Sadd Samallaqi Historic Dam
Sadd Samallaqi Historic Dam
A masonry dam in Wadi Thumala southwest of Taif, also called Samlaqi or al-Multaqa. Kufic inscriptions support an early Umayyad date. Published scale is about 212 by 25 metres.
Plan your visit
Practical information verified separately from the historical record.
Access: طريق بري جنوب الطائف؛ تحقق من حالة الطريق ولا تدخل مجرى الوادي عند توقع المطر.
Why visit?
Anchors Taif’s hydraulic history in a dated masonry dam rather than in spring-lore alone.
The dam is recorded under three equivalent names — Thumala, Samlaqi, and al-Multaqa — as one structure in Wadi Thumala, some 30 km southwest of Taif. The names are aliases, not three monuments.
Published dimensions are about 212 m long, 25 m high and 10 m at the crest, with storage on the order of half a million cubic metres. The wall is a double masonry face with a rubble core. Kufic inscriptions are read as early Umayyad, in the time of Muawiya. That is the working official reading, not a laboratory date. Informal captions that call the dam pre-Islamic are not followed here.
The work belongs to the tentative UNESCO file on ancient dams of Saudi Arabia. The crest is not a walkway; the channel is unsafe in flood.