The Road to Ubar (33 page)

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, brothers 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."

S
OMETIME 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.

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.