Archaeology: Arabia’s Lost Sand Castle

In all ancient Arabia, the most fabled land was the city of Ubar. As legend had it, one Shaddad ibn Ad created a jewel-encrusted oasis town in the southern deserts to stand as an “imitation of Paradise.” Islam’s holy Koran, which called the site Iram, evoked the grandeur of “lofty pillars, the like of which were not produced in ((all)) the land.” This was also Islam’s Sodom, however, a place that God destroyed because of its wickedness. Ever since, warns an Arabian saying, “anybody who finds Ubar will go crazy.” And according to an Arabian Nights tale, “Allah blotted out the road that led to the city.”

For centuries, the road to Ubar appeared to be blotted out forever. T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) dreamed of locating the lost city, which he called “the Atlantis of the sands,” but did not live to carry out the search. Others launched fruitless expeditions in 1947 and 1953. But last week a pair of archaeological amateurs in California announced that they had found the site through the use of ancient clues and space-age gadgetry.

The quest began in 1982, when Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker Nicholas Clapp happened upon an explorer’s evidence of an ancient road to Ubar. After unearthing more information from texts at the Huntington Library, Clapp teamed up with lawyer George Hedges to raise money and organize an expedition. They later recruited two Arabia experts, archaeologist Juris Zarins of Southwest Missouri State University and British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes.

The turning point came when Clapp remembered reading about a system called Space Imaging Radar carried on a space shuttle to peer underneath the deserts of Egypt and locate ancient riverbeds. In addition, satellites using optical sensing systems were able to record reflected near-infrared light that is invisible to the human eye. Scientists combined the data to produce digital images of 160-km-long (100-mile) tracts; these pictures were then manipulated by computers to bring out subtle details. Roads and rivers that were barely visible to explorers on the ground appeared in images captured from hundreds of kilometers up in space.

After initial skepticism, Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory agreed to take SIR photos in 1984 during two passes over southern Arabia by the Challenger space shuttle. Experts found faint white lines marking hundreds of kilometers of long-abandoned caravan routes, some running underneath sand dunes that over the centuries had grown 183 m (600 ft.) high.

Many of the routes converged on an area marked Omanum Emporium (the Omani Marketplace) on a map drawn by Ptolemy in the 2nd century A.D. The spot is in present-day Oman at the edge of the Empty Quarter, an appropriate designation for a trackless region infested with camel spiders, giant ticks and lethal carpet vipers. The team checked out the forbidding terrain in 1990 and began hunting in earnest last November. Just six weeks ago, says Clapp, “we were ^ within a whisker of total failure.” Then the party decided to examine Ash Shisar, a water hole with ruins of a primitive fort. Using ground-penetrating radar and sounding devices, the explorers discovered extensive ruins underneath.

The digging in subsequent weeks has uncovered an octagonal castle with high walls and towers, perhaps the pillars described in the Koran, that might have reached a height of 9 m (30 ft.). Although only 150 people could have lived inside the fortress, the explorers theorize that thousands of others resided in surrounding tents. Ubar’s destruction is easily explained, in accordance with the myths of the city swallowed by the desert. Sometime in the early Christian era, the walls of Ubar simply became too heavy and collapsed into a 12-m-deep (40-ft.) cavern beneath. Alas, those tales of limitless precious gems turn out, so far, to be pure legend.

Unless inscriptions surface, it may be impossible to identify the site as Ubar with absolute certainty. But pottery has been found that dates to at least 2000 B.C., which means that the Arabian peninsula had complex urban settlements almost as early as Mesopotamia. It is known that the area’s ancient wealth was built upon its unique product, frankincense, the crystallized tree sap that was as precious as present-day oil and used as medicine, perfume and a preparation in cremation and embalming. Since this is the region whence the biblical Queen of Sheba made her trade mission to King Solomon, it is possible that frankincense from Ubar was burned regularly in the Jerusalem Temple. It is even conceivable that this newly found castle in the sands could have been the source of the frankincense that the Magi brought to the infant Jesus.