Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [102]
Passing through the iron door, Solomon wandered through apartments bedecked with pearls and precious stones and confronted a legion of statues that came alive "with great noise and tumult ... causing earthquake and thunder." He threw them over, and from the throat of one drew a silver plate, inscribed: "I, Shaddad ben 'Ad, ruled over a thousand thousand provinces, rode on a thousand horses, had a thousand thousand kings under me, and slew a thousand thousand heros, and when the Angel of Death approached me, I was powerless."2
A further inscription offered a good moral for a bad place: "Whoever doth read this writing, let him give up troubling greatly about this world, for the destiny and end of all men is to die, and nothing remains of a man but his good name."3
The real Ubar was not left forever to the eagles. There was still water here, and after an initial period of abandonment the place has been occupied off and on to the present day. Sometime around 900 A.D., Mahra tribesmen rode to the site. With the fortress's old gate collapsed into the sinkhole, they breached the eastern wall so that they could water their horses. Their Arab horses were of sufficient quality to warrant, every year, running a herd across the Rub' al-Khali—via the old Ubar road—to be offered for sale in India. To provide a station for this trade, the Mahra rebuilt walls and parts of the Citadel, but with mud bricks and rubble rather than masonry.
Soon thereafter, someone brought a sandstone chess set to Shisur, as the site was now called, and in a tower of the ruined fortress matched wits in a game that, like the rise and fall of this lonely outpost, ended with the word shahmaut—"To the king (shah), death (maut)." Or, as we have anglicized it, "Checkmate." The chess pieces were scattered about and forgotten. This may have happened when the fortress was attacked and burned around 940, probably by the Hadramis, who had for a very long time sought to control the 'Ad and, thereafter, the Mahra. In the Citadel, the defenders had stashed but did not use hundreds of iron-tipped arrows (discovered by Juri in 1993). What would the Hadramis have gained? Little but the settling of an ancient score.
In medieval times, Shisur had to have been a melancholy place. In 1221, Ibn Mujawir, a merchant of Baghdad, recorded the final abandonment of the old trade route—the road to Ubar—across the Rub' al-Khali. Travelers Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta wrote of the Dhofar region but said nothing of a city out in the desert (although Ibn Battuta, somewhat sarcastically, mentioned the remnants of the realm of the 'Ad).
The final incident of note in Ubar's history came in the early 1500s when the Hadrami warlord Badr ibn Tuwariq appears to have desultorily rebuilt the old Citadel—and was subsequently credited by the region's bedouin for constructing the entire fortress. The site's true identity—and any hint of all that had happened in and around its walls—was thereafter obscured. Sometime later the bedouin began to believe that Ubar lay hidden in the dunes of the Rub' al-Khali, for that's where they found Neolithic artifacts and that's where the old road ran.
Just when all remembrance of Ubar was fading from bedouin memory (displaced by fascination with a world of Toyotas and Walkmans), an odd chain of events brought an odd collection of adventurers to Shisur. They dug and unearthed an ancient fortress rising above what once was a tent city.
***
Strata and shards and carbon-14 dates have subsequently given a new reality to the preaching of the prophet Muhammad, to the storytelling of streetcorner rawis, even to the doggerel of contemporary bedouin. A remote desert ruin might have forever remained just that, but for their words...
As old as 'Ad...
Roast flesh, the glow of fiery wine,
to speed on camel fleet and sure...
And ninety concubines, of comely breast
And rounded hips, amused