Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [82]
The Citadel at Ubar
So it appeared that the Citadel was, in part at least, a temple or shrine as well as an administrative center.3 The ancient Arabians saw no reason to keep their gods at arm's length from mammon. The gods blessed commerce, and commerce handsomely paid them back. The moneychangers weren't in the temple by accident; they were there by design.
As they excavated the Citadel, Juris team cleared a passageway that led to a deep, finely plastered basin that once may have served a ritual function; perhaps it held water for ablutions, or possibly it was a place for the storage of temple frankincense. The passage turned to the left, then right, and ascended a well-constructed staircase—that ended in midair. Any chambers beyond—and the secrets they held—had sheared off and plunged into the site's sinkhole. The complete layout of the Citadel, unfortunately, would never be known.
Sometime after Ubar's great cataclysm, the Citadel and adjoining structures were partially reinhabited. In Tower #0 (so designated because it had been missed in the first season), Juris team excavated 72 centimeters of stratigraphic deposits. (It was, he said, a "Sedimental Journey.") From 900 A.D. onward, the site had been rebuilt a half-dozen times, but with coarse mud brick rather than cut stone and fine plaster. As Juri commented, "Looks as if squatters moved in and hung out across from where the major collapse took place. Got by with as little as they could to make the place livable."
In early April of 1992, Juri shifted his crew to the coast, as he had the year before, and worked on through August. Kay and I joined him for a stint at Ain Humran. Kay, who had an eye for "surface collection," prowled the surrounding plain picking up bits and pieces of evidence of a sprawling agricultural community. I dug square #770 and didn't come up with an awful lot. When it came time for us to leave, I apologetically left the square to Juris wife, Sandy, who along with their kids was in Oman for the summer. Volunteer Ian Brown also worked the square and, six days after we left, was startled to unearth a vessel flecked with purple paint and marked with six crosses. A Christian chalice!
This was a significant find, for where there was a chalice, there was almost certainly a church, perhaps a monastery. The chalice raised the possibility of monks sailing to this remote comer of Arabia and establishing an outpost of Christianity in an abandoned incense-trading center. Significantly, they would have been dwelling in the shadow of "the eastern mountain range" of Genesis, biblical mountains marking the edge of the known world.
Chalice found at Ain Humran
There was once a considerable Christian presence in Arabia, and though documentation is sparse, there is a chance that Ain Humran was the missing "third church" founded by the Byzantine missionary Theophilus Indus in the middle 300s. The sites of Theophilus's first and second churches are known; the only clue to the locale of the third is that it was at a coastal emporium east of ancient Aden. It could well have been Ain Humran.
Theophilus, incidentally, was renowned for his DeMille-like miracles. A skeptical Arabian throng once challenged him: "Show us our Christ, alas!" The customary answer to this is an apologetic and gentle explanation that God works in mysterious ways and cannot be expected to work miracles on demand. Not in this case. Theophilus delivered. He looked skyward, "whereupon, after a terrible storm of thunder and lightning, Jesus Christ appeared in the air, surrounded with rays of glory, walking on a purple cloud, having a sword in his hand and an inestimable diadem on his head ... [The challengers] were stricken blind, and recovered not till they were all baptized." 4
At Ain Humran that second season, the Christian chalice was the sensational find. Juri also found and excavated the site's main gate, discovering that it