![]() Residents told him the fort had been built by a local sheik only 300 years earlier, and Thomas’s brief studies seemed to confirm that, so he abandoned the site.īut although the fort had been built recently, the team found that the sheik had built it on the rubble of Ubar. Ironically, Thomas had stopped at Shisr in his search and made note of a “rude fort” at the site. ![]() The team was able to rent three of the houses as headquarters. The Omani government recently constructed a regional center for Bedouin there, building a mosque and 12 little houses. ![]() Little more than a crossroads for wandering Bedouin, Shisr now has a few residents who farm an acre of land using water from its well. They quickly found that one of them, an oasis called Shisr, held great promise. They returned in December and began preliminary excavations at several sites. They found shards of pottery and other evidence of the trade routes, but nothing to show they had definitively found the city. The team made a brief, preliminary expedition to Oman last summer, searching about 35 sites. Junctions where the trade routes converged or branched seemed likely locations for the lost city.Īrmed with this information, they enlisted archeologist Juris Zarins of Southwest Missouri State University and British explorer Sir Ranulf Fiennes, who has served with the British military in the deserts of Oman and fought with the sultan’s forces. Using the imagery, the team was able to pick out the ancient trade routes, which were packed down into hard surfaces by the passage of hundreds of thousands of camels. The radar was able to “see” through the overlying sand and loose soil to pick out subsurface geological features. Lawrence was also fascinated and planned an exploratory expedition that was disrupted by his death.īut Clapp had two major advantages over Lawrence and Thomas: NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which is famous for its space imagery, and the gall to approach researchers there with his “crazy idea”-to use that imaging capability to find Ubar.Ĭlapp persuaded JPL scientists Charles Elachi and Ronald Blom to scan the region with a special shuttle radar system that was flown on the last successful mission of Challenger. Thomas had spent years unsuccessfully searching the suspected trade routes for Ubar. The impetus for the search arose when Clapp, a lifelong Arabophile, first read about Ubar in “Arabia Felix” by British explorer Bertram Thomas. The neolithic village was apparently located on the banks of a river-long since dried up-and its residents farmed a substantial area.Įven in the time of Ubar, 3,000 years after the neolithic village, rainfall was more plentiful and the well supplied quite large quantities of water, enough to support not only the city itself but also the camel caravans that traversed the forbidding desert.Įxcavations at Ubar and other sites the researchers have identified should provide the first accurate information about the trade in frankincense, one of the first agricultural commodities to become an item of commerce. ![]() The researchers have already found evidence that the climate was much different at that time. Among the mysteries of the region the findings may help resolve, for example, is whether the Queen of Sheba, who would have been contemporaneous with Ubar, really existed. The discoveries are expected to shed considerable light on the early history of the region, which has been shrouded in myth, said George Hedges, 39, a Los Angeles lawyer who with 53-year-old filmmaker Nicholas Clapp was one of the leaders of the expedition. ![]() The researchers also discovered the remains of a nearby neolithic village that may date to at least 6000 B. Ultimately, the weight of the city caused the cavern to collapse in a massive sinkhole, destroying much of the city and causing the rest to be abandoned. In building his “imitation of paradise,” the legendary King Shaddad ibn ‘Ad unknowingly constructed it over a large limestone cavern. Moreover, the researchers say they have documented how the city fell, and that it did not appear to be by divine retribution for wickedness. In a news conference today at the Huntington Library in San Marino, the researchers will announce that the site excavated over the past two months reveals an unusual eight-sided structure that must have been every bit as magnificent as it was portrayed in legend. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, called it “the Atlantis of the sands” and, like the undersea Atlantis, many scholars doubted that Ubar ever existed. Ubar’s rulers became wealthy and powerful and its residents-according to Islamic legend-so wicked and debauched that eventually God destroyed the city, allowing it to be swallowed up by the restless desert. ![]()
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