Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [78]
Juri and Amy were looking at the oldest known chess set found in Arabia, one of the oldest in the world. As well as a queen, there were (left to right above) three pawns, a bishop or vizier with a telltale "hat," a castle, and a knight. Finally, discovered outside the tower, there was a king, inscribed with a six-pointed star. 6
More sandstone artifacts
Sandstone king
The chess set, wonderful though it was, raised a further question. The game is believed to have originated in India in the late 600s, a hundred years or so after Ubar's legendary destruction. Did this checkmate our Ubar theories? Juri thought not. The sinkhole, he reasoned, could have collapsed sometime after 150 A.D., and the fortress thereupon abandoned. Then, centuries later, ruined Ubar may have been reoccupied.
The Ubarites did not vanish from the face of the earth after fleeing their city; rather, there is evidence that they were absorbed by other tribes (the Shahra of the Dhofar Mountains and the Mahra of the Oman-Yemen borderlands). In time, members of these tribes could have been drawn back to the ruined city and its unique water source. While their animals grazed on what was left of the verdant oasis, they could have whiled away the hours with the newly invented game of chess.
Baheet and Mabrook often dropped by Amy's lab to help out. Particularly when the sky was dark and the wind howled through their village, they would sit for hours, quietly cleaning shards and piecing them together. With the help of a magnifying glass, they translated fragments of Arabic barely visible on Islamic coins. And, forthrightly, they would ask questions that we tended to avoid. Such as: "If this is Ubar, then where's the gold?" Many bedouin assume that no matter what archaeologists say, they are treasure seekers. Why else would they dig in the dirt? Baheet and Mabrook were too sensible for that; nonetheless, they reminded us that the Ubar storied by their grandfathers was a city of , dhahab ahmar —red gold.
We hadn't found even a hint of gold. One good reason for this was that we hadn't found any skeletons either. When archaeologists do find treasure, it is usually in the form of grave goods, offerings to comfort and aid the deceased in their afterlife. But Juri had found no burials at or near Shisur. One possible explanation was that anyone who died there was taken to the mountains for burial, perhaps in the Vale of Remembrance that we had visited. This would have been likely, we thought, if the fortress of Shisur had been seasonally occupied. The People of'Ad might have spent the late spring and summer months in the cooler, monsoon-shrouded Dhofar Mountains, harvesting their precious frankincense. Come fall they could have transported it to Shisur, a staging area for the great caravans striking out across Arabia. When these caravans returned to Shisur in the spring, the People of 'Ad would take their dead—as well as their profits (including any gold)—back to their mountain retreat.7
So it was that Baheet's blunt "Where's the gold?" led to the working out of a scenario of the annual ebb and flow of life at Shisur. Depending on the time of year when the sinkhole collapsed, there may have been treasure stored in the Citadel. But, Baheet and Mabrook agreed, the 'Ad, when they fled, would not have been so panicked, morose, or witless as to leave any treasure behind.
As the nasty weather allowed, Juris students continued to clear away foundations of towers, walls, and the Citadel. It was hard to tell whether the Citadel was a stronghold, as it first appeared to be, or a temple dedicated to ancient gods—or both. We could only speculate that whoever had raised this fortress had been inspired by more than an elemental need to stave off their enemies.
In terms of productive archaeology, the next weekend was not the time for solving the inner meaning of the Citadel. The