Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [19]
What exactly happened in the monastery of Ebner in the 1460s is not clear. But a likely scenario is this: the creator of the manuscript correctly copied an earlier list of Ptolemy's coordinates and, working from these coordinates, set to drawing his map of Arabia. He outlined the coast, added mountains and rivers. One by one, he filled in the cities and towns. When he got to Omanum Emporium he ran out of ink ... or it was time to light a candle ... or perhaps he paused to brush away the scriptorium cat. One way or another, the scribe slipped up. When he put pen to parchment, the 87° latitude of the table of coordinates became 78° on the map. This simple inversion placed Omanum Emporium far west of where it belonged, a mistake that appears to have been repeated on later maps copied in Bologna, Rome, and Ulm.
Detail of Ptolemy's map of Arabia (corrected)
Heading home that afternoon, I was barely aware of what freeway I was driving. Was "Omanum Emporium" Ubar itself? In the ancient world, sites frequently had several names, just as they have in modern history. What was once Niew Amsterdam is Manhattan, Gotham, the Big Apple. Yet Omanum Emporium did not rest easily at its new location. What was a "market town of Oman" doing way out in the desert? An emporium was typically a seaside trading town.
Back at the Huntington, I found the answer no more than a half inch away on Ptolemy's map. Close by Omanum Emporium's newly established site was the legend Thurifero Regio, or Incense Land. In the ancient world incense was a major commodity, in demand for both temple and household use. Frankincense, I had read, was the resin of a humble desert tree, which, by the time it reached the faraway markets of the Mediterranean, was as valued as gold.
Omanum Emporium—Ubar—could well have had a role in the harvest and trade of incense. In fact, understanding how the trade worked might clarify the city's reason for being, and its rise and fall.
Iobaritae ... Omanum Emporium ... Thurifero Regio ... These three legends on Ptolemy's map appeared to equal a tribe, a city, a trade in incense. And it intrigued me that in all of Arabia, Omanum Emporium was the sole major site on Ptolemy's map that has not been accounted for. So it would make a great deal of sense if it and lost Ubar were one and the same.
Before the gates to the Huntington swung shut, I had time for a walk in my favorite of the library's gardens, the cactus garden. Though it was winter, pencil and silver cholla cactus were in bright yellow and red bloom. Admiring them, I reflected on my journey across the deserts of many maps of Arabia, new and old. With no little difficulty, I had made it past the saw-fingered man and the barking goat-man and had stood in awe of the landmark achievement of Claudius Ptolemy, the world's first great cartographer.
I looked back at the Huntington and realized why scholars, for one very good reason, had never taken Ubar seriously: the city wasn't on Ptolemy's map. Yet—under another name and in the wrong place—it had been there all along.
4. The Flight of the Challenger
FOR THE TIME BEING, at least, Ubar's place and purpose made sense. In a far corner of ancient Arabia, incense was harvested, then taken via a time-worn road to the fabled caravansary of Ubar, known to Claudius Ptolemy as the marketplace of Oman. The incense would then have been loaded on camels for a daring journey across the Rub' al-Khali to the great markets of Petra, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus, Rome.
But now, could the search for Ubar be defined, narrowed? Ptolemy's map of Arabia was fine for determining the lay of the land, yet its inherent distortions made it impossible to zero in on a site with any degree of accuracy.1 The best that could be said for Ubar was that it was somewhere in a 100-by-300-mile sandbox, somewhere in 30,000 square miles of gravel plains and dunes.
A while back, the Los Angeles Times had had an article about an airborne radar system that had successfully located Mayan ruins hidden beneath a dense