Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [115]
6. The Inscription of the Crows
1. converged at the well of Shisur. Curiously, the old incense caravan route to and past Shisur is accurately marked on a map in the classic 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Where this information came from is a mystery; at the time, no westerner is known to have penetrated the region.
2. "And we hunted the game...," Rev. Charles Forster, The Historical Geography of Arabia (London: Duncan & Malcolm, 1844), pp. 90–93.
7. The Rawi's Tale
1. rawis' tales of Iram/Ubar ... In the centuries after the Koran recounted the grief that befell the People of'Ad, two competing story lines evolved. On one hand there is the tale of how Ubar's mighty king had a fabulous-beyond-belief city built in his absence, only to have it destroyed by God at the moment he and his retinue came in sight of it. In an alternate version, the city has long been inhabited and is known for its idolatry and dissolution. Ubar's king is warned by the Prophet Hud that disaster is imminent unless the People of 'Ad forsake their evil ways. Hud is ignored; the city is destroyed. This is the scenario of the excerpt in the text, which is from Part 12 of The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa'i, translated by W. M. Thackston, )r. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), pp. 109–17.
2. "Oh my people ... worship god..." To give Tales of the Prophets a sense of authenticity and a dash of piety, al-Kisa'i's direct quotes from the Koran were set off with the equivalent of italics.
3. "suddenly the earth opened...," Khairat al-Saleh, Fabled Cities, Princes and Jinn (London: Peter Stone, 1985), p. 45.
4. "Ubar is ... the name of the land..." Medieval chroniclers who concur as to Iram/Ubar's location include Ibn Mujawir, Ibn Battuta, Ibn Ishaq, and al-Bedawi. Al-Himyari is quoted in Thomas, Arabia Felix, p. 161.
5. "They turned to dust...," al-Qadi Isma'il ibn Ali Al-Akoa, "Nashwan Ibn Sa'id al-Himyari and the Spiritual, Religious and Political Conflicts of His Era," in Werner Daum, ed., Yemen: 3000 Years of Art and Civilization in Arabia Felix (Innsbruck: Pinguin-Verlag, 1988), p. 212.
8. Should You Eat Something That Talks to You?
1. "The Lord destroyed everything there...," Ferdinand Wustenfeld, ed., Jacut's Geographisches Worterbuch (Leipzig: Bei F. A. Brockhaus, 1869), p. 897.
2. "Wabar is a vast piece of land...," Wustenfeld, Jacut's Geographisches Worterbuch, pp. 866–68.
9. The City of Brass
1. "unwholesome literature...," quoted in Joseph Campbell, ed., The Portable Arabian Nights (New York: Viking Press, 1952), p. 1; "vulgar, insipid," quoted in Reynold A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1930), p. 458; "The first who composed tales...," quoted in John Payne, The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, vol. 9 (London, 1884), p. 280.
2. pre-Persian origin of the tales. Frobenius hypothesized a common source for the Persian Arabian Nights and tales he collected from the Sudan, tales allegedly told by a slave named Far-li-mas, who hailed from the Arabian valley of the Hadramaut. Frobenius recalled that when he sailed the Red Sea in 1915, "the Arab seamen maintained, stoutly and firmly, that all the tales of the Arabian Nights had first been told in Hadramaut and from there had been diffused over the earth" (quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology [New York: Penguin Books, 1986], p. 164). The subsequent diffusion of the Arabian Nights to Persia may date to a Persian conquest of the Hadramaut, a little-known chapter of Arabian history.
3. "Allah blotted out the road ...," Richard F. Burton, trans., The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night, vol. 4 (London, 1885), p. 116. It is quite possible that the writer of this tale was familiar with an account (circa 1300) by Ibn Mujawir, a merchant