The Road to Ubar

by Nicholas Clapp

  2. "And we hunted the game...," Rev. Charles Forster, The Historical Geography of Arabia (London: Duncan & Malcolm, 1844), pp. 90–93.

  7. The Rawi's Tale

  1. rawis' tales of Iram/Ubar ... In the centuries after the Koran recounted the grief that befell the People of'Ad, two competing story lines evolved. On one hand there is the tale of how Ubar's mighty king had a fabulous-beyond-belief city built in his absence, only to have it destroyed by God at the moment he and his retinue came in sight of it. In an alternate version, the city has long been inhabited and is known for its idolatry and dissolution. Ubar's king is warned by the Prophet Hud that disaster is imminent unless the People of 'Ad forsake their evil ways. Hud is ignored; the city is destroyed. This is the scenario of the excerpt in the text, which is from Part 12 of The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa'i, translated by W. M. Thackston, )r. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), pp. 109–17.

  2. "Oh my people ... worship god..." To give Tales of the Prophets a sense of authenticity and a dash of piety, al-Kisa'i's direct quotes from the Koran were set off with the equivalent of italics.

  3. "suddenly the earth opened...," Khairat al-Saleh, Fabled Cities, Princes and Jinn (London: Peter Stone, 1985), p. 45.

  4. "Ubar is ... the name of the land..." Medieval chroniclers who concur as to Iram/Ubar's location include Ibn Mujawir, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Ishaq, and al-Bedawi. Al-Himyari is quoted in Thomas, Arabia Felix, p. 161.

  5. "They turned to dust...," al-Qadi Isma'il ibn Ali Al-Akoa, "Nashwan Ibn Sa'id al-Himyari and the Spiritual, Religious and Political Conflicts of His Era," in Werner Daum, ed., Yemen: 3000 Years of Art and Civilization in Arabia Felix (Innsbruck: Pinguin-Verlag, 1988), p. 212.

  8. Should You Eat Something That Talks to You?

  1. "The Lord destroyed everything there...," Ferdinand Wustenfeld, ed., Jacut's Geographisches Worterbuch (Leipzig: Bei F. A. Brockhaus, 1869), p. 897.

  2. "Wabar is a vast piece of land...," Wustenfeld, Jacut's Geographisches Worterbuch, pp. 866–68.

  9. The City of Brass

  1. "unwholesome literature...," quoted in Joseph Campbell, ed., The Portable Arabian Nights (New York: Viking Press, 1952), p. 1; "vulgar, insipid," quoted in Reynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1930), p. 458; "The first who composed tales...," quoted in John Payne, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, vol. 9 (London, 1884), p. 280.

  2. pre-Persian origin of the tales. Frobenius hypothesized a common source for the Persian Arabian Nights and tales he collected from the Sudan, tales allegedly told by a slave named Far-li-mas, who hailed from the Arabian valley of the Hadramaut. Frobenius recalled that when he sailed the Red Sea in 1915, "the Arab seamen maintained, stoutly and firmly, that all the tales of the Arabian Nights had first been told in Hadramaut and from there had been diffused over the earth" (quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology [New York: Penguin Books, 1986], p. 164). The subsequent diffusion of the Arabian Nights to Persia may date to a Persian conquest of the Hadramaut, a little-known chapter of Arabian history.

  3. "Allah blotted out the road ...," Richard F. Burton, trans., The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, vol. 4 (London, 1885), p. 116. It is quite possible that the writer of this tale was familiar with an account (circa 1300) by Ibn Mujawir, a merchant of Baghdad, who wrote of an old, abandoned caravan road from Baghdad to southern Arabia. It was a direct route across the Rub' al-Khali, and it almost certainly would have passed through our search area. Was Ibn Mujawir describing our road to Ubar? If so, he advised against following it, for it was dangerous, abandoned for good reason. He wrote: "God is a witness that any bedouin who travels this road again has no one but himself to blame!" (Quoted in G. Rex Smith, "Ibn al-Mujawir on Dhofar and Socotra," in Proceedings of the Eighteenth Seminar for Arabian Studies [London: Seminar for Arabian Studies, 1985], pp. 84–85.)

  4. "had been translated...," from "The Eldest Lady's Tale," in Burton, Thousand Nights, vol. 1, p. 165. Under the name "The Petrified City," this tale appears in Wil Clap's Oriental Moralist of 1797.

  5. "When they reached the top..." This and the following quotes are from Burton, Thousand Nights, vol. 6, pp. 102, 114–15, 93, 119.

