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                                                                                ARCHAEOLOGY, Page 69

Arabia's Lost Sand Castle


Space-age gadgetry helps explorers in their quest to find a
4,000-year-old city famed for frankincense -- and sin

By RICHARD N. OSTLING -- Reported by Ratu Kamlani/New York and
James Willwerth/Los Angeles


    In all ancient Arabia, the most fabled land was the city
of Ubar. As legend had it, one Shaddad ibn Ad created a
jewel-encrusted oasis town in the southdeserts to stand as an
"imitation of Paradise." Islam's holy Koran, which called the
site Iram, evoked the grandeur of "lofty pillars, the like of
which were not produced in [all] the land." This was also
Islam's Sodom, however, a place that God destroyed because of
its wickedness. Ever since, warns an Arabian saying, "anybody
who finds Ubar will go crazy." And according to an Arabian
Nights tale, "Allah blotted out the road that led to the city."

    For centuries, the road to Ubar appeared to be blotted out
forever. T.E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") dreamed of
locating the lost city, which he called "the Atlantis of the
sands," but did not live to carry out the search. Others
launched fruitless expeditions in 1947 and 1953. But last week
a pair of archaeological amateurs in California announced that
they had found the site through the use of ancient clues and
space-age gadgetry.

    The quest began in 1982, when Emmy-winning documentary
filmmaker Nicholas Clapp happened upon an explorer's evidence
of an ancient road to Ubar. After unearthing more information
from texts at the Huntington Library, Clapp teamed up with
lawyer George Hedges to raise money and organize an expedition.
They later recruited two Arabia experts, archaeologist Juris
Zarins of Southwest Missouri State University and British
explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes.

    The turning point came when Clapp remembered reading about
a system called Space Imaging Radar carried on a space shuttle
to peer underneath the des erts of Egypt and locate ancient
riverbeds. In addition, satellites using optical sensing
systems were able to record reflected near-infrared light that
is invisible to the human eye. Scientists combined the data to
produce digital images of 160-km-long (100-mile) tracts; these
pictures were then manipulated by computers to bring out subtle
details. Roads and rivers that were barely visible to explorers
on the ground appeared in images captured from hundreds of
kilometers up in space.

    After initial skepticism, Caltech's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory agreed to take SIR photos in 1984 during two passes
over southern Arabia by the Challenger space shuttle. Experts
found faint white lines marking hundreds of kilometers of
long-abandoned caravan routes, some running underneath sand
dunes that over the centuries had grown 183 m (600 ft.) high.

    Many of the routes converged on an area marked Omanum
Emporium (the Omani Marketplace) on a map drawn by Ptolemy in
the 2nd century A.D. The spot is in present-day Oman at the edge
of the Empty Quarter, an appropriate designation for a
trackless region infested with camel spiders, giant ticks and
lethal carpet vipers. The team checked out the forbidding
terrain in 1990 and began hunting in earnest last November. Just
six weeks ago, says Clapp, "we were within a whisker of total
failure." Then the party decided to examine Ash Shisar, a water
hole with ruins of a primitive fort. Using ground-penetrating
radar and sounding devices, the explorers discovered extensive
ruins underneath.

    The digging in subsequent weeks has uncovered an octagonal
castle with high walls and towers, perhaps the pillars described
in the Koran, that might have reached a height of 9 m (30 ft.).
Although only 150 people could have lived inside the fortress,
the explorers theorize that thousands of others resided in
surrounding tents. Ubar's destruction is easily explained, in
accordance with the myths of the city swallowed by the des ert.
Sometime in the early Christian era, the walls of Ubar simply
became too heavy and collapsed into a 12-m-deep (40-ft.) cavern
beneath. Alas, those tales of limitless precious gems turn out,
so far, to be pure legend.

    Unless inscriptions surface, it may be impossible to
identify the site as Ubar with absolute certainty. But pottery
has been found that dates to at least 2000 B.C., which means
that the Arabian peninsula had complex urban settlements almost
as early as Mesopotamia. It is known that the area's ancient
wealth was built upon its unique product, frankincense, the
crystallized tree sap that was as precious as present-day oil
and used as medicine, perfume and a preparation in cremation and
embalming. Since this is the region whence the biblical Queen
of Sheba made her trade mission to King Solomon, it is possible
that frankincense from Ubar was burned regularly in the
Jerusalem Temple. It is even conceivable that this newly found
castle in the sands could have been the source of the
frankincense that the Magi brought to the infant Jesus.