The Road to Ubar

by Nicholas Clapp

  In the half of Arabia under the sway of Greece and Rome, the kingdoms of Ma'in, Saba, and Qataban were too far away to present problems, at least for the time being. It was the increasingly powerful kingdom of the Hadramaut that was troublesome. It was uncomfortably close to the land of 'Ad, and the envoy did not have to remind Khuljan of the adage "If on the trail you meet up with a Hadrami and a deadly snake, kill the Hadrami."

  What a puzzle of kingdoms and peoples for such a remote land.

  "Enough!" said Khuljan, dismissing the envoy.

  The king clapped his hands and called for the wives and children who had accompanied him to Ubar. They were richly arrayed. His wives were unveiled and much freer than in Arabia of later days. Still, they had been painfully marked on their betrothal to Khuljan. He had ordered his fool to make a wide part in their hair by using a razor to remove a strip of skin from their foreheads to the back of their necks. It was a sometimes fatal operation.

  Khuljan clapped his hands a second time, and his fool brought forward a gourd of water. The king dipped his right hand in it as if to wash, but did not. Like most of his countrymen, he believed bathing damaged the body. (Although he washed on entering the temple, it was for appearances only.) Thank the gods for frankincense. With a burner, the fool perfumed the king's garments and beard.

  The king clapped his hands a third time, and servants brought forth bowls of squash, roasted beans, and meat both raw and roasted. There were flat breads and honeycakes, richly flavored by the nectar of the flowering elb tree. There was wine, too, pressed from the grapes that grew high in the Dhofar Mountains. Though the royal company ate well, they ate with haste, a custom born of the ancient reality that mealtime was the best time for lurking enemies to stage a surprise attack.

  As the remaining food was cleared away, to be shared by the servants and the king's animals, the fool rubbed the soles of Khuljan's feet and his calves with butter. The king relaxed and whiled away the desert night. From where his tent was pitched, he could take pleasure in looking across at Ubar's fortress, bathed in the light of the moon and set in a diadem of twinkling campfires. Some nights he would send the fool off to recruit camel drivers who could entertain him with their riding chants and songs of memory and love. Other nights the fool would entertain the king's family with jokes and riddles.

  "Which is there more of, land or sea?" asked the fool.

  "The sea," ventured one of the king's children, "for it goes on forever."

  "No," answered the fool, "it is the land, for the sea itself is set upon the land. And what is the sweetest thing in creation?"

  "A horse or a camel?" replied the king, only half joking.

  "A king's favorite wife," ventured the king's favorite wife.

  "Close," said the fool. "The sweetest thing is love from the heart. On this earth it is all we can expect."

  On rare and special nights, the king was favored with the presence of a poet. The crafting of verse was considered a great skill, a way to preserve tales of a tribe's history and glory, to immortalize its bold warriors and their dark-eyed women. Poets admitted to being possessed by shaytan djinns; how else could they produce anything so complex in rhythm and rhyme, so entrancing?

  Enthralled by a woman of the oasis, a poet versified:

  Were it not for her whose wily charms and love

  My heart have captured and my soul possessed,

  Never would I at Iram have pitched my tent...8

  Another poet evoked the melancholy destiny of Ubar and all Arabia: riches may come to you; death will surely come to you. A poem that cites "a man of the race of 'Ad and Iram" might well have portrayed King Khuljan and his court:

  Roast flesh, the glow of fiery wine,

  to speed on camel fleet and sure.

  White women statue-like that trail

  rich robes of price with golden hem,

  Wealth, easy lot, no dread of ill,

  to hear the lute's complaining string.

  These are Life's joys. But man is set

  the prey of Time, and Time is change.

  Life straight or large, great store or naught,

  all's one to Time, all men to Death.9

  The king's fool ventured the riddle: "Who shall conquer all human races?"

  "We all know," Khuljan answered. "It is death. Violent and cruel toward all."

