Iram of the Pillars

← Encyclopedia

In the deserts of southern Arabia, where the sand-ridges of the Rub’ al-Khali march off the edge of the inhabited world, there is said to have stood a city of columns unmatched in any land. It is named once in scripture, in a single breath, among a roll of peoples whom God brought low. From that one verse an entire architecture rose — a tower-city of brass and jewel, a king who tried to build paradise on the earth, and a wind that buried the whole proud achievement under the dunes. The city is Iram of the Pillars, Iram dhat al-‘imad, and its story is at once one of the briefest scriptural notices in the Arabic tradition and one of the most lavishly elaborated.

The name in the Dawn

The anchor is the eighty-ninth chapter of the Qur’an, Surat al-Fajr — the Dawn. Among its early verses, between an oath sworn on the dawn and the ten nights, comes a question put to the listener: consider how your Lord dealt with the people of ‘Ad — Iram dhat al-‘imad, the like of which was never created in the lands (Q 89:6–8). The phrase that fixes the legend is dhat al-‘imad. ‘Imad are pillars, columns, the upright supports of a great structure; the city is Iram of the Pillars, sometimes rendered Iram of the lofty columns and, by those who read ‘imad as tent-poles, Iram of the tent-poles. The verse is the whole of the canonical text. There is no description of the city, no king, no fate beyond the bare fact that the people who possessed it were brought low. Everything else is reception — the slow accretion of meaning around three Arabic words, words that belong wholly to the scripture of Islam and to its reading of the worlds that came before.

‘Ad and Iram stand close together in the Arabic genealogical tradition. ‘Ad is the ancient people; Iram, in one reading, is their eponymous ancestor — Iram son of Sam (Shem) son of Noah — so that the phrase the ‘Ad of Iram names the tribe by its forefather, while in another reading Iram is the city or seat that the ‘Ad built and were destroyed in. The two readings were never fully prised apart, and the legend lives in the productive ambiguity between a people, an ancestor, and a place. The genealogical thread runs back, in this reckoning, through the line of Abraham and the post-diluvian repopulation of the earth, so that Iram belongs to the prehistory of the Arabian peoples themselves.

A people of stature, a people of pillars

The ‘Ad are not confined to al-Fajr. They recur across the Qur’an as one of the destroyed nations, a standing example in the recital of peoples who rejected their prophet and were swept away. To them was sent Hud, named in scripture as one of their own kin, who summoned them to the worship of the one God and warned them against their arrogance. They lived, the tradition holds, in al-Ahqaf — the sand-dunes, the curving ridges heaped by the wind along the southern rim of Arabia, in the country between Yemen and Oman at the edge of the great sand-sea. When they persisted in their pride, the punishment came not by flood or fire but by wind: a howling, barren gale, the sarsar, loosed against them for seven nights and eight days until they lay like the hollow trunks of fallen palms.

What, then, were the pillars? The exegetes divided. One school read ‘imad architecturally: the ‘Ad were the first to raise high buildings on tall columns, masters of monumental construction whose cities stood on colonnades unmatched elsewhere — and their punishment fitted their pride in stone. A second school read ‘imad of the body: the ‘Ad were a people of immense physical stature, tall and strong as pillars themselves, the verse’s claim of an unmatched people understood as a verdict on their build rather than their masonry. The two readings were not enemies; many commentators held both, a people of giant frame who raised giant works, the like of which (the verse insists) was never created in the lands. Out of this double sense — bodies like columns, columns like a forest — grew the picture of a civilization whose hubris was written in its very scale.

This is the kernel of the whole tradition: not a treasure-city but a moral example. Al-Fajr names Iram alongside Thamud, who hewed the rock in the valley, and Pharaoh of the stakes — three powers, three monuments, three falls, set down so that the listener will read the lesson of pride humbled. Iram enters scripture as a warning, and the warning is the point. The elaboration that followed is the history of what a culture does with a warning when it begins to imagine the splendor that the warning presupposes.

