Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [60]
"Ali? Looking after the birds?"
Cross-section of the Dhofar region of Oman
"Feeding the djinns," he replied with a laugh that wasn't really a laugh. Even to the enlightened, djinns are not to be dismissed. They stalk the pages of the Koran, where they are considered, after man and animal, a third creation of Allah. 'Afrits, a particularly troublesome brand of djinn, dwell in graveyards. They are the spirits of wicked men turned away from Paradise, doomed to haunt their place of burial.
"And who was wickeder than the People of 'Ad?" asked Ali Achmed, paraphrasing a verse from the Koran.
We drove on down the Vale of Remembrance. Shading his eyes from the afternoon sun, Ali scanned the widening valley.
"The stones," he said, "you must see the stones. They're part of this."
He directed us to a row of stone monuments, each consisting of three unfinished slabs of stone tilted together to form a crude two- to three-foot-high pyramid, known as a trilith ("three-rocks").
Dhofar triliths
Line of triliths viewed from above
Rows of triliths have been reported throughout southeastern Arabia. This site had eight pyramids in a line and, parallel to them, four fire circles. Elsewhere we found rows of as few as three and as many as twenty-five triliths.
The triliths of the Vale of Remembrance were as old as the People of 'Ad. Ali Achmed showed us where, the year before, he had dug beneath two of them and discovered ash, and—via an English friend—sent it off for carbon dating. His ash samples dated to 60 and 110 B.C. (plus or minus approximately one hundred years).
Ali was convinced that the triliths had once been "quadriliths," that each set of three stones once supported a capstone, which over the years could have easily tumbled off. Spotting a rock that to us looked like any other, he crouched down, dug around it, and turned it over. It was inscribed with well-preserved letters from the same alphabet used in the rock art of the mountain caves.
His fellow Shahra, Ali Achmed told us, held that triliths were memorials to the ancient dead, a reasonable idea considering the funerary nature of this valley. 1 It has also been suggested that triliths were route markers for passing caravans or sites for the ritual crucifixion of ibexes, desert animals whose crescent horns symbolized the crescent moon, the principal deity of pre-Islamic Arabia.
Trilith capstone
That afternoon we visited several trilith sites and saw many others in the distance. They were generally on flat terraces above wadi drainage channels and were often silhouetted against the sky. Why were they here? What were they for?
Sometime later I came across a tantalizing passage in Hisham ibn al-Kalbi's Book of Idols, a catalogue of gods of pre-Islamic Arabia compiled in the early 800s. Al-Kalbi recounts, "Whenever a traveler stopped at a place or station [in order to rest or spend the night] he would select for himself four stones, pick out the finest among them and adopt it as his god, and use the remaining three as supports for his cooking pots. On his departure he would leave them behind and would do the same on his other stops."2
Here was a validation of Ali Achmed's opinion that these monuments had been constructed of not three but four stones. And the fourth, the missing capstone, would have served as a traveler's god, a betyl. The word expresses a concept common to both the Old Testament and the Koran. It comes from the Arabic bayt-el: the dwelling place (bayt) of God (el being the root of the word Allah). In Hebrew, bethel has the same meaning.
A betyl was a rock where God dwelled, or at least visited. Or several rocks where several gods took up residence. In Semitic tradition it was important that the rock not be representational, that it be without countenance. Arabs and Jews alike have long abhorred the idea of graven images. Idolatry to them was a crude invention of the Mesopotamians. If God (or gods) descended from the heavens and was to be found on earth, it was as a spiritual force— Sakina in Arabic, Shekinah in Hebrew—that dwelt in