Iram of the Pillars

A man went out after a strayed she-camel and came back with a story nobody believed. Abdullah bin Abi Kilabah was somewhere in the deserts of southern Arabia, in the district of Saba, when he saw walls where there should have been nothing, and palaces and pavilions standing up into the middle air behind them. He went in to ask directions. There was nobody to ask. The gates were enormous and set with jacinths in white and red and yellow and green, and behind them lay a city about the size of Medina, its pavilions built one brick of gold and one brick of silver, the doors inlaid to match. Water ran in channels beneath the buildings. Fruit trees and tall palms stood along the streets. The floors were strewn with pearls no smaller than hazelnuts and with balls of musk, ambergris and saffron, and the heat would have been lifting the smell of all three off the ground. He filled his arms with what the city used for gravel and rode home.

When the report reached the caliph Muawiyah in the Hijaz he sent for the man, listened, and refused to believe a word of it, so Abdullah put the evidence on the floor. The saffron still had some sweetness left in it. The pearls had gone yellow and lost their lustre. Of everything in the account, that is the detail that behaves most like something that actually happened.

The scripture underneath all this says almost nothing. Iram is named once in the Quran, in three short verses of the sura of the Dawn: have you not considered what your Lord did with the people of ʿĀd, with Iram of the pillars, the like of which was never created in the lands. Then the text moves straight on to Thamud who carved the rock in the valley, and to Pharaoh of the stakes, and it never comes back.

The commentators could not agree on what kind of thing Iram even was. Some read it as a city, some as a district, some as the name of a tribe, some as a man. The translators inherit the argument and cannot conceal it. Pickthall gives “many-columned Iram”, Yusuf Ali writes “the (city of) Iram, with lofty pillars”, Shakir has “the people of Aram, possessors of lofty buildings”, and Mohsin Khan removes the architecture altogether and renders the phrase as a people “very tall like lofty pillars”. Abu Ubayda took that last reading, on the grounds that Arabic will describe a tall man as a man of columns. Others held that the ʿĀd were the first people in the world to raise buildings on high pillars, and that the epithet is a flat description of their skyline.

The genealogists filled the gap with a family. Iram becomes a son of Shem son of Noah in one line, or a grandson of Shem through Aws in another, which makes him the same figure as the biblical Aram, ancestor of the Aramaeans, whose name means high country. From him the Arabian peoples descend: the ʿĀd through his eldest son, settled in al-Ahqaf, the sand dunes, and sent the prophet Hud; Thamud through another son, settled at al-Hijr, and sent the prophet Salih. On this reading Iram is not a place at all but a branch of the ʿĀd, the older half of a nation the Quran divides in two. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry does know a tribe of the name, usually spoken of alongside the ʿĀd, sometimes with Thamud and the Himyarites, and destroyed by a figure called Qudar al-Ahmar. Ibn Khaldun settled the matter for himself in a single line: Iram must be a tribe, because no city goes by the name.

Those who wanted a city had to choose one, and they could not agree either. Alexandria was proposed. So was Damascus, on the argument that Damascus was an Aramaean capital and that Iram simply is Aram; al-Hamdani preferred that reading and said the place was founded by Jayrun son of Saʿd son of ʿĀd and known as Jayrun of the columns for its marble. Tabari threw both suggestions out, pointing out that neither city fits what the Quran itself says about where the ʿĀd lived. Yaqut, who knew as much geography as anyone in the medieval world, recorded a high mountain called Iram in the land of Judham, inland from Aqaba. But the reading that won, and the one the storytellers seized, put Iram in Yemen between Hadramawt and Sanaa, and gave it a builder.

His name was Shaddad son of ʿĀd, and in the telling attributed to Kaʿb al-Ahbar he came across a description of paradise in an old book and decided to have one built. Three hundred and sixty kings emptied the mines of the world on his order. Gathering the material took twenty years and laying it took three hundred, and then twenty more went on raising a thousand pavilions on a thousand columns of chrysolite and ruby, one pavilion for each of his viziers, and twenty more before the court was ready to travel. Shaddad set out with his household and his army and got to within one day’s ride of the gates. A cry came out of the sky and killed the whole column where it stood, the king included, and not one of them ever laid eyes on the city. The road was blotted out behind them. His son had the body carried back to a cave in Hadramawt, laid it on a throne of gold under seventy robes of gold cloth, and set a gold tablet at its head, engraved with verses that open by telling the proud to take warning.

It is a magnificent story and it is not scripture. The chain it hangs from runs through Kaʿb al-Ahbar, a Yemeni convert whose material is the classic route by which Jewish and south Arabian legend entered Quranic commentary, and Turkish scholarship on that borrowed lore has established that the report usually cited as the source of the Iram treasure account is not sound. The paradise city, the pearl gravel, the three centuries of building: all of it is an elaboration on three verses.

