Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [31]
Within hours Juri was a member of our team. He thought Ubar could well be a real place. On the north side of the Rub' al-Khali, at the oasis of Jabrin, he had dug test pits that yielded bits of pottery from Mesopotamia. He knew that Mesopotamians had had trading colonies on the Arabian gulf coast, but what were they doing so far inland?
"It makes no sense," he mused, "unless, of course, there was an Ubar, and both sites functioned as stops for frankincense caravans." Heading north from Ubar, caravans could have followed a series of wells across the Rub' al-Khali to the oasis of Jabrin, then continued on their way to Mesopotamia. Zarins confirmed a larger vision of the Ubar road as a vital link in Arabia's incense trade (see map below).
Arabia's incense roads
By June of 1987 our now seven-member team had permission in the works, more space imagery on order, but still no money—so we had time to further research the myth of Ubar. Although I had more than twenty loose-leaf binders of notes, I didn't know that there would be another twenty-seven to go. The more I read, the more there was to read in English and (with the help of translators) German, French, and Arabic—including modern Arabic, medieval Arabic, and Epigraphic South Arabic (ESA), a long unspoken language known only in inscriptions from the time of Ubar.
What archaeologists really treasure at their sites is anything in writing. Scrawled graffiti will do; graven inscriptions are better. The South Arabians had left behind an abundance of both, and yet, Father Jamme had assured me, none made mention of Ubar or its People of 'Ad. But now, in an obscure volume, I happened across the story of the Palinuris, a British survey ship that in 1824 charted the coastline of southern Arabia. At 54°30'E, 20°15'N, the Palinuris dropped anchor in a protected natural harbor. From its white sand beach rose a spectacular black volcanic hill, which the local tribesmen called Husn al-Ghurab, the Fortress of the Crows. Ascending to its summit, the ship's first mate, Lieutenant Wellstead, discovered an imposing, finely carved inscription. He diligently copied it down, and sent it on to the Reverend Charles Foster, an English cleric who pronounced it to be an 'Adite inscription of "awful antiquity." Foster's translation revealed it to be an account of the golden age and ultimate grief of the People of 'Ad! It even mentioned the prophet Hud, Ubar's doomsayer, by name. In part the long inscription read:
And we hunted the game, by land, with ropes and reeds;
And we drew forth the fishes from the depths of the sea.
Kings reigned over us, far removed from baseness,
And vehement against the people of perfidy and fraud.
They sanctioned for us, from the religion of Hud, right laws,
And we believed in miracles, the resurrection,
And the resurrection of the dead by the breath of God.
Then came years barren and burnt up:
When one evil year had passed away, there came another to succeed it.
And we became as though we had never seen a glimpse of good.
They died: and neither foot nor hoof remained.
Thus fares it with him who renders not thanks to God:
His footsteps fail not to be blotted out from his dwelling.2
What a wonderful poetic vision this was, except that it didn't quite make sense: early on in the inscription, its people "believed in the religion of Hud" and had kings "far removed from baseness," yet they later paid the price of "him who renders not thanks to God." And how could a people die off—"neither foot nor hoof" remaining—then pop back to elegize their own fate?
Ever hopeful, I sought Father Jamme's opinion, and by return mail received a freshly annotated translation. The inscription really did exist, he told me, but it had nothing to do with a lost golden age, the prophet Hud, or the promise of resurrection. The inscription was, in fact, the equivalent of the plaques that modern politicians delight in affixing to the walls