Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [118]
7. back to their mountain retreat. Golden grave goods may yet come to light in the Vale of Remembrance, though it is doubtful. The extent of grave robbing in southern Arabia is reflected in the fact that a major function of the god of the morning star was to avenge desecrators of the dead.
8. inscription that included the word . As several experts assured us, in the more than ten thousand known southern Arabian inscriptions, the word was nowhere to be found. But then I happened on it in an inscription found at an Arabian colony in ancient Ethiopia. Jacqueline Pirenne equates the word with Abiru, meaning "Hebrew." This could be evidence of a Jewish association with Ubar (an association already present in the figure of the prophet Hud, "He of the Jews"). Or this could be a wishful translation (Father Jamme thinks it is), and Ubar could instead be derived from the Semitic root for either "place of passage" or "camel hair tent."
18. Seasons in the Land of Frankincense
1. a Mesopotamian-Persian sphere of influence. A link between Ubar and Mesopotamia tallies with a fragment of myth in which "the 'Adites quarreled with the children of Ham and left Babylon. They peopled a district in southern Arabia contiguous to 'Umman, Yaman, and Hadramaut. There they built palaces, erected temples, and worshipped deities as stars."
2. eastern versus western Arabia. An Arabian east versus west map can be drawn with archaeological evidence, admittedly sketchy, and with a brand-new cultural resource: genetic mapping. The division on the map on page 209 is based on the mean strength of the genes ESD*1 and GC*1F.
3. a temple as well as an administrative center. In Ancient Yemen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Andrey Korotoyev analyzes a settlement pattern in which a hagar was a dual religious and political center for a "sha'b," a surrounding territory of several dozen square kilometers. Ubar would have been a hagar.
4. "Show us our Christ, alas!" and "Whereupon, after a terrible storm...," Sale, "Preliminary Discourse," Koran, p. 16.
5. traditions of desert life. The renowned Cambridge Arabist Robert Serjeant found southern Arabia ideal for the concept of "Interpretation of the Antique by Reference to the Present" (Serjeant, South Arabian Hunt [London: Luzac, 1983], p. 80).
19. Older Than Ad
1. At these sites ... Archaeologically, the sites near Shisur contemporary with the Rub' al-Khali's lakes are Upper Paleolithic (40,000–100,000 years before the present). Juris Zarins homed in on some forty small settlements from this era by plotting the courses of late Pleistocene rivers found on space images, then methodically searching their banks.
2. the rains withdrew. The onset of hyperaridity was caused by a phenomenon called "Milankovitch forcing," in which Earth wobbled slightly in its orbit around the sun. This precipitated a global climactic change that to a large extent initiated the desertification of Arabia, Africa, India, and Australia.
3. retreating to the north ... It has long been argued—and counterargued—that the Semitic populations of the Middle East arose from the deserts of Arabia. A migration north twenty thousand years ago is how and when this could have happened. Though the date of this migration is far earlier than biblical scholars would like, the idea has an appealing fit. It has recently been championed by geologist Hal McClure.
4. waiting hunters would rise up ... The outline of Shisur's impressive Neolithic animal trap was photographed—quite unintentionally—by an Omani military overflight in the late 1970s. In 1990, Shisur's new village obliterated all traces of it.
5. "smelled the sweet savor...," Alexander Heidel, The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels (Chicago: University