At the outset of our search for Ubar, we scarcely imagined that we would find a reality that with a fair degree of accuracy validated the city's myth, but following Juris Zarins's four years of painstaking excavation, it seemed we had. Whether by divine vengeance or the random happenstance of nature, Ubar came to an awful end. For at least the next four centuries, the site's archaeological record—its stratigraphy—tells us that Ubar was a ghost fortress, abandoned.
Yet, Ubar lived on, as we've seen—in memory, imagination, and legend. Following the city's demise, a likely scenario is that the Mahra—a tribe that had its origins in the People of 'Ad—carried the tale of Ubar's fall to the kingdom of the Hadramaut. Then, traveling to Mecca around 610, Bani Zahl ibn Shaitan, a Hadrami merchant, told the prophet Muhammad of the fate that had befallen the wicked 'Adites. Muhammad saw in the story a mirror of the sins of his Meccan opponents and the punishment Allah might have in store for them if they continued to ignore and deride him, as the people of'Ad had laughed at the warnings of Hud.
Once cited in the Koran, the Ubar story was elaborated on by generations of Arab storytellers, threadbare rawis as well as caparisoned court historians. And, possibly even before the revelations of the Koran, the story became part and parcel of Jewish folklore.1 A Jewish tale has none other than King Solomon visiting ruined Ubar (disregarding the fact that the city was destroyed at least twelve hundred years after his time). It relates how he had a prized piece of tapestry, sixty miles square, on which he flew through the air so swiftly he could eat breakfast in Damascus and have supper in Medina. On one such outing he came to earth in a mysterious desert valley, his attention caught by a great, golden palace. With the exception of a pair of elderly eagles, it was abandoned. The oldest of the birds (aged 1,300 years) recalled that the palace could be entered by an iron door long buried in the sand. In clearing it, Solomon discovered the inscription: "We, the dwellers in this palace, for many years lived in comfort and luxury; then, forced by hunger we ground pearls into flour instead of wheat—but to no avail, and so, when we were about to die, we bequeathed this palace to the eagles."
Passing through the iron door, Solomon wandered through apartments bedecked with pearls and precious stones and confronted a legion of statues that came alive "with great noise and tumult ... causing earthquake and thunder." He threw them over, and from the throat of one drew a silver plate, inscribed: "I, Shaddad ben 'Ad, ruled over a thousand thousand provinces, rode on a thousand horses, had a thousand thousand kings under me, and slew a thousand thousand heros, and when the Angel of Death approached me, I was powerless."2
A further inscription offered a good moral for a bad place: "Whoever doth read this writing, let him give up troubling greatly about this world, for the destiny and end of all men is to die, and nothing remains of a man but his good name."3
The real Ubar was not left forever to the eagles. There was still water here, and after an initial period of abandonment the place has been occupied off and on to the present day. Sometime around 900 A.D., Mahra tribesmen rode to the site. With the fortress's old gate collapsed into the sinkhole, they breached the eastern wall so that they could water their horses. Their Arab horses were of sufficient quality to warrant, every year, running a herd across the Rub' al-Khali—via the old Ubar road—to be offered for sale in India. To provide a station for this trade, the Mahra rebuilt walls and parts of the Citadel, but with mud bricks and rubble rather than masonry.
Soon thereafter, someone brought a sandstone chess set to Shisur, as the site was now called, and in a tower of the ruined fortress matched wits in a game that, like the rise and fall of this lonely outpost, ended with the word shahmaut—"To the king (shah), death (maut)." Or, as we have anglicized it, "Checkmate." The chess pieces were scattered about and forgotten. This may have happened when the fortress was attacked and burned around 940, probably by the Hadramis, who had for a very long time sought to control the 'Ad and, thereafter, the Mahra. In the Citadel, the defenders had stashed but did not use hundreds of iron-tipped arrows (discovered by Juri in 1993). What would the Hadramis have gained? Little but the settling of an ancient score.
In medieval times, Shisur had to have been a melancholy place. In 1221, Ibn Mujawir, a merchant of Baghdad, recorded the final abandonment of the old trade route—the road to Ubar—across the Rub' al-Khali. Travelers Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta wrote of the Dhofar region but said nothing of a city out in the desert (although Ibn Battuta, somewhat sarcastically, mentioned the remnants of the realm of the 'Ad).
