Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [74]
With its varied ware, Shisur began to reveal its past. Its inhabitants must have prospered, for they could afford some of the best utensils the ancient world offered. Beyond that, they were themselves inventive, producing orange pottery decorated, frequently, with a motif of dots inside circles. Juri had found such ware at Khor Suli on the coast, probably out in the Rub' al-Khali (a piece so worn he couldn't be sure), and now here. He believed the style was unique to this part of Arabia—and possibly a hallmark of the People of 'Ad.
Dot-and-circle shard
Now we dared whisper, "Ubar?" Kay, raised in the South and familiar with things like jinxes and spells, said we should be careful and not risk spooking our good fortune. If at this point we went around thinking we had found Ubar, it could somehow make the place not be Ubar. If what we had found was too good to be true, maybe it wasn't. And there was now a nagging question: was our site a backwater outpost—or was it, as Ubar must have been, a significant and major settlement?
Week three at Shisur ... Monday passed without incident. On Tuesday the wall that appeared to extend east from the existing fort puzzled Juri. In Rick Brietenstein's square, instead of continuing straight on, the wall made an unexpected curve. "Comes off clean," Juri puzzled, "and curves around." He and Rick followed the wall stone by stone, questioning whether they were being deceived by collapsed masonry or, worse yet, a natural line of rocks. But no, the wall was distinctly there, curving around like a horseshoe, then abruptly resuming its prior alignment.
North ridge 3: tower discovered
Juri straightened up, stepped back. And it came to him. "You know what? A tower. Looks like we have ourselves a tower."
We clambered up on the roof of a Discovery for a high-angle view of the excavation. As Amy Hirschfeld focused her Nikon, juri had Rick chalk an ID slate: "DAD [Dhofar Antiquities Dept.] TOWER #1." From the width of its stone foundations Juri estimated that the tower might have risen as high as thirty feet.
"A tower, think about that," juri said. "You don't just build one in the middle of nowhere. You have a wall here, then a tower, then you're going to have more wall, more towers..." Here at Shisur a tower would almost certainly have been a component of a large structure: a fortress that protected the site's water supply and guarded a season's store of frankincense.
Ancient furnace
Sure enough, almost simultaneously, farther down the ridge Jean England unearthed in her square the foundations of a second tower, "DAD TOWER #2." Larger than the first and circular, it marked the fortress's northeast corner. It contained traces of an interior stair and sheltered what appeared to be a small furnace outfitted with stone reflecting vanes to achieve higher than normal temperatures. It was difficult to say what the furnace had been intended for. It wasn't for smelting metal, for there was no evidence of slag. It might have been used, we thought, to process frankincense. 3
North ridge 4: excavation completed
Juris hunch to excavate the site's north ridge could not have been more on target. We had uncovered the north wall and towers of an ancient fortress.
As, at dusk, Baheet issued a call to prayer from Shisur's minaret, I was prompted to read, as I had read many times before, the Koran's sura "The Dawn"..."Have you not heard how Allah dealt with 'Ad? The people of the many-columned city of Iram, whose like has never been built in the whole land?"
If this was Iram/Ubar, where were the columns? One explanation, I thought, lay in the Arabic word , pronounced imad. In contemporary usage, it means pillar, but older definitions were broader. In George Sale's 1782 edition of the Koran, the first in English, the line in question is translated as "The people of Iram, adorned with lofty buildings." In the ancient world,