Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [27]
Perhaps the archaeologists I met still secretly liked the old romantic, if not very effective, way of seeking a site. Or perhaps they were being tolerant of an amateur. In any case, they enthusiastically supported the idea of an expedition to find Ubar. At Brown University I met with professors Ernest Frerichs and Jacob Neusner. They told me that historians had unjustly ignored Arabia and that Ubar—if it existed—might have a significant role in the Middle East's complex archaeology. Gordon Newby of the University of North Carolina, an expert on early Arabic texts, was quite familiar with Iram/Ubar. He was particularly intrigued by the prophet Hud, a name that linguistically could be taken to mean "He of the Jews." He wondered: could Hud have been a lone wandering Israelite, a voice in the wilderness decrying Arabia's idolatry?
In Washington I spent an encouraging afternoon with Smithsonian archaeologist Gus Van Beek. I also visited with explorer Wendell Phillips's sister, Merilyn Phillips Hodgson, who, since his death, had supported Arabian archaeology. She arranged for me to meet Father Albert Jamme, the inscription expert who in 1953 had prompted a bedouin sheik's unreasonable, insatiable lust for latex, which in turn had propelled the Phillips expedition on to Oman and the search for Ubar. She said not to take it personally if the learned Jesuit threw me out.
Tucked away under the eaves of a timeworn Victorian mansion on the campus of Washington's Catholic University, Father Jamme's office was crammed with arcane journals, latex squeezes, and worn oaken files indexed not in English or even his native French but in ancient south Arabian script. "A to Ag," for instance, was . I knew that Father Jamme had no patience for fools and that many a visiting scholar had been sent packing down his narrow stairs with fulminations of "dangerous assumptions" and "unbelievable ignorance" echoing in his ears. It was a relief, then, after a few uncertain minutes, to be unrolling the father's annotated maps of Arabia and relating them to JPL's space images, which he found of great interest.
For some curious reason, members of his order—beginning in the 1860s with the self-described Jewish Jesuit, Gifford Palgrave—had long had a role in penetrating the mysteries of Arabia. And to Father Jamme, the Ubar region was a critical missing piece in the puzzle of an ancient land.
"The road!" he exclaimed as he paced about. "The road to Ubar! Yes, it could well be! An expedition? Yes! It will be valuable, even if it's to show us there's nothing there!" (This might be his idea of a crackerjack expedition; it wasn't mine.)
Father Jamme carried on about the importance of tracking the trade routes of ancient Arabia, pointing out that the land beyond Dhofar's coastal mountains was still pretty much an archaeological blank. He told me that according to classical sources, the world's finest incense—a translucent "silver" grade of frankincense—had been harvested on the back slope of those mountains, taken down to the coast, and exported by sea.2 But if evidence could be found that frankincense was also transported directly across the desert via Ubar, a new—and until now secret—chapter of the ancient past might be revealed.
After I returned to Los Angeles, we corresponded. In one letter Father Jamme said that although no known inscriptions mentioned the place, he hoped that someday I might come across the simple word m, Ubar. Along the way, though, I had better not make any "dangerous assumptions."
On a practical level, Kay and I wondered what we could do about Ran Fiennes's challenge: raise the money, and he would come aboard. I knew that whatever my abilities, fundraising wasn't one of them. I thought of George Hedges, an attorney I had worked with on an interactive video project. George, a complex and talented fellow, could not only raise money, he liked raising money. There were many Georges: George the dramatic trial lawyer, who often worked pro bono on near hopeless death penalty appeals; George the ex-rocker (who once