The final incident of note in Ubar's history came in the early 1500s when the Hadrami warlord Badr ibn Tuwariq appears to have desultorily rebuilt the old Citadel—and was subsequently credited by the region's bedouin for constructing the entire fortress. The site's true identity—and any hint of all that had happened in and around its walls—was thereafter obscured. Sometime later the bedouin began to believe that Ubar lay hidden in the dunes of the Rub' al-Khali, for that's where they found Neolithic artifacts and that's where the old road ran.
Just when all remembrance of Ubar was fading from bedouin memory (displaced by fascination with a world of Toyotas and Walkmans), an odd chain of events brought an odd collection of adventurers to Shisur. They dug and unearthed an ancient fortress rising above what once was a tent city.
***
Strata and shards and carbon-14 dates have subsequently given a new reality to the preaching of the prophet Muhammad, to the storytelling of streetcorner rawis, even to the doggerel of contemporary bedouin. A remote desert ruin might have forever remained just that, but for their words...
As old as 'Ad...
Roast flesh, the glow of fiery wine,
to speed on camel fleet and sure...
And ninety concubines, of comely breast
And rounded hips, amused me in its halls...
O delegation of drunks, remember your tribe...
Wealth, easy lot...
An ignominious punishment shall be yours this day, because you behaved with pride and injustice of the earth and committed evil...
Sons and thrones are destroyed!...
Now all is gone, all this with that...
Checkmate...
It was a great city, our fathers have told us, that existed of old; a city rich in treasure...
At the end of life there is nothing but the whisper of the desert wind; the tinkling of the camel's bell...4
* * *
Epilogue: Hud's Tomb
IN THE SPRING OF 1995, Juris Zarins and his crew wrapped up their archaeological program in Dhofar—and in neighboring Yemen, Kay and I, accompanied by our photographer friends Julie Masterson and David Meltzer, journeyed to where the myth of Ubar came to rest: the tomb of Hud.
Along the way we thought and talked about something that, we saw in retrospect, had underscored our quest for Ubar and the People of 'Ad: the relationship between myth and landscape. This relationship has been notably explored by the Australian architect and anthropologist Amos Rapoport, who listened to the stories of Australian bushmen and mapped their world as a mythological landscape. Rapoport perceived that a tribe's cherished myths—of its origin, its meaning, its purpose in the world—were "unobservable realities" that sought expression in "observable reality." Land and landmarks made myth real and validated a tribe and its heritage. To a seminomadic, materially rootless people, stories of their ancestors can mean as much as food and water.
Mythological landscapes can be found the world over. There are the kachina-populated mesas and valleys of the Hopi, the Buddhist caves of central China, the landscape of grief and miracles in the Holy Land. As we roamed Oman and then Yemen, it became apparent that southern Arabia had three distinct tiers of mythological landscape. There were the sites of fondly recalled bedouin raids and battles, proof of their daring and prowess. Next there were the many and dreaded haunts of djinns. And, lastly, there were sites associated with patriarchs and prophets holy to Islam. 1 This last landscape harked back to the time of Ub
ar and its principal players, especially the prophet Hud.
Ubar's mythological landscape
Of the two tombs of Hud appearing in this landscape, the oldest and perhaps original one is in an isolated corner of the Dhofar Mountains. It is marked on al-Idrisi's map of Arabia from 1154.2 We were told by the Omanis that it was a forlorn site and that nobody goes there now, which may or may not be so. In the 1930s, Bertram Thomas wrote of the bedouin perception of the site's awesome power: an oath sworn upon Hud's grave held more weight than one sworn on the Koran or in the name of the prophet Muhammad or of Allah himself. If a guilty party was dragged to the shrine, Thomas recounted, he would usually confess rather than profess his innocence and risk Hud's awful avenging power. Had not Hud brought down the wrath of God on the People of'Ad?
Regrettably and inexplicably, Omani government restrictions prevented our visiting this site, so David, Julie, Kay, and I found ourselves on our way to a perhaps less authentic, but considerably better known, Hud's tomb, at the far end of the valley of the Hadramaut in Yemen. 3 To get there from the capital, Sana'a, we drove through mist-shrouded highlands, across a land of soaring red rock mesas, then past a thousand salmon-orange dunes drifting into the sea. On the fourth day, at the old port of Mukalla, we turned inland and snaked up onto a drab, featureless tableland. We drove across it for the better part of a day, until suddenly the ground opened at our feet, a great rift nearly a thousand feet deep and one to two miles wide. This was the valley of the Hadramaut, the largest and surely the most breathtaking wadi in all Arabia.
