The Road to Ubar (28 page)

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 had inner and outer pivoting doors, with a small chamber between. It intrigued him, for one feature he hadn't found at Ubar was a main gate, presumably because it had been destroyed when the site sank into the sands. The gate at Ain Humran gave him an idea of what to look for at Ubar the next season.

1994:
Season three at Ubar.
With the layout of Ain Humran in mind, it didn't take long for Juri to find a matching gate at Ubar. It was in the western wall, between Tower #5 and the Citadel. At least it once was. Only the outer doorjambs remained; the rest had collapsed into the sinkhole. In search of the missing gate, Juri and his students sank a three-meter-square shaft in the sinkhole's sands.

Digging back in time, they first made their way through sand mixed with animal droppings and bits of bedouin bowls. For the last fifteen hundred-plus years, nomadic bedouin had watered their camels and goats here. Otherwise, there were no signs of occupation. Then, from one and a half meters on down, Juris team unearthed, one by one, stones that in cut and dimension precisely matched the masonry of what remained of the gate above.

Below the masonry of the crumbled and fallen gate were fragments of jagged, raw rock, once the gate's bedrock footing. Farther down, Juri and his students sifted through sand containing fragments of ancient pottery and bits of flint, evidence of the site's long occupation before its collapse. In the stratigraphy of the sinkhole's sands, Juri proved beyond a doubt that a single violent cataclysm had led to Ubar's abandonment. The sands below the fallen gate contained evidence of long and meaningful settlement. The sands above the gate contained next to nothing.

Cross-section of the sinkhole

Unfortunately, further digging would almost certainly destabilize the sinkhole and precipitate a disastrous cave-in, and so it is that a significant portion of the fallen Citadel would remain buried.

Season three was to be the last at Ubar. The city would still have its secrets and enduring mysteries. Beneath the rubble, beneath the sands, there still could be—who knows?—inscriptions, idols, skeletons, even treasure. Which is, perhaps, as it should be.

***

1995:
Season four, the last in the land of frankincense.
Juri and his crew devoted their final season to a wide-ranging search for evidence of the presence of the People of'Ad in the Dhofar Mountains and on the shores of the Arabian Sea. His archaeological sequence for the region now lacked but a single horizon: the Bronze Age, which in that part of the world was 2350–1200
B.C.
It was Airwork volunteer Sean Bowler who at Taqa, on the coast, found the first tiny evidence of that era: a single bronze fishhook. And it was student Jim Brake who hiked up a hill into a Bronze Age bonanza.

The main road from the coast up into the Dhofar Mountains passed a solitary spreading olive tree, unique in the surrounding broken-limestone landscape. A left turn at the tree led to a high desert valley where frankincense groves were still to be found here and there. We had driven this road dozens of times. We had stopped to examine and photograph the trees; we had watched as tribesmen had slashed their branches and harvested frankincense crystals. This final summer, something caught Juris eye. As usual, it was a rock, this one broken into three pieces. It was a monolith, a fallen pillar. Originally three meters high, it appeared to be funereal in nature, for it marked a burial site.

As Juri measured and photographed the pillar (and estimated its weight at five or more tons), student Jim Brake crossed the road and climbed to the crest of a low hill, only to come running back down. There were ruins up there; they went from hill to hill to hill. Jim had happened on, in Juris words, "a monster Bronze Age site."

Set on the banks of what were once three converging streams, site Hagif #240 rambled on for a good three miles. Judging from their foundations, the village's houses had been impressive, with entries flanked by rows of massive standing stones. Hagif not only proved to be the largest Bronze Age site in all Oman, it filled in a key period in the story of the People of 'Ad. Around 2500
B.C.,
the rains that had long blessed southern Arabia withdrew, initiating an arid period that continues to the present. The area in which frankincense flourished likely shrank to its current range on the back slope of the Dhofar Mountains. The majority of the region's seminomadic dwellers followed this retreat and settled in the heart of the remaining frankincense groves. Hagif would have been their principal site.

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."

I
N 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 site yet found in Dhofar."

Cross-section of Wadi Ghadun

What Juri had found was a sampling of Acheulean utensils that were 700,000 years (or more) old, the handiwork of long-vanished
Homo erectus.
Here was the beginning, Chapter One of the Ubar story. With skill, tenacity, and luck, Juri was subsequently able to detect the footsteps—all at or near Shisur—of man's journey from that time to the present.

For the better part of a million years our distant ancestor
Homo erectus,
upright but not very bright, roamed Arabia. Then, approximately one hundred thousand years ago,
Homo erectus
was displaced, as our direct ancestor,
Homo sapiens,
migrated out of Africa and across Arabia. It was not a difficult journey, for there was then a land bridge at the south end of the Red Sea, and Arabia at that time was verdant and welcoming. Every year life-giving monsoon rains swept across the peninsula. The rains gave birth to rivers and created a thousand or more lakes, home to water buffalo and hippopotamuses. (In the sands of ancient lakebeds geologists have found intact fossilized hippo teeth, so well preserved they could have been lost just yesterday.) Clouds of dark smoke rose from the shores of these lakes, from fires set by
Homo sapiens
to flush out wild cattle, goats, oryxes, gazelles, and possibly camels and hartebeests. The game was roasted at camps on ridges and hilltops all around Shisur. At these sites, early man had open-air workshops for manufacturing the huge blades he favored for his spears.
¹

But then, some twenty thousand years ago, the rains withdrew.
²
The rivers and lakes of the Rub' al-Khali dried up, and violent winds tore at their sandy beds and reworked them into vast fields of dunes. The birds fled, leaving the sky to a merciless sun. Daily temperatures soared to over 130 degrees in the shade, if there was any shade. Early man cleared out, in all probability retreating to the north and the land of the Fertile Crescent.
³

For the next hundred centuries there was no appreciable rainfall, and in the whole peninsula not a trace of human occupation. All that survived, in isolated pockets, were highly drought-tolerant animals and plants, among them a small, scraggly tree that favored a harsh limestone substrate and warded off other vegetation with toxic terpenes spread from its roots: the frankincense tree.

About eight to ten thousand years ago the rains returned to Arabia, and wanderers from the north appeared on the peninsula's empty stage. They came from what has been called the "proto-Semitic homeland," an arc stretching from northern Egypt up into Syria. In an amazingly short time—as little as two hundred years—they repopulated all of Arabia. The pride and sustenance of these people was their cattle; their progress through the peninsula is marked by images of cattle they pecked on blackened rocks. At their campsites, these new pastoral nomads gazed skyward and imagined the stars as the cattle of the moon, penned only by the far horizons.

By the time they reached the Dhofar Mountains (the only place in Arabia where a cattle culture still survives), a group of these wanderers had most likely achieved a tribal identity, an identity that would become the People of'Ad. They settled down and enjoyed the favors of a land that every year was becoming greener and more bountiful. The monsoon rains spilled over the mountains and watered the land beyond. The desert bloomed, soaked up the rains, and issued them forth as springs. Bubbling up through an ancient cavern, one spring would someday be called Shisur, the spring of "the cleft."

The early People of'Ad camped near the spring but probably not at it; because animals came to drink there, Shisur was an ideal place to trap game. Shisur's Neolithic game trap was cleverly laid out.