  When he had had his fill of poetry and wine, Khuljan selected his beloved for the night and prepared to retire. His fool shooed away the other wives and children and extinguished the lamps of the royal tent. All but one. By its light, Khuljan regarded himself in the sheet of polished bronze that served as his glass. Eyes lined with ashen frankincense, how regal was his gaze. He took two wads of cotton with tassels dangling from them, and with his little finger pushed them up his nose, protection against the djinns that rode upon the night air.

  The next week or the next month, Khuljan, mighty king of 'Ad, rode away to the mountains and the coast, to Eriyot, his royal city.10 Over the years he and his heirs enjoyed riches and (as far as is known) remarkable tribal stability. Khuljan and his people, in fact, stood at the threshold of classical achievement, even greatness.

  It was a threshold they never crossed.

  The 'Ad could have established a formal state, yet instead they remained forever a tribe. They could have created mosaics and heroic statues, yet their vision reached no farther than the rock art on the walls of their caves. The 'Ad could have developed a world view, even a transcendent theology, but instead they worried about lurking djinns and the evils of the night air.

  22. City of Good and Evil

  THE RISE AND FALL of Ubar spawned a myth of good versus evil. To give it dramatic impact and immediacy, many storytellers have had Ubar destroyed in the very reign of the king who ordered the city's construction. Ubar is barely up before it comes tumbling down. God hardly hesitates before wiping the wicked city from the face of the earth. How better to reward a king who proclaimed, "And people feared my mischief every one."

  In reality, following major construction around 350 B.C., Ubar thrived for at least six centuries before its destruction and abandonment. A secret city of frankincense, well fortified, splendid in its isolation. In that era the People of'Ad enjoyed an advantageous position in Arabia, even as an increasing number of tribes jostled for power. Classical writers called the collective lot of these tribes "Scenitae." Pliny the Elder tells us: "A singular thing too, one half of these almost innumerable tribes live by the pursuits of commerce, the other half by rapine: take them all in all, they are the richest nations in the world, seeing that such vast wealth flows in upon them from both the Roman and the Parthian empires; for they sell the produce of the sea or of their forests, while they purchase nothing whatever in return."1

  To protect their share of Arabia's wealth, the 'Ad aligned themselves with the Parthians, who likely demanded considerable tribute. Yet the Parthians were a long way away when, beginning in the 200s B.C., the People of'Ad faced increased threats to their control, at its source, of the frankincense trade.

  First a migrating tribe, the Omanis, approached from the west and may have threatened Ubar before continuing on their way. Then there was trouble on the coast. Shortly after the time of Christ, the neighboring kingdom of the Hadramaut established a fortified outpost overlooking the best natural port in the land of the Ad. They called it Sumhuram, a word likely meaning "the Great Scheme." That it was, for Sumhuram gave the Hadramis control of the sea trade in frankincense. Further, with military efficiency, the Hadramis built facilities for incense collection and storage inland at Hanun and Andhur.

  This incursion was not necessarily hostile. The Greeks and Romans now fully understood the seasonal workings of the trade winds and were freely plying the Indian Ocean. The 'Ad may have decided: better an alliance with the Hadrami king, 'Had, than potential conquest by the Romans. It wouldn't be the first instance of a love-hate relationship as old as the Middle East: "Brother against brother, brothers against cousins, brot
hers and cousins against the world."

  Despite what was happening on the coast, evidence suggests that Ubar continued to prosper.2 What ultimately dimmed its star, and all the stars of Arabia, was a development no one had anticipated: the advent of Christianity. The new religion, as it spread throughout the Middle East, preached that the dead be given a simple burial rather than being cremated, a rite that traditionally called for the burning of enormous quantities of frankincense. For Christians, salvation was gained by belief and good works, not by offerings to the gods. When in 313 A.D. Constantine the Great proclaimed Christianity the favored religion of the Roman Empire, the demand for incense fell off drastically. One by one, the kingdoms of southern Arabia, described by Pliny as "the richest nations in the world," collapsed and were forgotten.

  For four years, as myth has it, Ubar was cursed with a drought that withered its crops and killed its animals. If not actual, the drought was metaphorical; the glory days of the incense trade were over. Even so, the king of the 'Ad—now the legendary King Shaddad—was undiminished in his vanity, his arrogance. Shaddad—a name meaning "the strong"—believed himself to be a god, powerful and mighty. The Ubarites agreed. In chorus they proclaimed, "Who is mightier than we?"