We descended into a valley of foliage and flowers, surrounded by the buzzing of bees. (Their honey is unbelievably tasty.) Everywhere there were neatly furrowed fields tended by black-robed, veiled women wearing pointed straw hats—witch hats. The Hadramaut's villages, spaced every few miles, were remarkable: the densely clustered mud-brick dwellings rose four, six, eight stories high. As the last pale light of the day retreated up the towering cliffs that enclosed the valley, a thousand and more lamps glowed in the windows of Shibam, a town where five hundred buildings, soaring 120 feet in the air, crowded into less than half a square mile. We were in the valley of the world's first skyscrapers.4
In the next few days, we were awed by the valley of the Hadramaut's dramatic setting and fanciful, spectacular architecture. We were also a little uncomfortable. We had come upon an ancient way of life, ordered and conservative, with traditions kept very much to itself. Also, steeped in Ubar lore, I found it hard not to feel that we were in alien territory, the land of the Hadramis, who had long threatened and likely pillaged our erstwhile if wicked city. I had to remind myself that this happened fifteen hundred or more years ago.
We worked our way to the Hadramaut's most distant major settlement: Tarim, city of 365 mosques, once known throughout Islam as "the city of wisdom and learning." In late medieval times, Tarim had been celebrated for its great libraries, and we hoped, though we had been forewarned to the contrary, that one of them might still magically exist and hold a long-lost copy of Ibn al-Kalbi's History of 'Ad, the Beginning and the End or the ten lost volumes of al-Hamdani's Book of the Crown (documenting the early civilization of Arabia), or undiscovered early tales of the Arabian Nights. But we knew that in the late 1700s, fanatic Wahhabi tribesmen had overrun Tarim and ripped to shreds and burned its books. What they missed had been destroyed by later infestations of white worms. Learning and wisdom had become ashes and dust.
Even so, there were reverberations of the distant past in the valley's everyday life. Sacrificial blood consecrated the construction of buildings; white paint splashed around windows warded off djinns; the social structure of towns, clans, and families was as it had been hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years ago. And everyone was aware of the fate of Ubar and the People of 'Ad. The given name Abd al-Hud—"servant of Hud"—was common in the valley, and leading families claimed Ubar's prophet as their direct ancestor.
Every year Tarim's leading families oversee a three-day pilgrimage to Hud's tomb, fifty miles to the east. Reportedly, ten to twenty thousand souls travel to the tomb, many of them walking the entire way. Some oldsters, we were told, hobble a mile or two every year, intent on eventually accumulating the full fifty. It is a little-known Arabian event, yet in size and fervor it is second only to the hajj to Mecca. We would have given anything to witness this but had understood that it was off-limits to non-Moslems. Indeed, only Moslems who had roots in the Hadramaut were truly welcome.
We were told, though, that it would be no problem for us to visit Hud's holy precinct at any other time. And so on an April morning, awakened by the echoing calls of Tarim's many muezzins, we were on our way. It was a warm, sunny day, and we were all in good spirits, especially Hussein, our Yemeni driver, who kept time by thumping the stock of his prized Kalashnikov automatic rifle as he sang along with a newly purchased cassette of Hadrami music. East of Tarim the valley of the Hadramaut was quite wide and relatively uncultivated. We passed through several tiny villages but saw only a few distant figures. It was hard to imagine the dirt track clogged with the enormous procession of pilgrims that had passed this way a month before, as they annually did in the second week of the lunar month of Shaban.
By good fortune, there is a detailed account of the pilgrimage to Hud's tomb, written by Arabist-anthropologist Robert Serjeant in the late 1940s. As he described it, the procession out across the desert from Tarim was a high-spirited, often boisterous affair, with the pilgrims frequently breaking into song. There was the song of the cloud that accompanied Hud on his travels, ever shielding him from the sun. There was the song of the trapped gazelle who asked Hud to free her so she might feed her young. There were quaint songs, insulting and bawdy, for the villages marking the way. One ditty deemed the rock-hard ground at As-Sallalah uncomfortable for sleeping, fit only for buggery:
You camel men, go, abuse each other,
At As-Sallalah go meet your lover.
