Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [91]
The origin of the 'Adites' ancient language is reflected in its construction. It is clearly an early Semitic language, yet it appears to incorporate Mesopotamian-inspired verbs and word endings. Such were the People of 'Ad: a Semitic group with long-standing ties to Mesopotamia. Those ties, though, may not have always been friendly. A Mesopotamian inscription from circa 720 B.C. tells us that the armies of Tiglath-pileser III marched down the incense trade route and pushed back the Arabians. The Arabians in question were probably not the 'Adites themselves, but their trading partners to the north, the Gerrhans. Originally a pack of shepherd-brigands exiled from Babylon, the Gerrhans not only overran the oasis at Jabrin (directly across the Rub' al-Khali from Ubar), but piratically infested the waters of the Persian Gulf. In 694 B.C., Sennacherib put them down and, for a time, confined them to their city of Gerrha. But they were soon out roaming the desert and opening up caravan routes across northern Arabia.
The Gerrhans and the 'Ad, one suspects, were cut from similar cloth. Accepting the lot dealt them by life in the desert, they were ardent and not altogether trustworthy traders. They were intolerant of restraint, a thorn in the side of classical civilizations, whose wealth they considered their godsend.
Classical authorities tell us that for several centuries, the Gerrhans transshipped the frankincense of the People of'Ad to both Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. The demands of the Greeks, then the Romans, became prodigious. In the early era described in Homer's Odyssey, the Greeks made do "with the fragrance of flaming cedar-wood logs and straight-grained incense trees." When frankincense made its way up from Arabia, they were enthralled. The goddess Aphrodite was especially appreciative of frankincense, as was Alexander the Great, the first ruler known to have it burned in his honor.
As well as an offering to the gods, the Romans used frankincense as a balm to the body in this life and a means of easing it into the next. It was an ingredient in cosmetics and perfumes. It was materia medica, good for "broken heads ... and to bind bloody wounds and assuage malignant ulcers about the seat."8 The Romans' most copious use of frankincense was in their rites of cremation, for it pleased the gods, and, as down-to-earth Pliny notes, disguised the odor of burning bodies. He tells us that an entire year's production of Arabian frankincense was heaped upon the funeral pyre of Poppaea Sabina, Nero's wife. Pliny sums it up: "It is the luxury of man, which is displayed even in the paraphernalia of death, that has rendered Arabia thus happy."9
How it must have galled the Greeks and Romans that distant foreigners—smug in their Arabia Felix—profited so from their profligate lifestyle. Though parts of the peninsula were tenuously within their sphere of influence, the Greeks and Romans knew little—heard rumors, at best—of the secret city that was a key source of their frankincense. It was an uncertain dot on Claudius Ptolemy's Sexta Tabula Asiae, hidden in the desert of the Iobaritae, the Ubarites.
It is now that the myth of Ubar comes into play and runs a course parallel to the site's archaeological record. Archaeology is history; myth is imaginative history. The two should probably not be mixed, but with Ubar, the temptation is hard to resist. Be patient then, with the next chapter, which speculates—very conjecturally—what might have happened at Ubar in a season of its glory. It is written with the caveat oft used by Arab historians and