  6. an ancient language... The language of the Dhofar Mountains is actually a cluster of four related tongues called the Hadara group. Shahri, believed to be the oldest, is described in Chapter 12.

  10. The Singing Sands

  1. "Wabar, it seemed..." This and the following quotes are from Josephine Tey, The Singing Sands (New York: Collier Books, 1988), pp. 140, 176, 205, 141.

  11. Reconnaissance

  1. "The plan is great," "the great scheme," "Asadum Tal'an...," "The one-eyed ...DETESTABLE!" Jacqueline Pirenne, "The Incense Port of Moscha (Khor Rori) in Dhofar," Journal of Oman Studies 1 (Ministry of Information and Culture, Sultanate of Oman, 1975), pp. 82, 86, 89, 90.

  2. Andhur flint could have been traded ... With chemical fingerprinting, Juri explained, the extent of Andhur's flint trade could accurately be charted. Finding Andhur flint in sites to the north of the Rub' al-Khali would confirm the long-range reach—and trading importance—of our Ubar road.

  12. The Edge of the Known World

  1. "half a day's journey..." Ibn Battuta quoted in Philip Ward, Travels in Oman (New York: Oleander Press, 1978), p. 503.

  2. the well of the Oracle of Ad. We were not the first to reconnoiter the well. The intrepid husband and wife team of Theodore and Mabel Bent had been here in 1895, Bertram Thomas in 1929, and Wendell Phillips in 1953. None had known quite what to make of it. See Bent and Bent, Southern Arabia (London: Smith, Elder, 1900); Thomas, Arabia Felix; and Frank P. Albright, The American Archaeological Expedition in Dhofar, Oman (Washington: American Foundation for the Study of Man, 1982).

  3. "guarded by flying serpents," Selincourt, Herodotus: The Histories, p. 249; "in the most fragrant forests...," C. H. Oldfather, trans., Diodorus of Sicily (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 229; "sprang as high as the thigh...," Howard L. Jones, trans., Strabo: Geography, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 347.

  4. "the language of birds." This remarkable language was reported by Theodore and Mabel Bent (Southern Arabia) in 1900. As early as five thousand years ago, the Sumerians called an aboriginal tribe near the Persian Gulf "Lulubulu," an onomatopoeic word mimicking the song of birds. It's quite possible they could have been describing the same language, as it was spoken by the ancestors of today's Shahra.

  5. They were frankincense trees ... Frankincense trees— Boswellia sacra —are found elsewhere in Arabia and even in Africa. Though often impressive in size, none produce the pure, ethereally fragrant resin of the small, tortured trees of the Dhofar Mountains. Perhaps it is because the trees there grow in a unique microclimate: an elevation of 600–700 meters and seasons that alternate scorching sun with monsoon drizzle.

  6. "No Latin writer...," "The district ... is rendered inaccessible...," and "It is the people who originated the trade...," John Bostock and H. T. Riley, trans., The Natural History of Pliny, vol. 3 (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1855), pp. 124, 125.

  7. "Look at this your sacrifice ..." The Shahra's timeless chant of exorcism, first recorded by Bertram Thomas in 1930, was unchanged sixty years later.

  8. Here was a living link ... The Shahra also speak of al-Ahqaf, the Koran's location of our lost city. They consider al-Ahqaf to be not only the sands beyond their mountains (which we believed), but the mountains themselves. This made sense, for whoever built Ubar would have also held sway over the incense groves of the Dhofar Mountains.

  13. The Vale of Remembrance

  1. triliths were memorials ... It's doubtful that triliths marked actual burials, for some were set on exposed bedrock, where interment would have been impossible. A more reasonable explanation would be that they honored dead laid to rest elsewhere, as in the cave of the skulls we had visited.

  2. "Whenever a traveler stopped...," N
abih Amin Faris, trans., The Book of Idols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 28–29.

  3. "the secret of God in the universe...," Ali Shari'ati, Hajj (Tehran: Laleh-Baktiar, 1988), p. 48.

  4. "went so far as to pay divine worship...," George Sale, trans., "Preliminary Discourse," The Koran (London: Thomas Tegg & Son, 1838), p. 15.

  14. The Empty Quarter

  1. "This wilderness ... stretches away...," S. B. Miles, The Countries and Tribes of the Persian Gulf (London: Frank Cass, 1919), p. 386.

  2. Ron guessed that the satellites ... We later learned that the satellite navigation system had been more or less shut down for realignment—precisely when we planned to rely on it for our journey into the Rub' al-Khali.