Passing through the tiny town of Khon, the pilgrims sang:
O Khon, no girl in Khon is chaste,
Where married and unmarried women fornicate.5
Through As-Sallalah and on through Khon we drove. We turned off into the Wadi 'Aidid, a tributary of the Wadi Hadramaut. Far ahead, set on a rise at the foot of a towering red rock cliff, we caught sight of a glistening white dome. As we drew closer, we saw that the tomb overlooked a fair-sized town, which proved to be immaculately well tended and clearly prosperous—but totally deserted. No dog barked, no bird sang, no retainer looked after things. It was inhabited but three days a year, during the pilgrimage.
From the white, silent town, a broad staircase led up to an open-air prayer hall built around a giant boulder. A further flight of stairs ascended to the tomb itself, a graceful dome in which was enshrined a whitewashed, squared-off rock, split by a fissure. It was the sarcophagus of the prophet Hud. He was evidently a very tall man, for his sarcophagus extended beyond the confines of the building and a good ninety feet up the hillside behind it. The tomb's walls were speckled with colored dots, wads of paper conveying the prayers and pleas of recent pilgrims.
Though augmented by buses and pickups, this year's procession from Tarim, we had been told, was much as Serjeant had described it in the 1940s. Passing an outcropping called the Rock of the Infidel Woman, pilgrims shouted, "God curse you, infidel woman," and, better yet, peppered it with bursts of rifle fire. Their arrival at the town had prompted chanting, shouting, and more shooting. The atmosphere was festive, harking back to the great fairs of pre-Islamic Arabia, where the people of the desert and the cultivated lands, herdsmen and farmers, gathered to exchange goods, race camels, and honor not only Hud but, as a present-day Hadrami has written, "invoke peace on all the prophets of importance, the four perfect women, the archangels, and the gardener of Paradise."6
Close by holy Hud's town, water gushed inexplicably from the barren desert (a phenomenon that may have made this a place of pilgrimage long before its identification with him). The d
evout made their ablutions here, in the belief that they were bathing in the waters of a river of Paradise. Then they joined a long, slowly moving line that ritually retraced Hud's last days.
Hud, they believed, was pursued into the Wadi 'Aidid by a pair of wild and godless horsemen. He rode up the gully beyond the town (where there is now a wide staircase) and leapt from his faithful she-camel—a beast that God immortalized by turning it into a great boulder. Cornered and hard-pressed, Hud said to an oblong rock before him, "Open by the permission of God!" The rock opened wide. He entered, and the rock closed behind him, though it did not close entirely. A fissure remained through which, it is said, only the virtuous can pass.
Though pilgrims have demonstrated their virtue by squeezing partway into the fissure, what lies beyond it is holy, not to be seen. In the 900s, the Yemeni historian al-Hamdani offered the report of an informant from the Hadramaut: "As I went in, I saw stretched on a bier a man of dark brown complexion with a long face and thick beard. The corpse was dried up and felt hard to the fingers. I saw beside his head the following inscription in Arabic: 'I am Hud who believed in God. I had compassion upon 'Ad and regretted their unbelief. Verily nothing can forestall what God has ordained.'"7
In this far corner of far Arabia, we had come to a precinct that pilgrims held "so sacred that a stick or stone removed would come alive, leaping and screaming until it was replaced."8 We were at the center of a vivid mythological landscape. It encompassed belief (Hud's tomb) and unbelief (the Rock of the Infidel Woman). It encompassed heaven and hell; across the Wadi 'Aidid were pools watered by a river of Paradise, and a three-hour walk away was the cave and well of Bir Barhut, widely believed to be a sulfurous portal to the underworld.9
Journeying to Hud's tomb, the pilgrim entered a symbolic world of the past, the psyche, life, and death. The pilgrimage lamented the death of the prophet Hud in a landscape of death; the word "Hadramaut"—appearing in Genesis as Hazarmaveth—has been taken to mean "Valley of Death." Yet this landscape also served as a landscape of life, of fertility. Robert Serjeant tells of the Karat Mawla, a conical (phallic, he says) hill in the Wadi 'Aidid. If a woman does not become pregnant within two or three years of marriage, she may elect to climb to the top of this hill, strip herself naked, and lie on her back as if anticipating intercourse. In some cases, the husband is there and materially enhances the chance that the woman will become pregnant. A pilgrim confided to Serjeant succinctly, "Some people have tried this out and benefited."
The Road to Ubar Page 23