Atlantis of the Sands
Encyclopedia
Atlantis of the Sands is the popular name given to a legendary city in southern Arabia believed to have been destroyed by a natural disaster
or act of God.
of Atlantis
has generated a number of books, films, articles, web pages, and a Disney cartoon. On a smaller scale, Arabia has its own legend of a lost city, the so-called "Atlantis of the Sands", which has been the source of debate among historians, archaeologists and explorers, and a degree of controversy that continues to this day.
In February 1992, the New York Times anounced a major archaeological discovery in the following terms: "Guided by ancient maps and sharp-eyed surveys from space, archeologists and explorers have discovered a lost city deep in the sands of Arabia, and they are virtually sure it is Ubar, the fabled entrepôt of the rich frankincense trade thousands of years ago." When news of this discovery spread quickly around the newspapers of the world, there seemed few people willing or able to challenge the dramatic findings, apart from the Saudi Arabian press.
The discovery was the result of the work of a team of archaeologists led by Nicholas Clapp
, which had visited and excavated the site of a Bedouin well at Shisr in Dhofar
province, Oman
. The conclusion they reached, based on site excavations and an inspection of satellite photographs, was that this was the site of Ubar, or Iram of the Pillars
, the name for an ancient city destroyed by a natural disaster. Sir Ranulph Fiennes, another member of the expedition, declared that this was Omanum Emporium of Ptolemy
’s famous map of Arabia Felix.
A contemporary notice at the entrance to an archaeological site at Shisr in the province of Dhofar, Oman, proclaims:“Welcome to Ubar, the Lost City of Bedouin Legend”. However, scholars are divided over whether this really is the site of a legendary lost city of the sands.
had been approaching the southern edge of the Rub' al Khali ("The Empty Quarter"). It was Thomas’ ambition to be the first European to cross the great sands but, as he began his camel journey, he was told by his Bedouin
escorts of a lost city whose wicked people had attracted the wrath of God and had been destroyed. He found no trace of a lost city in the sands, but Thomas later related the story to T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), who regarded Ubar as the “Atlantis of the Sands”. Thomas marked on a map the location of track that was said to lead to the legendary lost city of Ubar and, although he intended to return in order to follow it, he was never able to.
The story of a lost city in the sands became an explorer’s fascination; a few wrote accounts of their travels that perpetuated the tale. T. E. Lawrence planned to search for the location of a lost city somewhere in the sands, telling a fellow traveller that he was convinced that the remains of an Arab civilization were to be found in the desert. He had been told that the Bedu had seen the ruins of the castles of King Ad in the region of Wabar. In his view the best way to explore the sands was by airship, but his plans never came to fruition.
The English explorer Wilfred Thesiger
visited the well at Shisr in the spring of 1946, “where the ruins of a crude stone fort on a rocky eminence marks the position of this famous well.” He noted that some shards found there were possibly early Islamic. The well was the only permanent watering place in those parts and, being a necessary watering place for Bedouin raiders, had been the scene of many fierce encounters in the past,
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In March 1948 a geological party from Petroleum Development (Oman and Dhofar) Ltd
, an associate company of the Iraq Petroleum Company
, carried out a camel-borne survey of Dhofar province. Like Thesiger, the party approached Shisr from the south, along the Wadi Ghudun. Their first sight of Ash Shisur was a white cliff in the distance. As they drew closer, they could see that the cliff was in fact the wall of a ruined fort built above a large quarry-like cave, the entrance of which was obscured by a sand dune. The fort had been built from the same white rock as the overhanging cliff, giving the impression of a single structure. One of the geologists noted: “There are no houses, tents or people here: only the tumble-down ruin of this pre-Islamic fort.” The geologists, without the benefit of modern satellite analysis or archaeological equipment, were unimpressed by the ruin. Shisur, like Ma Shedid a few days before, was a simply ‘difficult water’ and their escorts spent the best part of their 3 day stay trying to extract water for their camels from the well.
In 1953 oil man and philanthropist Wendell Phillips
set out to discover Thomas’ track but was unable to follow it because of the heavy sands which made further travel by motor transport impossible.
Some 35 years later, Clapp and his team uncovered a large octagonal fortress dating back some 2,000 years beneath the crumbling fort, and described a vast limestone table that lay beneath the main gate which had collapsed into a massive sinkhole around the well. This, some concluded, was the fabled city of Ubar, which was also known as Iram, or at least a city in the region of Ubar, once an important trading post on the incense route from Dhofar to the Mediterranean region.
