Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [114]
7. "Why do you tread this earth...," Wolohojian, Romance of Alexander the Great, p. 116.
8. 71° × 23° ... 73° × 16°. Though the principle is the same, Ptolemy's latitudes and longitudes are not the same as those on modern maps, on which the 0° prime meridian passes through the British Royal Observatory at Greenwich. Ptolemy chose the Fortunate Islands in the Atlantic for his prime meridian, because they were considered the far edge of the habitable world. The scale of his system differs from ours as well.
4. The Flight of the Challenger
1. its inherent distortions ...In laying out his maps, Ptolemy miscalculated the circumference of the earth. To make things fit, he took to squeezing empty spaces—such as the hinterlands of Arabia.
2. "It's like rotating your house...," Elachi quoted by Ronald Blom, Oct. 1984.
3. "the loss of viewing time...," Time, Oct. 22, 1984, p. 72.
4. "Have you not heard...," N. J. Dawood, trans., The Koran (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), p. 25.
5. the desert of al-Ahqaf. The Koran's passing mention of this region is a valuable geographic clue, for in post-Koranic accounts and even maps, al-Ahqaf (which has been taken to mean "wind-curved sand dunes") is located more or less where Bertram Thomas found his road to Ubar and where we hoped for success with the space shuttle's radar.
6. the proper names "bam" and "'Ad." The very earliest evidence of the city of Iram and its People of'Ad may be hidden in the word Adramitae, a southern Arabian tribe mentioned by Greek geographers. The name appears as well on Ptolemy's ever-helpful map of Arabia. Breaking the word apart, Adrami- could stand for "'Ad-i-lram"and the suffix -tae means "tribe." The Adramitae, then, would be the People of'Ad and Iram.
7. "Roast flesh, the glow of fiery wine...," Charles ]. Lyall, Ancient Arabian Poetry (London: Williams & Norgate, 1930), p. 64.
8. "of ill omen...," Lyall, Ancient Arabian Poetry, p. 113; "She [War] brought forth Distress...," William A. Clouston, ed., Arabian Poetry for English Readers (Glasgow: McLaren & Son, 1881), p. 34.
9. "Arrogant and unjust..." This and the following quotes are from Dawood, Koran, pp. 159–60, 129, 205.
10. "According to the tradition of the Arabs...," Johann Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, vol. 2 (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1972), p. 274; "the 'Adites continued to abandon themselves...," L. Du Couret, Life in the Desert: Or, Recollections of Travel in Asia and Africa (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), p. 271.
11. where lakes once formed. The ancient lakes of the Rub' al-Khali have been extensively studied by geologist Hal McClure. His findings are succinctly summarized in Arthur Clark, "Lakes of the Rub' al-Khali," Aramco World 40, no. 3 (May–June 1989).
12. "Iram ... will be unearthed, by ants...," Nabih Amin Faris, trans., The Antiquities of South Arabia (Princeton: University Press, 1936), p. 72. The prediction that Ubar would be unearthed by ants isn't as cryptic as it might appear. There are several classical accounts of ants bringing gold to the surface in India. Herodotus says: "There is found in this desert a kind of ant of great size, bigger than a fox, though not so big as a dog ... These creatures as they burrow underground throw up the sand in heaps, just like our own ants throw up the earth, and they are very like ours in shape. The sand has a rich content of gold, and this it is that the Indians are after when they make their expeditions into the desert" (de Selincourt, Herodotus: The Histories, p. 246). Could this ant be a lizard or small burrowing animal?
13. "Whoever shall find and enter Ubar...," David T. Rice, The Illustrations of the "World History" of Rashid al-Din (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1981), p. 42.
5. The Search Continues
1. "The bedu tell of such places...," Ranulph Fiennes, Where Soldiers Fear to Tread (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), pp. 195–96.
2. frankincense