Hegra

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The road that runs north out of southern Arabia, up the inland flank of the peninsula, crosses here a second road that ran from the Red Sea toward the Gulf; and at the crossing the rock rises out of the plain in detached outcrops of red and yellow sandstone, weathered into domes and bluffs. The caravans that carried the frankincense and myrrh of the south stopped at this place to water and to trade. Into the faces of the outcrops, above the heads of the men and the loaded camels, the people of the city cut the doors of their dead — more than a hundred of them, each crowned with a row of stepped battlements and a pediment, each a chamber hollowed back into the stone. The living town stood on the open ground below, and has mostly gone back to the sand. The tombs remain, where the rock keeps them, with the names of their owners and the curse on the violator still legible above the doors.

This is Hegra, the southern city of the Nabataeans, known in Arabic as al-Ḥijr and in the later memory as Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ, the cities of the prophet Salih. It lies in the oasis country of Al-ʿUlā, in the Ḥijāz of northwestern Arabia, some twenty kilometers north of the modern town and around four hundred kilometers southeast of Petra, the Nabataean capital in what is now Jordan. After Petra it was the second city of the kingdom and its southernmost major settlement, and it is, in the words of the UNESCO World Heritage record, “the largest conserved site of the civilization of the Nabataeans south of Petra.” In 2008 it became the first site in Saudi Arabia inscribed on the World Heritage List.

A caravan city of the incense road

The outcrops at al-Ḥijr had drawn settlement before the Nabataeans came. The oasis lay on the great north–south artery of the aromatics trade — the incense road that carried the gum-resins of the far south toward the Mediterranean, the traffic in which the Minaean merchant-towns and the Sabaeans of the deep south had grown rich — and the earlier masters of that traffic, the people of Dedan and then the kingdom of Liḥyān, had held the country around Al-ʿUlā for centuries. The Nabataeans, Arabs of the northern deserts who wrote their monumental texts in a cursive form of Aramaic, took the site as the southern anchor of a caravan kingdom whose hub was Petra. Here the road from the south met a route running between the Red Sea coast and the interior, and Hegra sat astride the junction, a walled town with wells sunk into the plain to water the caravans and the settled population that served them.

The city’s great age was the turn of the eras, the late first century BCE and the first century CE — above all the long reign of the Nabataean king Aretas IV (9 BCE–40 CE), under whom the bulk of the monumental tombs were carved. The dated dedications on the tomb faces, which fix the year of cutting by the regnal years of the Nabataean kings, run across roughly three generations: the earliest belong to the very end of the first century BCE and the latest to the years around 70 CE, so that the visible necropolis was made within a span of about seventy years. Across the whole site and its surrounding necropolises, set among the outcrops over more than thirteen kilometers, surveyors have counted on the order of a hundred and thirty monumental tombs; within the principal groups, the UNESCO assessment records a hundred and eleven, of which ninety-four carry the carved decoration that makes Hegra what it is.

When Rome annexed the Nabataean kingdom in 106 CE, taking the whole realm into the new province of Arabia Petraea, Hegra did not empty. It became the southernmost garrisoned town of the empire on this frontier; a Latin inscription of the years 175–177 CE names its community as the civitas Hegrenorum, the city of the Hegrenes, and Roman soldiers were stationed at the wells. The aromatics still moved up the road. In time the trade shifted, the frontier drew back, and the town declined, until what stood above the ground was the architecture of the dead and the memory attached to it.

The architecture of the dead

What Hegra holds, and what it was inscribed for, is its tombs. They are not built but cut — carved downward and inward into the standing rock, so that each is a single block of the sandstone hollowed into a burial chamber and dressed, on the one face that meets the open air, into a monumental front. The facades fuse a borrowed classical vocabulary of columns, pilasters, and pediments with elements that belong to the Nabataeans alone: above the cornice runs the stepped merlon, the “crow-step” battlement that descends in five tiers on each side toward a central point, a motif the Nabataeans carried out of the older Near East and made their signature. Over the doorways the carvers set eagles with spread wings, masks and rosettes, and at the corners the half-figures of sphinxes or griffins — guardians of the threshold between the living plain and the chamber of the dead. The eagle above the portal is generally read as a sign of Dushara, the chief god of the Nabataeans, lord of the mountain, into whose protection the grave was given.