  To this, one man dissented. He was a handsome merchant, said to be dark-skinned, with flowing hair. He warned of the fate in store for the 'Ad if they persisted in their wicked ways. The man's name was Hud, and he may well have been a Jew, for his name meant "He of the Jews."

  It wouldn't have been at all unusual for a wandering Jew to visit Ubar, or even for a faction of the People of 'Ad to have subscribed to Jewish beliefs. Historically, there were several opportunities for Judaism to have penetrated Arabia. As early as the time of Solomon (950 B.C.), Jewish envoys and traders may have traveled the Incense Road. And in one tradition, following their exile to Babylon (587 and 538 B.C.), a contingent of Jews migrated to Dhofar (and Ubar?) and thence to southwestern Yemen, where they quietly survive to this day in the valley of the Wadi Habban. Later, it is certain that in the diaspora precipitated by the Roman conquest of Jerusalem (70 A.D.), numbers of Jews fled to Arabia. Over the years they flourished to the extent that in 520—the time of the legendary but perhaps real Hud—a Jewish king sat on the throne of a powerful western Arabian kingdom.3

  At Ubar the stage was set for a morality play, perhaps real, definitely metaphorical. The saintly Hud versus the degenerate Shaddad. Transcendence versus materialism. God versus gods. According to the Koran and subsequent Islamic accounts, Hud was appalled by Shaddad's idolatry; this accords with Islam's tenet that the greatest of all sins is shirk, the indiscriminate worship of both lesser beings and material goods. It is uncertain, though, how strongly a real (or even metaphorical) Hud would have felt about this, even if he was Jewish. The Old Testament, though a wellspring of monotheism, directs, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," not "Thou shall have no other gods but me." In Hud's era, Judaism in Arabia wasn't all that monotheistic; it appears to have been entranced with the worship of a hierarchy of angels, with the archangel Metatron rivaling the majesty of God.

  Evidence of Hud's tolerance of other gods may be found in the story of the delegation of 'Adites that set out for Mecca at his urging to seek relief from Ubar's four years of drought. Mecca then was hardly a center of monotheism; it was, in fact, a swap meet for gods. A pilgrimage often entailed carting a tribal god-block to Mecca and taking another one home in return. The city's holy precinct was choked with 360 tribal idols, complemented by a painting of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. To the Arabians, various deities were sources of power and influence, and it seemed perverse to turn one's back on a potential source of help by opting for only one God.

  The prophet Hud may have espoused the worship of El or Allah, a single, transcendent God, and he may have decried the betyls of the People of'Ad, but there had to be more than that to his quarrel with Shaddad. Consider an obscure but telling fragment of the Ubar legend ascribed to Kaab al-Ahbar. It tells of the palace "which Shaddad ibn 'Ad built and plastered against the wind.... When he sat atop his palace with his wives, he would order everyone who passed by, be he who he may, to be killed. God destroyed him."4 This chilling image raises the question: how wicked were the People of 'Ad, if in fact they were wicked?

  Certainly the eye—and the agenda—of the beholder needs to be considered when it comes to wickedness in the biblical era. Nations and tribes (and their chroniclers) have long looked at one another and said, "We can't conquer them, we can't control them, therefore they're ignorant, barbarous, wicked." For all we know, the populace of Sodom and Gomorrah (to say nothing of the entire world before the Flood) may have not been that bad a lot, just a little rough around the edges.

  Nonetheless, there was a dark, dystopian side to life in pre-Islamic Arabia. In the works of classical authors and in the inscriptions left behind by southern Arabians, there is a dispiriting sense that life was coarse and brutish, particularly in the Jehiliaya, the approximately four-hundred-year "age of darkness" that preceded the birth of the prophet Muhammad and the rise of Islam. The Arabians were mired in blood feuds and internecine wars. Drunkenness and debauchery were common. The vocabulary of the pre-Islamic Arabians has an astounding number of words descriptive of treachery, cruelty, and malice.5 HBT means "to act corruptly," TBR is "to crush or ruin," RIDH is "to sow death." There appears to be but a single recorded use of the word HMRN, which means "a gracious act."