Shaddad’s paradise

The richest growth came in the tafsir — the Qur’anic commentary — and in the qisas al-anbiya’, the Tales of the Prophets, that flourished in the learned Arabic milieu of the early Islamic centuries, the same milieu that produced the great chronicles and the genealogical and geographical compilations of the Abbasid world. Commentators including al-Tabari (d. 923), later al-Mas’udi, and Ibn Kathir (d. 1373) gathered and expanded the story, most of them drawing, by their own framing, on older folk tradition rather than scripture. Into the gap left by the silent verse they set a king.

His name is Shaddad ibn ‘Ad. In the developed legend he is a monarch of overweening pride, told by his teachers of the gardens of Paradise promised to the righteous in the world to come — its pavilions of gold and silver, its rivers, its jewel-bright courts. Shaddad’s response is the legend’s whole engine: he will not wait for Paradise, nor earn it; he will build it. He sets his kingdom’s wealth and labor to raising a city in imitation of the garden described to him — Iram of the columns — a place of brass and gold, its pillars studded with rubies and pearls, its conduits running with sweet water, a deliberate copy on earth of the paradise-garden — the Garden of Eden and the gardens of the world to come — that scripture reserves for the saved. By the most famous reckoning the work consumes five hundred years.

The end is the punishment of the prideful made exact. As Shaddad rides out at last to enter the finished city — to take his seat in the paradise he has counterfeited — a single cry comes down from heaven, the shout of the angel of destruction, and it strikes him and all his retinue dead at the gate, none of them having set foot inside. The city itself is not destroyed but hidden: God draws it out of the sight of men, veiling it in the sands so that it can be stumbled upon only by accident and never sought out twice. The moral architecture is precise. A man who builds Paradise to escape death dies on its threshold; a city raised to outshine the eternal garden is swallowed into the desert that surrounds it. Pride builds the pillars; the pillars become a tomb.

The wanderer who found it

The legend acquired its most circulated form in the Alf layla wa-layla, the Thousand and One Nights, in the tale usually titled “The City of Many-columned Iram.” Here the perspective shifts from king to wanderer. A man of the desert — Abdullah ibn Abi Qilaba — goes out after a strayed camel into the wastes of Yemen and the old land of Saba’, and comes by chance upon a deserted city of impossible wealth: gates of gold, pavilions of gold and silver, walls inlaid with pearl and jewel, and not a living soul. He fills his arms with what he can carry and returns to tell of it. The tale then lends itself an air of record by bringing the find before the caliph Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, who summons the learned traditionist Ka’b al-Ahbar; Ka’b identifies the place at once as the lost Iram of Shaddad ibn ‘Ad, built and forsaken exactly as the prophets foretold. The naming of real early-Islamic figures is the storyteller’s craft of credibility — a folk marvel sutured to remembered history so that the marvel might pass for it.

The version preserved in Richard Burton’s nineteenth-century English rendering of the Nights carries this shape into the modern European imagination, where the columned city of the desert takes its place beside the other vanished places of romance. It is worth marking what kind of place it is. Iram is not an island of the blessed dead like the Greek Fortunate Isles, nor a city drowned for a woman’s sin like Breton Ys, nor a holy town hidden beneath a lake to escape an invader like Russian Kitezh, nor a coast lost under the sea like Cornish Lyonesse. It is a city of pride entombed in sand — punishment, not refuge; buried, not drowned; a paradise counterfeited and revoked. The desert is its element and its judgment.

The Atlantis of the Sands

In the twentieth century the legend went looking for ground. The southern Arabian deserts had long carried a rumor among the Bedouin of a great lost city of the sands — Ubar, or Wabar — a caravan-town swallowed for its wickedness, and the rumor drew explorers. The English traveler Bertram Thomas, the first documented Westerner to cross the Rub’ al-Khali (in 1930–31), recorded in his Arabia Felix (1932) that his guides had shown him well-worn tracks graven into the plain, roads they said ran to the lost Ubar. The book carried a foreword by T. E. Lawrence, who had himself mused on a sand-buried Atlantis of Arabia — and the phrase that would shadow every later expedition, the Atlantis of the Sands, attached itself to the quest. Harry St John Philby reached a crater-field he took for the place; Wilfred Thesiger crossed the same country; none brought back proof.

