Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [84]
At the same time, far out in what had become a waterless, hostile desert, a hardy minority of these people withdrew to a last freely running spring, flowing from the cavern of Shisur. They would become our Ubarites. As we shall see, drought and desertification worked to their advantage and enriched them, for their modest settlement now became the only viable water and rest stop for caravans carrying incense across the sands of the Rub' al-Khali.
Time and time again in the last few years, Juri Zarins had shaken his head and told us how experts often dismissed an area as unimportant because, truth be told, they hadn't spent enough time there to have a really good look around. This had certainly proved the case with the mountains and interior of Dhofar. Well into the 1980s, it was believed that the true land of frankincense was to the west, in the kingdom of the Hadramaut. Juri and his crew had proved otherwise and had done it so thoroughly that it was now possible to tentatively reconstruct the history and life of the once mythical People of'Ad.
The story told in the next several chapters is a story framed by archaeological evidence, including the results of carbon-14 dating, and filled in with material from classical accounts. From time to time, it incorporates traditions of desert life that have survived intact into our century.5
Setting foot in Oman five years ago, we saw Ubar and the People of 'Ad "through a glass, darkly; but then face to face."
III. The Rise and Fall of Ubar
19. Older Than'Ad
IN THE VOCABULARY of our bedouin friends, "old" meant when their grandfathers were alive, and "really old" meant a hundred or so years ago. If you were interested in something thousands of years old, you said "as old as 'Ad" or "older than 'Ad." In his desert archaeology, Juris Zarins was interested not only in Ubar's classical period—its rise and citification—but in times "older than 'Ad." Long interested in the origins of things, he sought the very first people to walk the surrounding landscape. It wouldn't be easy, for over the millennia the desert's geology had not so subtly shifted, hiding older artifacts.
Deposition and erosion had conspired to change the sites of ancient, logically situated camps into places where now nobody in his right mind would choose to stay. Prowling the desert, Juri would ask himself, "If I were early man, where would I camp?" Depending on where he was, the answer might be "Where I can see game" or "Right by the river" (for there once had been rivers and lakes out here). Often referring to space images, he would then work out how such a site might have been affected by the region's evolving geology.
Space imaging is what one day drew him sixty miles south of Shisur to the banks of the dry Wadi Ghadun. The wadi was deep, cut into the desert by infrequent but torrential floods and, a very long time ago, by a slow-moving river. Five terraces now stairstepped up its banks. The top terrace, Juri knew, would be the oldest. Early man would have camped there first, then gradually moved down to stay close to water as the wadi eroded and deepened. Walking the top terrace, Juri frequently stooped down to pick up a stone or two, only to pronounce them AFRs—worthless—and throw them over his shoulder. But then he found a concentration of stones that fit comfortably in the palm of his hand. His notes matter-of-factly record: "The ferruginous quartzite specimens are very windworn, but consist of flakes, choppers and some scrapers. Typologically, they represent the oldest