The modern Arabic name most commonly attached to the site, Mada'in Salih, "the Cities of Salih," comes from an identification made long after the Nabataean kingdom itself had faded, connecting the ruins to a narrative found in the Quran about the Thamud, a people to whom the prophet Salih was sent and who were destroyed after rejecting his message and, in the account's central episode, hamstringing a miraculous she-camel sent to them as a sign. Islamic tradition has generally identified the Thamud with the region around Hegra and its rock-cut tombs, reading the abandoned, monumental ruins as physical evidence of divine punishment carried out against a people who defied a prophet, an identification that shaped how the site was regarded for centuries independent of what modern archaeology has since established about its actual Nabataean origin.
That religious association has had a real, practical effect on how the site has been visited and treated historically: accounts describe travelers and pilgrims passing near the site, including on routes toward Mecca, being cautioned or advised against lingering there, treating the ruins less as a destination worth admiring and more as a place whose history called for solemnity or even avoidance. Modern archaeology and the site's inscription as a UNESCO World Heritage property, Saudi Arabia's first, have since reframed Hegra publicly as a monument of genuine historical and artistic significance in its own right, but the older religious reading has not simply disappeared, and this atlas records both accounts, the archaeological Nabataean history and the Quranic Thamud association layered onto the same ruins, rather than treating one as having quietly replaced the other.