Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [119]
20. The Incense Trade
1. "the rising of the Dog Star...," Bostock and Riley, Natural History of Pliny, vol. 3, pp. 126–27.
2. the surrounding oasis. An ancient oasis appears to have extended east from Shisur along a fault line that tapped an aquifer charged by the runoff from the Dhofar Mountains. To this day, the wadi overlying this fault is called Umm al-Hait, the Mother of Life.
3. "The fairness of beautiful girls...," Thomas, Alarms and Excursions, p. 288.
4. "Thou shalt cast incense...," Master of Belhaven (A. Hamilton), The Kingdom of Melchior (London: John Murray, 1949), pp. 21, 20; "A stairway to the sky...," Raymond O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 76.
5. "called sacred and ... not allowed...," Bostock and Riley, Natural History of Pliny, vol. 3, p. 125.
6. "The whole city now is conceived...," Joseph Campbell, "The Hieratic City State," Parabola 18, no. 4 (Nov. 1993), pp. 41–43.
7. The language of the 'Adites ... Though only a two-letter fragment of the 'Ad script has surfaced at Ubar, inscriptions abound in the Dhofar Mountains. It appears to have preceded not only other languages of southern Arabia, but also Hebrew, which has nine fewer sounds, and Arabic, which has eight fewer.
8. "broken heads ... and to bind bloody wounds...," Oldfather, Diodorus of Sicily, p. 45.
9. "It is the luxury of man...," Bostock and Riley, Natural History of Pliny, vol. 3, p. 127. As a measure of the value of frankincense, there are records of the denarii paid for a measure in the markets of Rome. To translate its cost into modern terms, the Smithsonian's Gus Van Beek worked out the formula that a pound of frankincense was worth between 2.5 and 5 percent of the minimum annual urban cost of living. In 1990 dollars, that would be over $1,000 a pound.
21. Khuljan's City
1. summer's night in 350 B.C. This year could have been as early as 410 or as late as 290 B.C. The earliest carbon-14 date associated with Ubar's New City is 350 B.C. plus or minus sixty years.
2. "After the sun has set...," Thomas, Arabia Felix, pp. 52, 290.
3. a fence woven of gnarled branches... Duwwar construction is still used by the Shahra of the Dhofar Mountains. Its use at Ubar would explain why there is no "meltdown" from dissolved mud brick walls.
4. "To thee from Babylon we made our way...," Faris, Antiquities of South Arabia, p. 30.
5. a large plastered basin... Water installations—including fountains and sheets of water one walked through—were an important feature of Arabian temples. To ensure a fresh water supply, there may have been a rock-cut passage between Ubar's temple and the spring. Our Shisur friend Baheet recalled that as a boy, he found and squeezed through such a passage that had since collapsed.
6. the kahin shuffled the arrows ... Divination by arrows is called istqam in Arabic, "rhabdomancy" in English. The rite may have an echo in the Bible when Yahweh, through his soothsayer Gad, speaks to David, saying: "I offer you three things; choose one of them for me to do to you" (2 Samuel 24:12). Similarly, in legend, the fate of the Ubarites is sealed as they choose one of three clouds.
7. Once ... the religion of the 'Ad may have been more meaningful ...As historian Karen Armstrong has noted, "In Arabia the original symbolic significance of the old gods had been lost during the nomadic period and Arab religion had no developed mythology to express this pagan insight" (Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet [San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1992], p. 98).
8. "Were it not for her whose wily charms...," Faris, Antiquities of South Arabia, p. 29.
9. "Roast flesh, the glow of fiery wine...," Lyall, Ancient Arabian Poetry, p. 64.
10. to Eriyot, his royal city. Eriyot may have been Ain Humran. But there is also reason to believe