When the explorer Freya Stark
consulted the works of Arab geographers, she found a wide range of opinions as to the location of Wabar: “Yaqut says: "In Yemen is the qaria of Wabar." El-Laith, quoted by Yaqut, puts it between the sands of Yabrin and Yemen. Ibn Ishaq… places it between "Sabub (unknown to Yaqut and Hamdani) and the Hadhramaut. Hamdani, a very reliable man, places it between Najran, Hadhramaut, Shihr and Mahra. Yaqut, presumably citing Hamdani, puts it between the boundaries of Shihr and San'a, and then, on the authority of Abu Mundhir between the sands of B.Sa'd (near Yabrin) and Shihr and Mahra. Abu Mundhir puts it between Hadhramaut and Najran.”
“With such evidence,” Stark concluded, “it seems quite possible for Mr. Thomas and Mr. Philby each to find Wabar in an opposite corner of Arabia.”
The discovery of the remains of towers at the excavation site at Shisr was claimed to support the theory that this was indeed the site of Ubar, the city of 'Ad with "lofty pillars" described in the Qur'an.
, explorer and adventurer, was a member of Clapp’s expedition and speculated that Ubar was identified on ancient maps as “Omanum Emporium”.
He began his search for Ubar in the library of the University of California in Los Angeles, and found a 2nd century AD map by the Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy which showed a place called “Omanum Emporium”. He speculated that this might be the location of Ubar, situated on the incense route between Dhofar and the Mediterranean region. Aware that Mayan remains had been identified from aerial photographs, Clapp contacted NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and obtained satellite images of Dhofar. These helped to identify ancient camel tracks hidden beneath the shifting sands of the desert which in turn might identify places of convergence such as wells and ancient cities.
After Clapp’s team had visited a number of possible sites for Ubar, they found themselves drawn back to the crumbling ruin at Shisr. Although the fort had been written off as being no more than a few hundred years old by the earlier explorers, Clapp's team began to speculate that the fort had been rebuilt in the 1500s on the remains of a far more ancient site.
Under the direction of Zarins, the team began excavation, and within weeks had unearthed the wall and towers of a fortress dating back more than 2,000 years. Clapp suggested that the evidence was "a convincing match" for the legendary lost city of Ubar. The city's destruction, he postulated, happened between A.D. 300 and 500 as the result of an earthquake which precipitated the collapse of the limestone table; but it was the decline of the incense trade, which led to the decline of the caravan routes through Shisr, that sealed Ubar’s fate.
Zarins himself concluded that Shisr did not represent a city called Ubar. In a 1996 interview, on the subject of Ubar, he said: “There's a lot of confusion about that word. If you look at the classical texts and the Arab historical sources, Ubar refers to a region and a group of people, not to a specific town. People always overlook that. It's very clear on Ptolemy’s second century map of the area. It says in big letters "Iobaritae" And in his text that accompanied the maps, he's very clear about that. It was only the late medieval version of The One Thousand and One Nights, in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, that romanticized Ubar and turned it into a city, rather than a region or a people.”
In a more recent paper he suggested that modern Habarut may be the site of Ubar.
By 2007, following further research and excavation, their findings could be summarised as follows:
More recent academic opinion is less than convinced about the accuracy of Clapp’s findings. One reviewer noted that Clapp himself did not help matters by including a speculative chapter about the king of Ubar in his book, The Road to Ubar, which in his view undermined his narrative authority: “its fictional drama pales next to the gripping real-life story of the Ubar expedition recounted in earlier portions of this volume.”
The case for Shisr being Omanum Emporium has been questioned by recent research. Nigel Groom commented in an article “Oman and the Emirates in Ptolemy's Map” published in 2007, that Ptolemy’s map of Arabia contained many wild distortions. The word “Emporium” in the original Greek meant a place for wholesale trade of commodities carried by sea, and was sometimes an inland city where taxes were collected and trade conducted. Thus the term could be applied to a town that was some distance from the coast. This, Groom suggests, may have been the case with Ptolemy’s ’Omanum Emporium’. He suggested that the Hormanus River, the source of which is marked on Ptolemy’s map as being north-east of Omanus Emporium, was in fact the Wadi Halfrain which rises some 20 kilometres north east of Izki in modern-day central Oman. Thus, Groom concludes, Omanum Emprorium was likely to have been located at Izki, possibly Nizwa, or in their vicinity.