  3. "Only a fool will brave the desert sun ...," O'Shea, Sand Kings of Oman, p. 187.

  4. The first half dozen he threw ... "AFR" is an informal archaeological designation for worthless: "A" stands for "another," and "R" for "rock."

  5. "a creature of night to signify the days...," cited in John Gray, Near Eastern Mythology (New York: Peter Bedrick Books, 1982), P. 37

  16. City of Towers

  1. "Arrogant and unjust were the men of'Ad..." and the following quotes are from Dawood, Koran, pp. 159, 25, 113, 129, and 138.

  2. Our Christmas tree. Out of deference to our Islamic host country, we had anticipated a low-key Christmas and brought with us but a single tape. To our surprise, the Omanis loved the holiday. When we drove to the coast to collect Juris students, it was to the strains (on the radio, in the hotel, everywhere) of familiar carols. We heartily sang along with "We Three Kings of Orient are...," for we were in that very Orient, the land of frankincense and myrrh.

  3. It might have been used ... to process frankincense. How frankincense was processed is unclear. Its crystals may have been compacted for shipment, or a refining process may have enhanced its aroma. From the historian Pliny we do know that frankincense was processed at the far end of the Incense Road. He writes: "At Alexandria ... where the frankincense is worked up for sale, good heavens! no vigilance is sufficient to guard the factories. A seal is put upon the workmen's aprons, they have to wear a mask or a net with a close mesh on their heads, and they are stripped naked before they are allowed to leave work" (Bostock and Riley, Natural History of Pliny, 3:127).

  4. Where were the columns? After the expedition I discovered that in pre-Islamic poetry (the literature closest to the era of Ubar) the word for pillar is not imad but dawwar. Appearing only once in the Koran, the word imad appears to be a southern Babylonian loan word derived from a root meaning "to make stand, to erect"—and can describe anything from tent poles to pillars to towers.

  5. a sprawling oasis. Mabrook recalled that as late as the 1920s, his grandfather remembered a dense "forest" of brush and dwarf trees in the outlying area known as Hailat Shisur. And in the 1930s Bertram Thomas wrote, "I have heard that in the surrounding desert plain are still to be seen shadowed furrowings as though once it had known the plough" (Thomas, Arabia Felix, p. 137).

  6. a six-pointed star. Was our chess king's star a star of David? I later learned that the six-pointed star, though linked to Judaism from the 1500s on, may have been no more than a popular (and secular) design motif in the Middle East before then. Yet six-pointed stars have been discovered at an early synagogue at Capernaum in ancient Palestine, on the third-century tombstone of a certain Leon ben (son of) David, and in Jewish catacombs near Rome. And now on a chess king in the Arabian desert.

  7. back to their mountain retreat. Golden grave goods may yet come to light in the Vale of Remembrance, though it is doubtful. The extent of grave robbing in southern Arabia is reflected in the fact that a major function of the god of the morning star was to avenge desecrators of the dead.

  8. inscription that included the word . As several experts assured us, in the more than ten thousand known southern Arabian inscriptions, the word was nowhere to be found. But then I happened on it in an inscription found at an Arabian colony in ancient Ethiopia. Jacqueline Pirenne equates the word with Abiru, meaning "Hebrew." This could be evidence of a Jewish association with Ubar (an association already present in the figure of the prophet Hud, "He of the Jews"). Or this could be a wishful translation (Father Jamme thinks it is), and Ubar could instead be derived from the Semitic root for either "place of passage" or "camel hair tent."

  18. Seasons in the Land of Frankincense

  1. a Mesopotamian-Persian sphere of influence. A link between Ubar and Mesopotamia tallies with a fragment of myth in which "the 'Adites quarreled with the children of Ham and left Babylon. They peopled a district in southern Arabia contiguous to 'Umman, Yaman, and Hadramaut. There they built palaces, erected temples, and worshipped deities as stars."

  2. eastern versus western Arabia. An Arabian east versus west map can be drawn with archaeological evidence, admittedly sketchy, and with a brand-new cultural resource: genetic mapping. The division on the map on page 209 is based on the mean strength of the genes ESD*1 and GC*1F.

  3. a temple as well as an administrative center. In Ancient Yemen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Andrey Korotoyev analyzes a settlement pattern in which a hagar was a dual religious and political center for a "sha'b," a surrounding territory of several dozen square kilometers. Ubar would have been a hagar.

  4. "Show us our Christ, alas!" and "Whereupon, after a terrible storm...," Sale, "Preliminary Discourse," Koran, p. 16.

