Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [101]
23. Sons and Thrones Are Destroyed
SOMETIME 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