H. Stewart Edgell contended that Ubar is essentially mythical and makes arguments against any significant historical role for Shisr beyond that of a small caravansary. Edgell suggested that the building was small and used by a few families at most. He believed that all the “discovery” of Ubar showed was how easily scientists can succumb to wishful thinking.
Professor Barri Jones
of the University of Manchester
visited the Shisr site and wrote a report for UNESCO
which included the following summary: "The purely archaeological discoveries that are emerging from Shisr are of the greatest importance for south Arabian archaeology in the own right... The archaeological integrity of the site should not be allowed to be affected by possible disputes regarding its name.
Natural disaster
A natural disaster is the effect of a natural hazard . It leads to financial, environmental or human losses...
or act of God.
Introduction
In modern times, the mystery of the lost cityLost city
A "Lost City" is a term that is generally considered to refer to a well-populated area which fell into terminal decline, became extensively or completely uninhabited, and whose location has been forgotten. Some lost cities whose locations have been rediscovered have been studied extensively by...
of Atlantis
Atlantis
Atlantis is a legendary island first mentioned in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written about 360 BC....
has generated a number of books, films, articles, web pages, and a Disney cartoon. On a smaller scale, Arabia has its own legend of a lost city, the so-called "Atlantis of the Sands", which has been the source of debate among historians, archaeologists and explorers, and a degree of controversy that continues to this day.
In February 1992, the New York Times anounced a major archaeological discovery in the following terms: "Guided by ancient maps and sharp-eyed surveys from space, archeologists and explorers have discovered a lost city deep in the sands of Arabia, and they are virtually sure it is Ubar, the fabled entrepôt of the rich frankincense trade thousands of years ago." When news of this discovery spread quickly around the newspapers of the world, there seemed few people willing or able to challenge the dramatic findings, apart from the Saudi Arabian press.
The discovery was the result of the work of a team of archaeologists led by Nicholas Clapp
Nicholas Clapp
Nicholas Clapp is a Borrego Springs, California based writer, film-maker, and amateur archaeologist. He has often been called the "real Indiana Jones" and he has received 70 film awards and several Academy Award nominations. He has two daughters, Jennifer and Cristina...
, which had visited and excavated the site of a Bedouin well at Shisr in Dhofar
Dhofar
The Dhofar region lies in Southern Oman, on the eastern border with Yemen. Its mountainous area covers and has a population of 215,960 as of the 2003 census. The largest town in the region is Salalah. Historically, it was the chief source of frankincense in the world. However, its frankincense...
province, Oman
Oman
Oman , officially called the Sultanate of Oman , is an Arab state in southwest Asia on the southeast coast of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by the United Arab Emirates to the northwest, Saudi Arabia to the west, and Yemen to the southwest. The coast is formed by the Arabian Sea on the...
. The conclusion they reached, based on site excavations and an inspection of satellite photographs, was that this was the site of Ubar, or Iram of the Pillars
Iram of the Pillars
Iram of the Pillars , also called Aram, Iram, Irum, Irem, Erum, Wabar, Ubar, or the City of a Thousand Pillars, is a lost city on the Arabian Peninsula.-Introduction:Ubar, a name of a region or a name of a people, was mentioned in ancient records, and was spoken of in folk...
, the name for an ancient city destroyed by a natural disaster. Sir Ranulph Fiennes, another member of the expedition, declared that this was Omanum Emporium of Ptolemy
Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy , was a Roman citizen of Egypt who wrote in Greek. He was a mathematician, astronomer, geographer, astrologer, and poet of a single epigram in the Greek Anthology. He lived in Egypt under Roman rule, and is believed to have been born in the town of Ptolemais Hermiou in the...
’s famous map of Arabia Felix.
A contemporary notice at the entrance to an archaeological site at Shisr in the province of Dhofar, Oman, proclaims:“Welcome to Ubar, the Lost City of Bedouin Legend”. However, scholars are divided over whether this really is the site of a legendary lost city of the sands.