  5. traditions of desert life. The renowned Cambridge Arabist Robert Serjeant found southern Arabia ideal for the concept of "Interpretation of the Antique by Reference to the Present" (Serjeant, South Arabian Hunt [London: Luzac, 1983], p. 80).

  19. Older Than Ad

  1. At these sites ... Archaeologically, the sites near Shisur contemporary with the Rub' al-Khali's lakes are Upper Paleolithic (40,000–100,000 years before the present). Juris Zarins homed in on some forty small settlements from this era by plotting the courses of late Pleistocene rivers found on space images, then methodically searching their banks.

  2. the rains withdrew. The onset of hyperaridity was caused by a phenomenon called "Milankovitch forcing," in which Earth wobbled slightly in its orbit around the sun. This precipitated a global climactic change that to a large extent initiated the desertification of Arabia, Africa, India, and Australia.

  3. retreating to the north ... It has long been argued—and counterargued—that the Semitic populations of the Middle East arose from the deserts of Arabia. A migration north twenty thousand years ago is how and when this could have happened. Though the date of this migration is far earlier than biblical scholars would like, the idea has an appealing fit. It has recently been championed by geologist Hal McClure.

  4. waiting hunters would rise up ... The outline of Shisur's impressive Neolithic animal trap was photographed—quite unintentionally—by an Omani military overflight in the late 1970s. In 1990, Shisur's new village obliterated all traces of it.

  5. "smelled the sweet savor...," Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), p. 87; "its resin was considered...," Walter W. Miiller, "Notes on the Use of Frankincense in South Arabia," in Proceedings of the Ninth Seminar for Arabian Studies (London: Seminar for Arabian Studies, 1976), p. 131.

  20. The Incense Trade

  1. "the rising of the Dog Star...," Bostock and Riley, Natural History of Pliny, vol. 3, pp. 126–27.

  2. the surrounding oasis. An ancient oasis appears to have extended east from Shisur along a fault line that tapped an aquifer charged by the runoff from the Dhofar Mountains. To this day, the wadi overlying this fault is called Umm al-Hait, the Mother of Life.

  3. "The fairness of beautiful girls...," Thomas, Alarms and Excursions, p. 288.

  4. "Thou shalt cast incense...," Master of Belhaven (A. Hamilton), The Kingdom of Melchior (London: John Murray, 1949), pp. 21, 20; "A stairway to the sky...," Raymond O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 76.

  5. "called sacred and ... not allowed...," Bostock and Riley, Natural History of Pliny, vol. 3, p. 125.

  6. "The whole city now is conceived...," Joseph Campbell, "The Hieratic City State," Parabola 18, no. 4 (Nov. 1993), pp. 41–43.

  7. The language of the 'Adites ... Though only a two-letter fragment of the 'Ad script has surfaced at Ubar, inscriptions abound in the Dhofar Mountains. It appears to have preceded not only other languages of southern Arabia, but also Hebrew, which has nine fewer sounds, and Arabic, which has eight fewer.

  8. "broken heads ... and to bind bloody wounds...," Oldfather, Diodorus of Sicily, p. 45.

  9. "It is the luxury of man...," Bostock and Riley, Natural History of Pliny, vol. 3, p. 127. As a measure of the value of frankincense, there are records of the denarii paid for a measure in the markets of Rome. To translate its cost into modern terms, the Smithsonian's Gus Van Beek worked out the formula that a pound of frankincense was worth between 2.5 and 5 percent of the minimum annual urban cost of living. In 1990 dollars, that would be over $1,000 a pound.

  21. Khuljan's City

  1. summer's night in 350 B.C. This year could have been as early as 410 or as late as 290 B.C. The earliest carbon-14 date associated with Ubar's New City is 350 B.C. plus or minus sixty years.

  2. "After the sun has set...," Thomas, Arabia Felix, pp. 52, 290.

  3. a fence woven of gnarled branches... Duwwar construction is still used by the Shahra of the Dhofar Mountains. Its use at Ubar would explain why there is no "meltdown" from dissolved mud brick walls.

  4. "To thee from Babylon we made our way...," Faris, Antiquities of South Arabia, p. 30.

  5. a large plastered basin... Water installations—including fountains and sheets of water one walked through—were an important feature of Arabian temples. To ensure a fresh water supply, there may have been a rock-cut passage between Ubar's temple and the spring. Our Shisur friend Baheet recalled that as a boy, he found and squeezed through such a passage that had since collapsed.