad, passing this way in 630 on the expedition to Tabuk, told his companions not to enter the dwellings of the punished people except in tears. For this reason Hegra was for centuries regarded as a cursed place to be avoided, and the authorities, who want to develop tourism here, have had to contend with that image. In 2008 Hegra became Saudi Arabia's first site on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

Witnesses

Muslim tradition (the Quran, hadith); local people and travellers over the centuries.

Explanations and hypotheses

Archaeologists date Hegra's tombs to the Nabataean period, while the Thamud are also known from Assyrian inscriptions and later sources – identifying the ruins with the place where the Thamud were punished is a religious tradition, not a research finding. Hegra's ‘curse’ is not about supernatural phenomena but about a religious injunction to treat the site as a warning. For many believers it remains a place to visit with humility; opening it to tourists has met with mixed reactions.

Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.

Sources

  1. UNESCO World Heritage Centre – Hegra Archaeological Site (al-Hijr / Madā ͐ in Ṣāliḥ)
  2. The Atlantic – Graeme Wood, Absolute Power (2022)
  3. U.S. News – Donna Abu-Nasr, Digging up the Saudi past: Some would rather not (2009)

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