The Cairn of Wrd (Wādī Ḥašād Salmà), Al-Mafraq Governorate, Jordan

The cairn of Wrd, probably vocalized Wāred, is a burial installation situated atop a prominent hill overlooking Wādī Ḥašād Salmà in the northeastern Badia of Jordan. During the rainy season, the valley receives substantial water and enjoys abundant herbage, which draws nomadic-pastoralists. Remote sensing reveals numerous wall-like structures and kites, used in ancient times for hunting. 𝐇𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐨𝐟 𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: The cairn was first documented in 1995 by Dr Sabri Al-Abbadi. He recorded an unknown number of inscriptions from the area, of which he only published three in Abbadi (1996); these appear on OCIANA under the siglum AbWH. Abbadi also reports that the Graeco-Arabic inscription A 1 (Al-Jallad and al-Manaser 2015) was found at the cairn of Wrd, but the inscription could not be relocated or verified by the BES19 team. The site was visited again by Ali al-Manaser during his 2004 survey of Wādī al-Ḥašād. Only eight of the inscriptions from this survey were published in Al-Manaser 2016, with the remaining texts appearing online in the first iteration of OCIANA under the siglum AMSI. AMSI 41 was published separately by Al-Jallad (2018a). The cairn was visited by the BES19s mission in June 2019 (Dir. Ahmad Al-Jallad and Ali al-Manaser), where a number of important inscriptions, including AMSI 41, were re-photographed. A future mission is planned to fully document the site archaeologically.

The main feature of this site is a large, single-chamber funerary cairn. Unlike the cairn of Hani (Harding 1953), this construction boasts a portal entrance to the burial chamber, where the dead man was interred. The cairn has been looted but the skull of the deceased remains within the chamber. In ancient times, the site was a center of visitation. Nearly 200 Safaitic inscriptions (most of which remain incompletely edited) have been documented here, but only 15 commemorate Wrd and describe building the installation. Two inscriptions were left by men who visited the site later and reacted to Wrd's burial. The remaining inscriptions are not associated with the burial and could have been left by those who stopped here before the cairn's construction, or those who came after but without any intent to visit or commemorate Wrd. For more on this custom, see Al-Jallad 2025c.