The decisive expedition came in 1992. A team assembled by the American filmmaker and amateur archaeologist Nicholas Clapp — with the field archaeologist Juris Zarins, the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, and the lawyer George Hedges — used satellite imagery, including NASA orbital and radar data, to read the old camel-roads of Dhofar as faint converging lines in the sand, and followed them to their meeting-point. There, at the oasis of Shisr in southern Oman, they excavated a settlement built around a permanent water-source: an octagonal walled fort with tall corner towers, a caravan entrepot that had thrived from roughly the first millennium BCE into the Roman period at the heart of the frankincense trade, where the resin of the Boswellia trees of the Qara mountains was gathered and sent north. Most strikingly, a large part of the fortress had collapsed into a limestone sinkhole when the underground water-table fell away — a real city, that is, partly swallowed by the earth beneath it. The announcement went out to the world as the discovery of Ubar, the Atlantis of the Sands.

Here the documentary record and the legend must be held apart. Shisr is unquestionably real and important: a genuine pre-Islamic caravan station of the incense road, with a genuine and dramatic collapse that could well have seeded a folk memory of a town the desert devoured. That Shisr is the Iram of the Qur’an — the columned paradise of Shaddad ibn ‘Ad — is a hypothesis, not a finding, and one that few specialists accept as proven; the identification of a Bronze-to-Roman incense fort with a moral exemplum of scripture rests on the desire for a match more than on evidence of one. The nickname “Atlantis of the Sands” is a borrowed glamour and nothing more: Iram is no kin of the Platonic island, sharing with it only the shape of a great place lost. What Shisr supplies is a plausible kernel — a sand-swallowed caravan city — for a rumor that scripture and storytellers had already raised into something far larger.

Reading and scholarship

The textual core lies open to study. The primary anchor is Surat al-Fajr itself, read against the other ‘Ad passages — the missions of Hud in al-A’raf and the chapter al-Ahqaf, the wind of destruction in al-Haqqa — and the full Qur’anic text with parallel translations is available at quran.com; the chapter’s structure and the verse on Iram are summarized in the reference article on Al-Fajr (surah). The exegetical growth must be traced through the tafsir tradition — al-Tabari’s vast commentary, the later commentary of Ibn Kathir, and the qisas al-anbiya’ literature — where the figure of Shaddad and the paradise-city take their developed form; modern scholarship reads these not as transmitted history but as the literary imagination of the early Islamic centuries working on a scriptural seed, a process examined in studies of Iram at the intersection of the Nights, Qur’anic exegesis, and Arabian memory.

The Arabian Nights stratum is preserved in the standard nineteenth-century European editions and translations, the columned-city tale appearing in the fourth volume of Richard Burton’s Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. For the modern archaeology, Nicholas Clapp’s The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands (1998) is the popular account of the Shisr expedition; the field results and the debate over the identification are surveyed in the reference literature on the Atlantis of the Sands and in the geography of the people of ‘Ad and their land of dunes, al-Ahqaf. Across all of it the scholarly verdict is steady: the people of ‘Ad and their city of pillars belong to the moral and narrative world of scripture and legend, while the real desert beneath the legend holds caravan forts, incense roads, and one collapsed oasis that the rumor may have grown around.

The Arabic learned world that built this legend was the same that translated the Hermetic sciences into Arabic and identified the antediluvian sage Idris with Enoch and Hermes — a milieu fluent in the prehistory of the world before the flood, in fallen giants and vanished cities, and inclined to set the marvels of that lost age at the southern edge of its own deserts. Iram is the desert’s answer to the question every such culture asks: what stood here before us, and why is it gone.

The pillars are still the heart of it. A man wished to outbuild Paradise and raised a forest of jeweled columns in the one country that could hide them; the cry of judgment caught him at his own gate, and the sand came in over the colonnade. What the legend keeps before the eye is not the gold but the burial — a city perfect, complete, and entered by no one, standing somewhere under the moving dunes of al-Ahqaf with its pillars upright in the dark, the exact measure of a pride that finished its monument and was struck down on the doorstep of it.

→ Related: Islam · Qur An · Garden Of Eden · Kaaba · Abraham · Arabic Hermetica · Enochic Idris Prophetology · Islamic Golden Age · The Fortunate Isles · Ys Sunken City · Kitezh · Lyonesse