Iram of the Pillars: What Happened to the People of 'Ad?
A vanished Arabian people of great stature and their city of pillars, "the like of which was not created in the lands," erased by a wind.
The 'Ad were an ancient Arabian people in the Quran to whom the prophet Hud was sent. Their city is "many-columned Iram," and a cold wind lasting seven nights and eight days destroyed them.
The 'Ad were an ancient Arabian people to whom the prophet Hud was sent. The Quran mentions them often. Surah 89 asks: "Dost thou not consider how thy Lord dealt with (the tribe of) A'ad, With many-columned Iram, The like of which was not created in the lands." In Surah 7:69 Hud reminds them that God gave them "growth of stature," which later writers took to mean they were giants.
The 'Ad rejected Hud, and they were destroyed. Several surahs describe the method: a furious, cold wind that blew for seven nights and eight days and left them lying like hollow palm trunks (69:6–7). In 46:24 they see a cloud approaching their valleys and think it brings rain. It brought the punishment instead. Their land is called al-Ahqaf, "the winding sand tracts."
Medieval writers made Iram a fabulous city of gold and jewels, built by a king named Shaddad to rival paradise. In the modern era the search turned practical. In the early 1990s Nicholas Clapp, with satellite imagery and a team including archaeologist Juris Zarins, identified a site at Shisr in Oman as Ubar, a lost incense town he linked to Iram. His book was titled The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands.
Most scholars do not accept the Shisr identification, and even Clapp later hedged it. Others point to inscriptions from the Wadi Rum area of southern Jordan, whose ancient name may preserve Iram. The story endures because it combines tall builders, monumental columns, and a weather catastrophe that emptied a civilization.
Satellite radar images from NASA were used in the 1990s to trace ancient caravan tracks in the search for Iram under the sands of Oman.
The Quran's references are brief moral warnings; the golden city of Shaddad is later legend, and no archaeological site has been securely identified as Iram.
