Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [38]
Because of his preoccupation with nisnases, both Arabic and Western scholars have ridiculed and discounted Yaqut's account of Ubar. But subtract all the nisnas lore, and what's left is an intriguing geographical description: "Wabar is a vast piece of land, about 300 fer-sakh [37½ miles] wide....The land of Wabar was very much fertile and very rich with water. It was full of trees and fruits. The very fast growing population there could multiply their wealth and could live in excessive luxury.... [There is] a big well called the Well of Wabar."2
Here we have a thumbnail sketch of Ubar as it really might have been: a sizable oasis watered by a great well, and the home of a rapidly expanding, prosperous population that became a little too full of themselves.
9. The City of Brass
AS THE TALE OF UBAR was told and retold throughout medieval times, any clues to its underlying reality became more and more submerged in fantasy. This is evident in the variations of the legend that appear in Alf Laylah wah Layla, the Arabian Nights.
The Arabian Nights tales have long been considered the product of overheated imagination. When they were popularized in English at the turn of our century, essayist Thomas Carlyle considered them "unwholesome literature" and forbade their presence in his house. "Downright lies," he sniffed. "No sober stone is permitted to kill even the wildest fantasies." Even back in the 900s, historian Abu al-Hasan Ali al-Mas'udi termed the tales "vulgar, insipid"; nevertheless, he wrote of their origin: "The first who composed tales and made books of them were the Persians. The Arabs translated them and the learned took them and embellished them and composed others like them."1
Still relatively unexplored is a possible pre-Persian origin of the tales. Ethnologist Leo Frobenius and mythologist Joseph Campbell both suspected that a number of the tales were in their earliest forms genuinely Arabian—and had their genesis in the valley of the Hadramaut, not far west of our search area.2 (It was in this valley that Ubar's Prophet Hud was traditionally said to lie buried.) Given this proximity—and given that Iram/Ubar's People of'Ad wander in and out of many of the tales in the Arabian Nights —I thought they might conceal a wealth of useful information.
A succinct, relatively restrained tale is "The Story of Many Columned Irani and Abdallah Son of Abi Kilabah." As for clues to Ubar, there is an interesting description of the city's locale as "an uninhabited spot, a vast and fair open plain clear of sand-hills and mountains, with founts flushing..." And, following Ubar's divine demolition, there is the line "Moreover, Allah blotted out the road which led to the city"—a reference, it would appear, to the very road we were seeking.3
In other Arabian Nights tales, the myth of Ubar gathers momentum—and fancy—as it careens from story to story. In "The Eldest Lady's Tale" a medieval traveler enters a version of Ubar and finds it quite intact. It has not been destroyed; rather, its inhabitants "had been translated by the anger of Allah and had become stones ... all were into black stones enstoned: not an inhabited house appeared to the espier, nor a blower of fire. We were awe struck at the sight ... and said 'Doubtless there is some mystery in all this.'"4
In this version the Iram/Ubar myth has been populated by maskoot, an Arabic term for human beings petrified by the wrath of God. It has been suggested that the idea of maskoot came from the discovery by superstitious bedouin of shattered statuary in the deserts of Upper Egypt.
More maskoot are found in the tale "The City of Brass," by all odds the most bizarre rendition of the Ubar myth. It is phantasmagoric, funereal. It recounts the adventures