Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [90]
How much of this the Mesopotamians actually had in mind is uncertain, and how much of it rubbed off on the Ubarites is even more questionable. Yet it was from Mesopotamia that the hieratic design of cities disseminated, and that design dovetailed with a belief, common to kings and commoners, that the gods dwelt in a celestial realm that was more splendid, more ordered than life in the dust of the earth. At one time man may even have enjoyed that life, but no more; he had long since sullied the earth's primordial harmony.
In temple and city building, early civilizations sought to re-create or at least mirror a celestial realm. To the Israelites, the Mesopotamians, and the Ubarites alike, there was no question that life was fragile, shadowed by mortality. Yet if men built houses—temples—as their gods built houses, couldn't they then share their enviable power?
As legend has it, Ubar became "an imitation of Paradise." And so it may have been. Its verdant oasis would have been a striking contrast to the surrounding parched, dead, and dying landscape. The focus of that oasis was now not only a life-giving spring but a temple that, however small and simple, was oriented to the cardinal directions (as Campbell mentioned) and looked upward to the heavens and eternity.
What gods the Ubarites saw as ascendant in the heavens is unclear. A rain or storm god called Sada appears to have had some importance, but he may have fallen into disfavor, considering how little he'd done in centuries of merciless drought. By the same token, the Ubarites would have had quite enough of the sun god favored in the Fertile Crescent (where that god brought warmth and fertility rather than heat and death). A moon god was almost certainly preeminent, his strength and power symbolized by the crescent-horned bull. But it is doubtful that the Ubarites worshipped the bull as a graven image; they would have been content to burn frankincense before an elemental, uncut rock. Or they would, in the coolness of the night, have looked skyward as the moon itself rose and dominated the night sky. The phases of the moon were carefully observed, and a phase of the quarter moon— II or llah—came over the centuries to be taken as a general term for God; it is the root of the Hebrew El or Elohim and of the Arabic Allah.
With their first temple, the Ubarites staked their place in the cosmological world and in the temporal world as well. The temple served several down-to-earth purposes. On its roof, lookouts could stand watch over a 360-degree view of the surrounding desert. As in the biblical Song of Songs (3:6), the Ubarites could look to the far horizon and ask, "What is this coming up from the desert like a column of smoke, breathing of myrrh and frankincense?" Most often it would be friendly caravans. Though marauders were an occasional problem, they would think twice before attacking Ubar. If they as much as tried to water their animals at the Shisur spring, they would be met by a hail of arrows from the stone structures and temple above.
With their temple, the Ubarites were both reaching for the heavens and protecting their flanks. The temple compound would have served as a lockup, a safe deposit for whatever gold or treasure the Ubarites possessed. Even better, it became a means of acquiring wealth, for the temple's existence justified the demand for tolls on passing caravans. The Ubarites had probably long benefited from the needs of passing caravans. Now the gods needed to be fed, and what did they appreciate more than frankincense, the very "food of the gods"? Judging from accounts of similar caravansaries, the toll demanded (subject, as always, to negotiation) could have been a tenth of a caravan's cargo.
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