Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [45]
By flashlight we took a last look at the inscription and its nose-thumbing graffiti. Angling the beam to cast the letters in deep relief, we picked out the name "'Il'ad Yalut, king of Hadramaut." His name dates the site's construction, for he is mentioned (as King Eleazus) in a Greek mariner's account written sometime between 40 and 70 A.D. Sumhuram, then, had to have been built no earlier than about 20 A.D.
It was then that it came home to us that we might truly be on to something. There are allusions to the frankincense trade dating back to thousands of years B.C., but Sumhuram had been built after the time of Christ. Who, then, had managed the trade, shipped the region's precious incense overall those centuries before?
Who other than our People of'Ad?
For the next few days, we surveyed the coast with an eye to finding anything that might have been built by the 'Adites. We walked a couple of sites that might have been from their era, but they could also have been built by far-ranging Portuguese seafarers as late as the 1600s. Without actually digging, Juri explained, it was hard to tell. Depending on weather conditions and building materials, a site built within the last hundred years could look thousands of years old, and a thousand-year-old site could look as if it had been abandoned yesterday.
Wrapping up our survey and heading back to Salalah, we drove into a late afternoon patch of sunshine, a break in the pervasive gloom of the monsoon. Off to the left, Juri glimpsed something.
"Wait, wait! Over there!" he exclaimed.
At the wheel, Ran muttered, "Every time you see a rock, you want to stop."
"No! No. This is important!" insisted Juri.
Juri had spied an ancient graveyard, dozens and dozens of rock-walled mounds. Ran sighed and drove over to them; everybody got out and, led by Juri, prowled from one mound to another to another.
"Don't step on that," Juri cautioned Ran. "That's something right there. See that?"
He picked up a pottery shard and explained that it could have accompanied a burial and, over the millennia, worked its way to the surface. "Burnished ware. Look at that. See, hold it in the sun there. Kind of shines. See that? The people who made that pottery took a little stick and rubbed it real good to give it a shine. They couldn't make fancy pottery. But they tried hard. Did their best."
In a simple scrap of pottery, Juri the archaeologist had glimpsed the hand and life of an ancient potter. Moreover, the piece was unlike anything Juri had previously seen in Arabia. He logged the potsherd and hastened past the graves to the crest of a hill overlooking a marshy area called, we later learned, Khor Suli. He wasn't sure, but he thought he could discern traces of the docks of an ancient harbor. And closer to the sea we saw some structures that George Hedges dubbed "boats." They were stone enclosures, three to four meters long, shaped very much like small boats still in use on the Arabian coast. Juri wondered if cargoes of frankincense might have been sorted and weighed here before being loaded onto actual boats.
The site at Khor Suli almost certainly predated Sumhuram. Its masonry was rougher; there were no inscriptions. It had its own style of pottery, and its graves and stone "boats" were unique. This was the work not of outside colonists but of a native populace.
The People of'Ad?
The next day we were to fly a long-range desert reconnaissance. If we were lucky, we would find compelling evidence of the People of 'Ad. Of course we might find absolutely nothing, in which case the quest for Ubar would probably be over.
In an early-morning drizzle, under a leaden overcast, we clambered aboard a camouflaged Huey helicopter provided by the SOAF, the Sultanate of Oman Air Force. It was a tight squeeze: our six team members plus three National Police escorts and the pilot and copilot. And camping gear, weaponry, water, and fuel.
Pilot Nick Clark, an Englishman on contract to the SOAF, flipped a sequence of switches.