The radar was able to “see” through the sand and loose soil to pick out subsurface geological features. He also persuaded Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists Charles Elachi and Ronald Blom to scan the region with a Space Shuttle radar system.
Thomas mentions that he came across ancient caravan tracks, which his Arab guides called the “road to Ubar.”Ĭlapp started reading everything he could lay his hands on. Thomas, the first European to cross the Rub‘ al-Khali, noticed that the tribes living in the region of the Dhofar mountains in South Oman considered themselves the descendants of the “People of ‘Ad,” the people associated in the Qur’an with Ubar. The pair became interested in Ubar after reading Bertram Thomas’ book Arabia Felix. Ubar’s rediscovery was the result of an intriguing combination of space-age technology, literary detective work, painstaking archaeology and two larger-than-life adventurers, Nicholas Clapp and Ranulph Fiennes. By the seventh century, its location was forgotten. The Qur’an says that the people there were punished for wasting their wealthy sinful lives. Then at the height of its wealth, Ubar vanished. The historian Al-Hamdani, writing in the sixth century CE, hailed Ubar as first among the treasures of ancient Arabia. Trade brought affluence, and at their height the people of the region might have been the richest in the world, said Faulhaber. Used in cremations and religious ceremonies, as well as in perfumes and medicines, frankincense was as valuable as gold.Īs the only source of permanent water in thousands of square kilometers, Ubar became a nexus for trade, especially frankincense. One such city was Ubar, “the Atlantis of the Sands.” Ubar flourished from about 2800 BCE to about 300 CE as a remote desert outpost where caravans assembled for the transport of frankincense across the desert.
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