  Every Arabian is by nature "a huckster and merchant," Strabo tells us, and that's the best he has to say. He proceeds to describe a convoluted, dissolute social order:

  Brothers are held in higher honor than children.... One woman is also the wife for all, and he who first enters the house before any other has intercourse with her, having first placed his staff before the door, for by custom each man must carry a staff; but she spends the night with the eldest. And therefore all children are brothers. They also have intercourse with their mothers; and the penalty for an adulterer is death; but only the person from another family is an adulterer. A daughter of one of the kings, who was admired for her beauty, had fifteen brothers, who were all in love with her, and therefore visited her unceasingly, one after another. At last, being tired out by their visits, she used the following device: she had staves made like theirs, and when one of them left her, she always put a staff like his in front of the door, and a little later another, and then another—it being her aim that the one who was likely to visit her next might not have a staff similar to the one in front of the door. 6

  This polyandry arose because of the prevalence of female infanticide. The prophet Muhammad felt the practice was poison to the cup of Arabia. As he sought to reform his world, eliminating it was his first and major social concern. Muhammad's assertions in the Koran are reinforced by a grim account offered by Abu al-Kasim al-Zamakhshari, an early commentator on the Koran:

  When an Arab had a daughter born, if he intended to bring her up, he sent her, clothed in a garment of wool or hair, to keep camels or sheep in the desert; but if he designed to put her to death, he let her live till she became six years old and then said to her mother, "Perfume her, and adorn her, that I may carry her to her mothers"; which being done, the father led her to a well or pit dug for that purpose, and having bid her to look down into it, pushed her in headlong, as he stood behind her, and then filling up the pit, leveled it with the rest of the ground. Others say that when a woman was ready to fall in labor, they dug a pit, on the brink whereof she was to be delivered; and if the child happened to be a daughter, they threw it into the pit; but if a son, they saved it alive.7

  We can understand why the historian al-Tabari wrote of the "inhuman brutality" of the People of 'Ad, which they "indulged without remorse, and with unmitigated ferocity." So it may have been that, beholding the dark practices of pre-Islamic Arabia, Muhammad preached that Allah told the People of'Ad: "An ignominious punishment shall be yours this day, because you behaved with pride and injustice of the earth
and committed evil."

  23. Sons and Thrones Are Destroyed

  SOMETIME BETWEEN 300 and 500 A.D., Ubar was suddenly and violently destroyed—both in myth and reality. Over millennia, Ubar's great well had watered countless caravans and had been drawn upon to irrigate a sizable oasis. Handspan by handspan, its waters had receded, and the limestone shelf on which the fortress rested became less and less stable, for it was the water underneath Ubar that quite literally held the place up. If, as in legend, there was a severe drought—and ever more reliance on a single, dwindling spring—the situation would have become critical.

  By all accounts, the end came at night. It was likely initiated by a minor tremor, an echo of a faraway earthquake. Yet the seismic shock that hit Ubar was enough to crack and split the limestone underlying the main gate. Almost simultaneously, a huge mass of rock beneath the Citadel gave way, and with a thunderous crash ("the divine shout" of the Ubar legend?) the eastern half of the fifteen-hundred-year-old structure sheared off and plunged into the void below. Anyone inside would have been instantly killed by the crush of tons of masonry and fractured bedrock.

  In a few seconds it was over, and a terrible stillness was upon Ubar. A haze of dust rose from the yawning, hellish sinkhole. The colors of that night were the crimson of sudden death, the blackness of the sky, and the pale yellow of the moon. In the broken city, a few shattered oil lamps flickered and died out.

  As in its myth, the city had sunk into the sands.

  "The next morning," the story has it, "all was ruin." Even so, there would have been survivors, as relatively few people slept inside the city's walls, still preferring the tents of their nomadic ancestors. Terror-stricken, they probably gathered up any treasure that was kept at Ubar and fled across the desert.