Hegra (Mada'in Salih) in the context of She-Camel of God

The Thamud (Arabic: ثَمُود, romanized: Ṯamūd) were an ancient tribe or tribal confederation in pre-Islamic Arabia that occupied the northwestern Arabian Peninsula. They are attested in contemporaneous Mesopotamian and Classical inscriptions, as well as Arabic ones from the eighth century BCE, all the way until the fifth century CE, when they served as Roman auxiliaries. They are also later remembered in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and Islamic-era sources, including the Quran. Prominently, they appear in the Ruwafa inscriptions discovered in a temple constructed circa 165–169 CE in honor of the local deity, ʾlhʾ.

Islamic sources state that the Thamud were an early Arab tribe that had gone extinct in ancient days. Thamud appears twenty-six times in the Quran, where the tribe is presented as an example of an ancient polytheistic people destroyed by God for their rejection of God's prophet Salih. In the Quran, Thamud is associated with a pattern of rebellion and destruction of past groups of people. This is done the most times with Ad, but others as well, like Lot and Noah. When Salih calls Thamud to serve one God, they demand a sign from him. He presents them with a miraculous she-camel. Thamud, unconvinced, injure the camel; for this, God destroys them, except Salih and his followers. This account is embellished with a more detailed background in the Islamic exegetical tradition. Some traditions locate the tribe in northwestern Arabia at Hegra, and in others they are identified as Nabataeans. Islamic genealogy describes the Thamud as among the true Arab tribes, as opposed to the "Arabicized Arabs".

Nabataean Arabic was the dialect of Arabic spoken by the Nabataeans in antiquity.

In the first century AD, the Nabataeans wrote their inscriptions, such as the legal texts carved on the façades of the monumental tombs at Mada'in Salih, ancient Ḥegrā, in Nabataean Aramaic.

The Rūwafa inscriptions (or Ruwwāfa inscriptions, Rawwāfa inscriptions) are a group of five Greek–Nabataean Arabic inscriptions known from the isolated Ruwāfa temple, located in the Hisma desert of northwestern Arabia, or roughly 200 km northwest of Hegra. They are dated to 165–169 AD. The inscriptions are numbered using Roman numerals, running from Inscriptions I to Inscription V. Two of the five inscriptions describe the structure as a temple and that it was constructed by the εθνος/šrkt of Thamud in honor of the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. The Thamud tribe is otherwise well-attested to have existed in this region of Arabia from at least the 8th century BC. At the time of the composition of these inscriptions in the second century, northwestern Arabia was known as Arabia Petraea, a frontier province of the Roman Empire that had been previously conquered in 106 AD.

The location of the inscriptions are curious, given that they are found at the southern extremities of the Roman province of Arabia with little else nearby, which has been described by some as the "last place" where a set of inscriptions recognizing the imperial authority of the Roman Empire would be found, though it adds to the significance of the inscription, indicating that this distant region of Arabia alongside the allied auxiliary unit still received attention from the emperors. It may have been that the empire was recruiting some of the inhabitants of the region into the army. Today, the inscriptions are housed at the National Museum of Saudi Arabia except for the Inscription V which is lost.

The She-Camel of God (Arabic: نَاقة الله, romanized: naaqat Allah, lit. 'camel of God (f.)') in Islam was a miraculous female camel sent by God to the people of Thamud in Al-Hijr, after they demanded a miracle from Salih to prove his prophethood. The narrative and story of the she-camel is recorded in the Qur'an, particularly in Surah Al Hijr.

al-Ula (Arabic: ٱلْعُلَا‎, romanized: al-ʿUlā), officially AlUla, is an ancient Arabian oasis city and governorate located in Medina Province, Saudi Arabia, 350 kilometres (220 miles) northwest of the city of Medina. Situated in the Hejaz, a region that features prominently in the history of Islam as well as several pre-Islamic Semitic civilizations, al-Ula was a market city on the historic incense trade route that linked India and the Persian Gulf to the Levant and Europe.

From an archaeological perspective, the immediate vicinity contains a unique concentration of precious artifacts, including well-preserved ancient stone inscriptions that illustrate the development of the Arabic language, and a concentration of rock dwellings and tombs that date from the Nabatean and Dedanite periods that coincided with Greco-Roman influence during classical antiquity. Saudi Arabia's first UNESCO World Heritage Site, Hegra (also known as al-Hijr, or Mada'in Ṣalih), is located 22 km (14 miles) north of the city, in al-Ula governorate. Built more than 2,000 years ago by the Nabataeans, Hegra is often compared with its sister city of Petra, in Jordan. Meanwhile, the ancient walled oasis city of al-Ula, locally known as al-Dirah, situated near the oasis's palm grove that allowed for its settlement, contains a dense cluster of mudbrick and stone houses. al-Ula was also the capital of the ancient Lihyanites (Dedanites).

The Nabataean script is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) that was used to write Nabataean Aramaic and Nabataean Arabic from the second century BC onwards. Important inscriptions are found in Petra (in Jordan), the Sinai Peninsula (now part of Egypt), Bosra and Namara (in Syria), and other archaeological sites including Abdah (in Israel) and Mada'in Saleh (Hegra) (in Saudi Arabia).

Nabataean is only known through inscriptions and, more recently, a small number of papyri. It was first deciphered in 1840 by Eduard Friedrich Ferdinand Beer. 6,000 – 7,000 Nabataean inscriptions have been published, of which more than 95% are mostly short inscriptions or graffiti, and the vast majority are undated, post-Nabataean or from outside the core Nabataean territory. A majority of inscriptions considered Nabataean were found in Sinai, and another 4,000 – 7,000 such Sinaitic inscriptions remain unpublished. Prior to the publication of Nabataean papyri, the only substantial corpus of detailed Nabataean text were the 38 funerary inscriptions from Mada'in Salih (Hegra), discovered and published by Charles Montagu Doughty, Charles Huber, Philippe Berger and Julius Euting in 1884-85.

Thirteen ancient towns have been discovered in Saudi Arabia up to the present day. These include, Mecca, Qaryat al-Fāw, the Al-Ukhdūd archeological area, Hegra (Madā'in Ṣālih), Jubbah, Tārūt, Al-Shuwayḥaṭiyah, Thāj, Taimaa and Dūmat Al-Jandal. There are still more ancient towns in Saudi Arabia, but little information is currently available on them. Saudi Arabia occupies a unique and distinctive geographic location, bridging civilizations between continents. In ancient times the Arabian peninsula served as a corridor for trade; therefore it saw the beginning of many civilizations, the relics of which are still evident today. The Saudi government has recently established the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities, which is responsible for the preservation of these cities.