Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [18]
Nonetheless, fragments of Ptolemy's work survived. At least one copy of his table of coordinates—his listings of landmarks and sites—was saved and passed down through the centuries, until in the late 1400s European mapmakers laid out longitude and latitude grids and plotted afresh Ptolemy's coordinates of coastlines, mountains, rivers, and tribal fiefdoms. They marked his cities and towns with quaint castles or little dots, often in gold. They reconstructed, quite successfully, the world as Ptolemy knew it, as it was not long after the time of Christ.
On Ptolemy's map of Arabia—if anywhere—I should find Ubar. And sure enough, on most editions, the tribal name "Iobaritae"—Latin for "Ubarites"—appears more or less where Bertram Thomas encountered his road to Ubar. But there was no identifiable settlement, only evidence that an Ubarite tribe once may have wandered the region's sandy wastes. No castle or golden dot on Ptolemy's map, no city. And it wasn't as if I could look further into the past. Before Ptolemy, the only maps were very crude and usually local.
For several weeks there seemed no way to get beyond this impasse. Then, to better understand how Ptolemaic maps were constructed— and to attempt to conjure something out of nothing—I decided to make one of my own, step by step. Working from a table of coordinates printed in Ulm, Germany, in 1482, I plotted nearly four hundred landmarks and towns, just as Renaissance mapmakers had done. The project, which took several evenings, was intriguing, much like working a jigsaw puzzle. But there were no surprises. Except ... a day or two after I'd finished, one of the places I'd plotted popped up in my mind and bothered me. Omanum Emporium, "the marketplace of Oman," appeared in western Arabia at 77° × 19°. As far as I knew, the ancient land of Oman was in eastern Arabia (as today's Sultanate of Oman is).
Ptolemy's map of Arabia (simplified)
What, then, was "the marketplace of Oman" doing so far from home? The next time I could make it over to the Huntington, I doggedly double-checked the library's many editions and manuscripts of Ptolemy's Cosmographia. Nothing to be learned. When I returned the atlases to the rare book desk, I felt a little guiltier than usual for asking the librarians to lug these enormous volumes back and forth from the Huntington's vaults. It was a little before five, closing time. I hesitated, then drifted back to the library's main reading room. Though the lights were off, its oak paneling glowed in the last rays of the winter sun. I noticed, tucked under a shelf, a version of Ptolemy's atlas that I had thumbed through but not really studied. It was not an original edition but rather a reproduction, printed in the 1930s, of the Ebner Manuscript owned by the New York Public Library.
The Ebner Manuscript was a one-of-a-kind work, hand-done in 1460. It predated, I realized, all the other atlases at the Huntington. I turned to its map of Arabia. Omanum Emporium was in its usual place, at roughly 78° × 20°. Then I flipped to the atlas's table of coordinates and found Omanum Emporium listed at 87°40' × 19°75'. Something was wrong. Omanum Emporium's longitude was listed as 87° in the atlas's table of coordinates, yet placed at 78° on its map of Arabia. A door swung open. A library guard looked in, glanced at his watch, and cocked his head at me, the only person left in the cavernous room.
"Just a second, just wrapping it up," I said ... and checked the Ebner Manuscript's map of Arabia to see where the 87°40' × 19°75 listed in the table of coordinates might be. It fell in eastern Arabia, just above the word "lobaritae." Here was a settlement—long misplaced—in the homeland of the Ubarites! And it was a major settlement, for in some editions of Ptolemy's map of Arabia, a dozen or so cities are singled out (sometimes by larger type, sometimes by an asterisk) as being particularly important.