There is, meanwhile, a real Iram, and the joke of it is that hardly anybody hunting the legendary one has ever wanted it. In the sandstone valley now called Wadi Rum in southern Jordan, inland from Aqaba, a spring drew nomadic tribes to a shrine long before the Nabataeans came. When the epigrapher Raphaël Savignac published his reports on the site through the early 1930s, he titled them for the sanctuary of Allat at Iram, which settles what the place was called locally. Under Aretas IV, who ruled from 9 or 8 BC to AD 40, a rectangular podium went up over the older shrine, reached by a narrow central stair of seven steps and carrying a chapel a little over three metres by not quite three, ringed on all four sides by columns: four across the front, four across the back, five down each flank. Fourteen in total. A block reused in the chapel foundation carries an older Thamudic dedication recording the building of a sanctuary to the same goddess by a tribe attested elsewhere in the valley. Diana Kirkbride dug there in 1959, the Jordanian Department of Antiquities cleared the site in 1962, the French institute Ifpo cleaned it in 1995, and the Belgian archaeologist Laurent Tholbecq recorded the temple in detail the following season. Iram of the pillars exists. It has fourteen of them, and they are broken.

None of which stopped the twentieth century having one more attempt. In 1930 the explorer Bertram Thomas was crossing the Empty Quarter when his guide pointed at a faint line in the ground and told him that was the way to Ubar, a great city rich in treasure, with date gardens and a fort of red silver, buried under the sand now. Thomas called it the Atlantis of the Sands and the name stuck. Sixty years later a team including the film-maker Nicholas Clapp, the explorer Ranulph Fiennes and the archaeologist Juris Zarins went after it with satellite imagery, traced old caravan tracks converging on a point in the Omani desert, dug at Shisur and found a fortress standing over a permanent spring that had been drawing people since the Neolithic. In February 1992 the New York Times announced the lost city. What the space shuttle radar had actually photographed, when the imagery was released, was fifty kilometres by a hundred of dune and limestone with the caravan tracks showing as diffuse reddish streaks, and NASA’s own caption records that the fortress is too small to appear in the frame at all. Zarins, writing the excavation up five years later, was blunter than the headlines. Ubar, he said, appears to have been an Arabian Nights fantasy: Arab historians used the word for a region rather than a town, and no city of that name appears anywhere on Ptolemy’s maps. He identified Shisur instead with a place Ptolemy did map, Marimatha, and allowed only that it was very possibly one of the towns that gave the myth something to grow on. Equating Ubar with Iram was never his idea.

So the city grants nothing, which turns out to be its function. It has no treasure a living person can spend, no gate anyone has found twice, and no location that two authorities will agree on. Its only power is the one those three verses give it, which is to head a short list of the destroyed and make an argument about wealth by being conspicuously missing. Its weakness is the same fact seen from the other side: erase the road to a place and you erase every means of proving it was ever there. What survives is a phrase good enough to have outlived its own evidence. In the poetry of the Islamic east the Garden of Iram became shorthand for anywhere too beautiful to be ordinary, a lover’s courtyard, the arrival of spring, and among the Sufis it turned inward completely and came to mean the human heart, on the grounds that the heart is where God is actually met.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Iram of the Pillars?

Iram of the Pillars is a legendary Arabian city of gold, silver and jewels, named a single time in the Quran and described at length only in much later storytelling. The Quranic passage says only that it was destroyed along with the people of ʿĀd and that nothing like it had been created in the lands. Everything else, including the treasure and the builder, comes from commentary and folktale rather than scripture.

Is Iram of the Pillars mentioned in the Quran?

Yes, but only once, in three short verses of the sura of the Dawn, where it is listed among the peoples God destroyed for their arrogance. The passage gives no location, no description and no date. Early commentators could not agree whether Iram was a city, a district, a tribe or a man, and the major English translations still split on the point.

Who was Shaddad and did he build Iram?

Shaddad son of ʿĀd is the king who builds Iram in the best known version of the legend, attributed to the early convert Kaʿb al-Ahbar and preserved in the Thousand and One Nights. He is said to have spent more than three centuries constructing a copy of paradise, only to be killed by a cry from the sky one day’s ride short of the gates. The story is not part of the Quranic text, and the report usually cited as its source has been judged unsound.

Has Iram of the Pillars ever been found?

No site has been accepted as the city of the legend. There is, however, a genuine place called Iram: the Nabataean sanctuary of the goddess Allat in Wadi Rum in southern Jordan, whose small temple stands on a podium ringed by fourteen columns and was built under King Aretas IV. Medieval writers proposed Alexandria, Damascus and a lost city in Yemen instead, and Tabari rejected the first two as inconsistent with the Quran.

Is Iram the same as Ubar, the Atlantis of the Sands?

They are separate legends that modern publicity welded together. Ubar was a lost-city story collected by the explorer Bertram Thomas in 1930 and pursued in 1992 by a team using satellite imagery, who excavated a fortress at Shisur in Oman. The archaeologist who ran that dig, Juris Zarins, later wrote that the city of Ubar looks like an Arabian Nights fantasy, that Arab historians used the word for a region rather than a town, and that Shisur is better identified with Ptolemy’s Marimatha.

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