Early explorers in Dhofar
In 1930, the explorer Bertram ThomasBertram Thomas
Bertram Thomas was an English civil servant who is the first documented Westerner to cross the Rub' al Khali . He was also a scientist who practiced craniofacial anthropometry,...
had been approaching the southern edge of the Rub' al Khali ("The Empty Quarter"). It was Thomas’ ambition to be the first European to cross the great sands but, as he began his camel journey, he was told by his Bedouin
Bedouin
The Bedouin are a part of a predominantly desert-dwelling Arab ethnic group traditionally divided into tribes or clans, known in Arabic as ..-Etymology:...
escorts of a lost city whose wicked people had attracted the wrath of God and had been destroyed. He found no trace of a lost city in the sands, but Thomas later related the story to T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), who regarded Ubar as the “Atlantis of the Sands”. Thomas marked on a map the location of track that was said to lead to the legendary lost city of Ubar and, although he intended to return in order to follow it, he was never able to.
The story of a lost city in the sands became an explorer’s fascination; a few wrote accounts of their travels that perpetuated the tale. T. E. Lawrence planned to search for the location of a lost city somewhere in the sands, telling a fellow traveller that he was convinced that the remains of an Arab civilization were to be found in the desert. He had been told that the Bedu had seen the ruins of the castles of King Ad in the region of Wabar. In his view the best way to explore the sands was by airship, but his plans never came to fruition.
The English explorer Wilfred Thesiger
Wilfred Thesiger
Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, CBE, DSO, FRAS, FRGS was a British explorer and travel writer born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.-Family:...
visited the well at Shisr in the spring of 1946, “where the ruins of a crude stone fort on a rocky eminence marks the position of this famous well.” He noted that some shards found there were possibly early Islamic. The well was the only permanent watering place in those parts and, being a necessary watering place for Bedouin raiders, had been the scene of many fierce encounters in the past,
Petroleum Development Oman
Petroleum Development of Oman is the foremost exploration and production company in the Sultanate. It accounts for more than 90% of the country's crude-oil production and nearly all of its natural-gas supply...
, an associate company of the Iraq Petroleum Company
Iraq Petroleum Company
The Iraq Petroleum Company , until 1929 called Turkish Petroleum Company , was an oil company jointly owned by some of the world's largest oil companies, which had virtual monopoly on all oil exploration and production in Iraq from 1925 to 1961...
, carried out a camel-borne survey of Dhofar province. Like Thesiger, the party approached Shisr from the south, along the Wadi Ghudun. Their first sight of Ash Shisur was a white cliff in the distance. As they drew closer, they could see that the cliff was in fact the wall of a ruined fort built above a large quarry-like cave, the entrance of which was obscured by a sand dune. The fort had been built from the same white rock as the overhanging cliff, giving the impression of a single structure. One of the geologists noted: “There are no houses, tents or people here: only the tumble-down ruin of this pre-Islamic fort.” The geologists, without the benefit of modern satellite analysis or archaeological equipment, were unimpressed by the ruin. Shisur, like Ma Shedid a few days before, was a simply ‘difficult water’ and their escorts spent the best part of their 3 day stay trying to extract water for their camels from the well.
In 1953 oil man and philanthropist Wendell Phillips
Wendell Phillips
Wendell Phillips was an American abolitionist, advocate for Native Americans, and orator. He was an exceptional orator and agitator, advocate and lawyer, writer and debater.-Education:...
set out to discover Thomas’ track but was unable to follow it because of the heavy sands which made further travel by motor transport impossible.
Some 35 years later, Clapp and his team uncovered a large octagonal fortress dating back some 2,000 years beneath the crumbling fort, and described a vast limestone table that lay beneath the main gate which had collapsed into a massive sinkhole around the well. This, some concluded, was the fabled city of Ubar, which was also known as Iram, or at least a city in the region of Ubar, once an important trading post on the incense route from Dhofar to the Mediterranean region.
Legendary lost cities of the Arabian peninsula
There are at least four contenders for the title of “lost city”, Ubar (Wabar), Iram of the Pillars, Omanum Emporium.Ubar
This was the city that Thomas heard about from his guides. Thomas’ guide pointed to wide tracks between the dunes and said: “Look, Sahib, there is the way to Ubar. It was great in treasure, with date gardens and a fort of red silver. It now lies beneath the sands of the Ramlat Shu’ait.” Thomas dismissed the ruins at the well of Ash Shisur as a ‘rude’ fort which he took to be only a few hundred years old.Wabar
Wabar was in fact Ubar by another name, the difference being one of transliteration. St. John Philby (who preferred “Wabar”) was an English adviser to Emir Aziz bin Saud in Riyadh. He first heard the story of Ubar from his Bedouin guide who told him about a place of ruined castles where King Ad had stabled his horses and housed his women before being punished for his sinful ways by being destroyed by fire from heaven. Anxious to seal his reputation as a great explorer, Philby went in search of the lost city of Wabar but, instead of finding ruins, discovered what he described as extinct volcano half-buried in the sands or, possibly, the remnants of a meteorite impact. Modern research has revealed this latter event to have been the cause of the depression in the sands.When the explorer Freya Stark
Freya Stark
Dame Freya Madeline Stark, Mrs. Perowne, DBE was a British explorer and travel writer. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels, which were mainly in Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan....
