THE AD & THE THAMUD: The home of the Ad was Iram of the Pillars. These ‘pillars’ are currently known as Rajajel Columns. According to Wiki: “The Rajajel Columns is an archaeological site of pillars carved from sandstone thought to be 6,000 years old. It is located in the Al Jawf Region in Saudi Arabia. Specifically situated in the suburb of Qara south of Sakakah, it consists of 50 groups of erected stone columns called Rajajil. Some of the existing columns are higher than three meters, while they are about 60 cm thick.” The Ad predated Moses according to the Quran which states that the Egyptian king who ruled at the time of Moses was Khufu whose vizier, Haman (Hm Awn -Priest of ‘the city of” the Pillars) is named in the Quran. His tomb was discovered in 1912. Accordingly, the Ad tribal confederation which erected the rajajel pre-dated Khufu. The year of this tribe’s demise has not been established but it was before the reign of Khufu.
The Thamud of the Quran are NOT the Nabateans. According to the Quran, the Ad and the Thamud lived before Haman, the vizier of the Egyptian king, Khufu. Quran 7:74 does not say that the Thamud carved houses into mountains. The verse says that they “take out of the plains (material to build) palaces and from the mountains they hew (stone for their) dwellings/buildings. These stone structures are called ‘mustatils’. “Concentrated in northern Arabia, over 1600 mustatils have been identified through remote sensing, aerial photography, and ground survey. Ranging from 20-600m in length, these monumental structures were constructed from… local undressed rocks…”
According to Wiki: Mustatils are prehistoric monuments made of sandstone walls which are found in northwest Saudi Arabia. Named mustatil (Arabic: lit.’rectangle’, plural, mustatilat) for their shape, they have walls surrounding a long central courtyard, with a rubble platform at one end and entrances at the end opposite the platform. Some entrances are closed off with stones. Over 1,000 mustatils, clustered in groups of 2–19, are spread out across a ritual landscape covering 200,000 square kilometres. They range from 20 to over 600 metres in length, with walls that are 1.2 metres high. Some of the sandstone blocks used in their construction weigh more than 500 kilograms…Excavation of one mustatil funded by the Royal Commission for Al-‘Ula (aka Al Hijr aka Mada’in Salih) revealed a chamber at the center containing fragments of cattle skulls, but no remains from other parts of the animals; they are believed to be evidence of a previously unknown cattle cult. Radiocarbon dating of the skulls revealed that the mustatil, and maybe the others, was built between 5300–5000 BCE, during the Holocene Humid Phase, a time when the area was a grassland that went through frequent droughts. This would make the mustatils one of the oldest-known large-scale ritual landscapes in the world.” Radio carbon shows that these builders of the mustatils were either the Thamud or a people who were ancestors of the Thamud who continued to dwell in the area and became contemporaries of the Ad. However, because of their position in the northwest Arabia, the Ad were more powerful than the Thamud. When the Ad were destroyed, the Thamud succeeded them as the most prominent tribe and/or tribal confederation. According to the Quran, both of these tribes preceded Haman, the vizier to the Egyptian King Khufu. Khufu ruled Egypt at the time of Moses, according to the Quran. THE QURAN IS ALWAYS CORRECT AND PRECISE.