Qasr al-Farid, the “Lonely Castle” — the unfinished tomb of Lihyan son of Kuza, the largest monument at Hegra, cut into a free-standing outcrop. Richard Mortel, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The grandest of them stands apart from the rest, cut into a single small outcrop on the plain: the tomb the Arabs call Qaṣr al-Farīd, the “Lonely Castle,” whose inscription names it for Liḥyān son of Kūzā. It is the largest tomb at Hegra and was never finished — its lower third still bears the rough chisel marks where the carvers had not yet smoothed the stone down to the level of the plain — and it is distinguished from every other facade by its four engaged columns where the rest have two. To stand before it is to watch the making of a tomb arrested in the middle: the front dressed from the top down, the doorway and the upper orders complete and the base left as raw rock, the work stopped before the dead it was meant to hold could be laid in it.

Many of the tombs carry, cut above the door, the dedicatory inscription in the Nabataean Aramaic script — the cursive that would, in the centuries after the kingdom fell, develop into the Arabic alphabet. These texts are the richest single source for Nabataean law and religion, and their value lies precisely in their legal form. The inscription names the owner who commissioned the tomb and the heirs to whom it shall belong; it often names the mason who cut it and dates the work to a king’s regnal year; and it closes, characteristically, with a curse. The grave is reserved to its owner and his named descendants forever, and whoever should sell it, lease it, alter it, or bury in it any body without right is made liable to a fine — payable, the texts specify, in part to the king and in part to the god — and is delivered over to the gods invoked by name as the avengers of the violated grave. Among the deities so called are Dushara above all, and the goddess the texts write as Manōtu — Manāt, the apportioner of fate and of death, who stands here as the guardian of the dead. The curse is not rhetoric appended to a contract; it is the sacred guarantee that made the contract hold. The tomb belonged to its owner under the protection of the gods, and the gods would answer for it.

The sanctuary in the rock

The Nabataeans did not only bury at Hegra; they worshiped there. To the northeast of the necropolis a cluster of outcrops called the Jabal Ithlib holds the city’s sanctuary, and the form of it is characteristically Nabataean: not a built temple on open ground but a precinct found within the rock itself. A narrow natural gorge, a siq some forty meters long, cuts between the cliffs, and where it opens stands a chamber carved into the stone — a square room with benches cut along three of its sides, known as the Diwan, where those who came to the sanctuary could gather, recline, and take the ritual meal. The whole district was given over to Dushara, and along the gorge and across the rock faces the worshipers cut niches and dedications, some holding the betyl — the standing stone, the aniconic god-block in which the Nabataean deity was present not as a human image but as a worked rectangle of rock.

Inscriptions and votive niches in the rock at Jabal Ithlib, the sanctuary district of Hegra, given over to Dushara. Richard Mortel, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The wells belong to this sacred and practical order as much as the tombs do. The town and its caravans lived by water drawn from a field of wells sunk into the plain, and it was the holding of that water, in a country that withholds it, that made a city possible here at all. The Nabataeans were the great desert hydraulic engineers of the ancient world, and at Hegra as at Petra the management of water was inseparable from the life of the place — the difference between a station where the caravan could break its journey in safety and a stretch of road on which men and animals died. To carve a hundred tombs into the rock and call down the gods upon their violators is the work of a settled, propertied, confident society; the wells are what made that society possible.