consulted the works of Arab geographers, she found a wide range of opinions as to the location of Wabar: “Yaqut says: "In Yemen is the qaria of Wabar." El-Laith, quoted by Yaqut, puts it between the sands of Yabrin and Yemen. Ibn Ishaq… places it between "Sabub (unknown to Yaqut and Hamdani) and the Hadhramaut. Hamdani, a very reliable man, places it between Najran, Hadhramaut, Shihr and Mahra. Yaqut, presumably citing Hamdani, puts it between the boundaries of Shihr and San'a, and then, on the authority of Abu Mundhir between the sands of B.Sa'd (near Yabrin) and Shihr and Mahra. Abu Mundhir puts it between Hadhramaut and Najran.”
“With such evidence,” Stark concluded, “it seems quite possible for Mr. Thomas and Mr. Philby each to find Wabar in an opposite corner of Arabia.”
Iram of the Pillars
Iram's pillars are mentioned in the Qur'an. For example: "Seest thou not how thy Lord dealt with the `Ad (people); of the (city of) Iram, with lofty pillars; the like of which were not produced in (all) the land? And with the Thamud (people), who cut out (huge) rocks in the valley? And with Pharaoh, Lord of Stakes? All these transgressed Beyond bounds in the lands. And heaped therein mischief (on mischief). Therefore did thy Lord pour on them a scourge of diverse chastisement: For thy Lord is as a guardian on a watch-tower.The discovery of the remains of towers at the excavation site at Shisr was claimed to support the theory that this was indeed the site of Ubar, the city of 'Ad with "lofty pillars" described in the Qur'an.
Omanum Emporium
Ranulph FiennesRanulph Fiennes
Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, OBE , better known as Ranulph Fiennes, is a British adventurer and holder of several endurance records. He is also a prolific writer. Fiennes served in the British Army for eight years including a period on counter-insurgency service while...
, explorer and adventurer, was a member of Clapp’s expedition and speculated that Ubar was identified on ancient maps as “Omanum Emporium”.
The Shisr discoveries
Nicholas Clapp’s search for Ubar began after he read Thomas’ book Arabia Felix. Clapp had just returned from Oman, having helped to stock an oryx sanctuary on the Jiddat al Harassis, and was inspired by Thomas’ references to the lost city of Ubar.He began his search for Ubar in the library of the University of California in Los Angeles, and found a 2nd century AD map by the Alexandrian geographer Claudius Ptolemy which showed a place called “Omanum Emporium”. He speculated that this might be the location of Ubar, situated on the incense route between Dhofar and the Mediterranean region. Aware that Mayan remains had been identified from aerial photographs, Clapp contacted NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and obtained satellite images of Dhofar. These helped to identify ancient camel tracks hidden beneath the shifting sands of the desert which in turn might identify places of convergence such as wells and ancient cities.
After Clapp’s team had visited a number of possible sites for Ubar, they found themselves drawn back to the crumbling ruin at Shisr. Although the fort had been written off as being no more than a few hundred years old by the earlier explorers, Clapp's team began to speculate that the fort had been rebuilt in the 1500s on the remains of a far more ancient site.
Under the direction of Zarins, the team began excavation, and within weeks had unearthed the wall and towers of a fortress dating back more than 2,000 years. Clapp suggested that the evidence was "a convincing match" for the legendary lost city of Ubar. The city's destruction, he postulated, happened between A.D. 300 and 500 as the result of an earthquake which precipitated the collapse of the limestone table; but it was the decline of the incense trade, which led to the decline of the caravan routes through Shisr, that sealed Ubar’s fate.
