The Road to Ubar (38 page)

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...," Nabih 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."