Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [30]
In an enthusiastic letter, Father Jamme, the Jesuit epigrapher, gave us his blessing: "From JPL you have the revelation of an ancient road in the country of Ubar. Now you have a wonderful starting point which has to be discovered in place; it is an entirely new ball game. What a hope. Full speed ahead!"
Once JPL had made blow-ups of our satellite image, George Hedges framed one and sent it off to Ran Fiennes so that he could present it to Oman's Sultan Qaboos ibn Said, in the hope that he would eventually allow us to trek across his desert. Ran warned us, though, that we were not dealing with a land of quick responses.
Between us, Ron Blom and I spent hours scanning every millimeter of our full Landsat image and, tentatively, reconstructing the course of Oman's ancient Incense Road. It appeared that frankincense harvested in the mountains of Dhofar was first taken to two collection points, Hanun and Andhur, where there are known ruins. From Hanun and Andhur two separate routes went north across a gravel plain and converged at the well of Shisur.1 From there a single route headed northwest and soon entered the dunes of the Rub' al-Khali. The telltale line on our Landsat image then shifted to the 325-degree alignment reported by Bertram Thomas. As the dunes became ever more massive, the line became fainter and fainter. Just short of where Thomas thought Ubar was to be found, it all but vanished.
Incense caravan route through Oman
The road surely continued on, but we now could only approximate its route, for features generally have to be upward of thirty meters wide to show up on a Landsat image. For higher resolution, Ron suggested France's SPOT (Système Probatoire d'Observation de la Terre) satellite. Zeroing in on a smaller area and sacrificing color for black-and-white, it could image features less than ten meters across. Carefully, we plotted reference points for SPOT coverage so that as it arced over Arabia, the French satellite could align its lenses, prisms, and mirrors and further reveal the road to Ubar.
At about this time, we all agreed that we should recruit a trained, experienced archaeologist. It was one thing to look for Ubar, but if we found anything, any excavation would have to be directed by a professional. The obvious candidate for the job was Dr. Juris Zarins, who had recently completed a ten-year field survey of major archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia. Yet I hesitated to call him. His name conjured up the image of a long-bearded, stoop-shouldered academic, speaker of nine antique languages, who would say, dismissively, "Ubar! Ha! A fanciful myth, yes, but nothing more."
Zarins was currently teaching at Southwest Missouri State. When I finally phoned, I was surprised and delighted to find myself talking at great length with an immensely good-natured and enthusiastic individual. Within a week George Hedges and I were on a plane for Springfield, Missouri, to review the project.
It wasn't hard to break the ice with Juris Zarins—six foot four, mustache, but no long academic beard.
"Do you prefer to be called Juris or Juri?" George asked.
"Yes," he answered, deadpan, then broke into a broad smile and slapped us on our backs.
Juris/Juri had been born in Lithuania, raised in a German displaced persons camp, then had come to America with his family and settled in the Midwest. In high school he became a first-string basketball center, polished his English, and developed a lifelong fondness for terrible puns. And he took up the study of cuneiform.
"I guess the light struck early. I was interested in the origins of things, and even before college I got a summer job digging Lewis and Clark's fort. Guess what they gave me."
"The kitchen? Graveyard?" we ventured.
"The crapper. Personally excavated it."
With fellow farm kids, Juri served as a combat infantryman in Vietnam, then, on the GI Bill, earned a Ph.D. in archaeology from the University of Chicago. He was drawn to the Middle East and the evidence there of the origins