Arab Prophets and the 

Tombs of Giants

Prof. Brannon M. Wheeler 
Associate Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington, 

Senior CAORC Fellow, American Centers for Oriental Research in Amman, 

Research Fellow, Multi-Country Fulbright in Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and 

Author of numerous books and articles on Islam

Numerous pilgrims and travellers report that the tombs of the Arab prophets are much longer than the tombs of ordinary people, ranging from ten to fifty meters in length.  Little has been written on these long tombs despite their frequent mention in a variety of sources and the clear association between the Arab prophets and the giants of antediluvian times.

What scholarship has been done on Muslim tombs has tended to focus on the architecture and archaeology of cemeteries and on funerary rituals and the visitation of tombs by Muslim pilgrims. There has been some recognition of the so-called "Nine-Meter" [nau-gaz] long tombs in South and Southeast Asia, usually associated with the Muslim warriors [ghazi] involved in the earliest conquests of India, and have been identified primarily in northwest India and Pakistan but also as far east as Bengal and Java.   Until how, however, no studies have been made of the connection between the nau-gaz tombs and the long tombs of the Arab prophets, nor has there been an attempt to explain the Islamic character of these tombs.

The lecture proposes a broad theoretical context with which to
interpret the nau-gaz tombs and the long tombs of prophets in the Hadhramawt and other locations throughout the Near East and Africa. 

This study does not constitute a systematic overview of all the recorded long tombs, but rather highlights a number of details linking the Islamic examples with traditions from Hindu and Buddhist practices, classical Greece, and the ancient Near East.  Some of the different explanations given for the length of particular tombs are examined with a goal of reaching a larger conception of how these long tombs are related to Islamic models of prophet hood and the spread of religion. The comparison of these various traditions suggest that the long tombs are to be understood as part of an Islamic ideology of the origins and development of civilization from the time of Adam and Eve's fall from Eden to the prophet Muhammad and beyond.

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