The cities of the prophet Salih

The later memory gave the place another name and another story. To the Arabs of the Islamic centuries the ruined city in the Ḥijāz, with its carved doors standing empty in the rock, was Madāʾin Ṣāliḥ — the cities of Salih — and it was understood through the Qurʾanic account of the people of Thamūd. In that tradition Thamūd were an ancient people of Arabia to whom God sent the prophet Salih; they hewed their houses out of the mountains in their pride, rejected the prophet’s warning, and were destroyed. The carved fronts in the sandstone were read as the dwellings of that vanished people, the marks of a community overthrown for its unbelief, and the place carried for centuries a reputation as cursed ground that travelers crossed quickly and were reluctant to disturb.

This identification belongs to the tradition of revelation, not to the documented history of the site; to the inscriptions the carved monuments are Nabataean tombs of the turn of the eras, while to the Qurʾan they are the dwellings of the Thamūd, the people to whom Salih was sent. But the association is itself part of what Hegra is — the frame through which the ruined city was held in memory for the better part of a millennium, the name under which it was known to the travelers who eventually reached it, and the reason its empty tombs were left so long alone. The two understandings of the place sit side by side: the necropolis of the Nabataean dead, and the destroyed cities of an unbelieving people, the one read from the inscriptions and the other from the scripture.

The recovery of the forbidden city

For the outside scholarly world Hegra was, into the nineteenth century, a place known by report and difficult to reach. The first European to describe it from his own eyes was the Englishman Charles Doughty, who reached al-Ḥijr in 1876 traveling with the pilgrim caravan and lingered to copy the inscriptions on the tombs, and whose Travels in Arabia Deserta (1888) carried the first detailed account of the carved city to a Western readership. He was followed by the epigraphers who came specifically for the texts: the Alsatian traveler Charles Huber and the German scholar Julius Euting, who journeyed together through Tayma, Khaybar, Al-ʿUlā, and al-Ḥijr in 1883–84 to record the ancient inscriptions of the Ḥijāz — a journey that cost Huber his life, murdered in the desert on a later expedition. The funerary inscriptions of Hegra, some thirty-eight of them, were published through the combined work of Doughty, Huber, Euting, and Philippe Berger in 1884–85, and entered the great corpus of Semitic inscriptions; they have been edited in their modern critical form by the epigrapher John F. Healey in The Nabataean Tomb Inscriptions of Madāʾin Sāliḥ.

Systematic excavation came late. From the early 2000s the Madâʾin Sâlih Archaeological Project, directed by the French epigrapher and archaeologist Laïla Nehmé with Saudi partners, undertook the first sustained survey and excavation of the site, mapping the necropolises, re-reading and dating the inscriptions, and beginning to recover the buried town that the tombs surrounded. Nehmé’s two-volume study of the Hegra tombs, published in 2015, set the funerary architecture and its dated epigraphy on a documentary footing for the first time. The excavation has confirmed what the inscriptions implied: a carefully ordered city of the dead, made by a propertied Nabataean society within a tight span of decades, watered by its wells and governed by the gods named in its curses.

A heritage opened

Hegra’s standing today rests on that double recovery — the inscriptions read and the city dug. Its inscription on the World Heritage List in 2008, as the first such site in Saudi Arabia, recognized it as the outstanding surviving monument of the Nabataeans in Arabia and a unique witness to the caravan civilization that joined the architecture, the script, and the trade of the ancient Near East at this crossing of the roads. The recognition came as the kingdom began to open its pre-Islamic past at Al-ʿUlā, and Hegra now stands at the center of that opening — a place long held at a wary distance under the name of the destroyed cities, presented now as the carved Nabataean sanctuary and necropolis it was made to be.

What endures, in the end, is the rock and what was cut into it. The living city has gone back to the plain; the wells that watered it are mostly silted; the trade that paid for the tombs ended with the road that carried it. But the doors of the dead remain open in the sandstone, dressed with their merlons and their eagles, and above many of them the dated dedication still names an owner and his heirs and gives them over, against the day of the violator, to Dushara and to Manawat — the contract of a confident people with its gods, cut into the one material at Hegra that the desert could not take back.

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