The shifting sands of the Arabian Peninsula hide more than their fair share of secrets. Once, flourishing lakes teeming with life lie buried beneath scorching dunes. Even entire cities have been swallowed by the gaping maw of the desert. “Searching for and finding one of them is one of the great adventures of a lifetime,” said John Faulhaber, at a recent meeting of the Arabian Natural History Association “Just reading about it is exciting.”
One such city was Ubar, “the Atlantis of the Sands.” Ubar flourished from about 2800 BCE to about 300 CE as a remote desert outpost where caravans assembled for the transport of frankincense across the desert.
Used in cremations and religious ceremonies, as well as in perfumes and medicines, frankincense was as valuable as gold.
As the only source of permanent water in thousands of square kilometers, Ubar became a nexus for trade, especially frankincense. Trade brought affluence, and at their height the people of the region might have been the richest in the world, said Faulhaber.
The historian Al-Hamdani, writing in the sixth century CE, hailed Ubar as first among the treasures of ancient Arabia. Then at the height of its wealth, Ubar vanished. The Qur’an says that the people there were punished for wasting their wealthy sinful lives. By the seventh century, its location was forgotten.
Ubar’s rediscovery was the result of an intriguing combination of space-age technology, literary detective work, painstaking archaeology and two larger-than-life adventurers, Nicholas Clapp and Ranulph Fiennes.
The pair became interested in Ubar after reading Bertram Thomas’ book Arabia Felix. Thomas, the first European to cross the Rub‘ al-Khali, noticed that the tribes living in the region of the Dhofar mountains in South Oman considered themselves the descendants of the “People of ‘Ad,” the people associated in the Qur’an with Ubar. Thomas mentions that he came across ancient caravan tracks, which his Arab guides called the “road to Ubar.”
Clapp started reading everything he could lay his hands on. He also persuaded Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists Charles Elachi and Ronald Blom to scan the region with a Space Shuttle radar system.
The radar was able to “see” through the sand and loose soil to pick out subsurface geological features. The imagery clearly showed the ancient trade routes, which were packed down into a hard surface by the passage of hundreds of thousands of camels. The images revealed pieces of the ancient tracks converging on the small oasis settlement of Shisur in Oman.
Clapp and Fiennes, accompanied by archaeologist Juris Zarins, began work at Shishur. Their excavations revealed a sizeable walled fortress with eight or more towers, connected by a 2.5- to 3-meter-high limestone wall about a meter thick.
The fortress had partially collapsed into a large sinkhole. Analysis shows that the sinkhole was originally a large subterranean cave partly filled with water. There was almost certainly a well on top to allow access to the water. When the cave collapsed, the resulting sinkhole took down almost the full interior space of the fortress and a sizeable part of the gate and adjacent walls, said Faulhaber.
The excavated site closely matches written descriptions. The Quran calls it “a city with lofty buildings.” The Arab historian Yaqut ibn Abdallah said a “great well” was the city’s main feature. The Qur’an also says the city was destroyed by “sinking into the sand,” which is what clearly happened at Shisur, said Faulhaber. Reaching Ubar these days requires little more than a few hours’ drive from Salalah, he said. “There are even signs reading ‘Road to Ubar.’”