Zarins himself concluded that Shisr did not represent a city called Ubar. In a 1996 interview, on the subject of Ubar, he said: “There's a lot of confusion about that word. If you look at the classical texts and the Arab historical sources, Ubar refers to a region and a group of people, not to a specific town. People always overlook that. It's very clear on Ptolemy’s second century map of the area. It says in big letters "Iobaritae" And in his text that accompanied the maps, he's very clear about that. It was only the late medieval version of The One Thousand and One Nights, in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, that romanticized Ubar and turned it into a city, rather than a region or a people.”
In a more recent paper he suggested that modern Habarut may be the site of Ubar.
By 2007, following further research and excavation, their findings could be summarised as follows:
- A long period of widespread trade through the area of Shisr was indicated by artefacts from Persia, Rome, and Greece being found on the site. More recent work in Oman and Yemen indicated that this fortress was the easternmost remains of a series of desert caravansaries that supported incense trade.
- As far as the legend of Ubar was concerned, there was no evidence that the city had perished in a sandstorm. Much of the fortress had collapsed into a sinkhole that hosted the well, perhaps undermined by ground water being taken to irrigate the surrounding oasis.
- Rather than being a city, interpretation of the evidence suggested that “Ubar” was more likely to have been a region—the “Land of the Iobaritae” identified by Ptolemy. The decline of the region was probably due to the decline of the frankincense trade caused by the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, which in the early days did not use the incense for its rituals. Climatic changes led to desiccation of the area, and sea transport became a more reliable way of transporting goods.
- The archaeological importance of the site was highlighted by satellite imagery that revealed a network of trails, some of which passed underneath sand dunes 100 m tall, which converged on Shisr. Image analysis showed no further evidence of major undocumented sites in this desert region, such as the Ubar of legend.
Critical reception
The Saudi Arabian press was generally sceptical about the discovery of Ubar in Oman, with Dr. Abdullah al Masri, Assistant Under-Secretary of Archaeological Affairs stating that similar sites had been found in Saudi Arabia over the past 15 years. In Ashawq al Awsat he explained: “The best of these sites was when, in 1975, we uncovered more than one city on the edge of the Empty Quarter, in particular the oasis on Jabreen. Also the name of Ubar is similar to that of Obar, and oasis is eastern Saudi Arabia. We must await further details but so far we have far more important discoveries at Jabreen or Najran.” However, Professor Mohammed Bakalla of King Saud University wrote that he would not be surprised if Ad’s nation cities were found underneath the Shisr excavation or in the close vicinity.More recent academic opinion is less than convinced about the accuracy of Clapp’s findings. One reviewer noted that Clapp himself did not help matters by including a speculative chapter about the king of Ubar in his book, The Road to Ubar, which in his view undermined his narrative authority: “its fictional drama pales next to the gripping real-life story of the Ubar expedition recounted in earlier portions of this volume.”
The case for Shisr being Omanum Emporium has been questioned by recent research. Nigel Groom commented in an article “Oman and the Emirates in Ptolemy's Map” published in 2007, that Ptolemy’s map of Arabia contained many wild distortions. The word “Emporium” in the original Greek meant a place for wholesale trade of commodities carried by sea, and was sometimes an inland city where taxes were collected and trade conducted. Thus the term could be applied to a town that was some distance from the coast. This, Groom suggests, may have been the case with Ptolemy’s ’Omanum Emporium’. He suggested that the Hormanus River, the source of which is marked on Ptolemy’s map as being north-east of Omanus Emporium, was in fact the Wadi Halfrain which rises some 20 kilometres north east of Izki in modern-day central Oman. Thus, Groom concludes, Omanum Emprorium was likely to have been located at Izki, possibly Nizwa, or in their vicinity.
H. Stewart Edgell contended that Ubar is essentially mythical and makes arguments against any significant historical role for Shisr beyond that of a small caravansary. Edgell suggested that the building was small and used by a few families at most. He believed that all the “discovery” of Ubar showed was how easily scientists can succumb to wishful thinking.
Professor Barri Jones
Barri Jones
Geraint Dyfed Barri Jones was a classical scholar and archaeologist.Born in St Helens to Welsh-speaking parents, he attended High Wycombe Royal Grammar School from 1947–1954, and won a Welsh Foundation Scholarship to read classics at Jesus College, Oxford.-Fieldwork and...
of the University of Manchester
University of Manchester
The University of Manchester is a public research university located in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is a "red brick" university and a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities and the N8 Group...
visited the Shisr site and wrote a report for UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
which included the following summary: "The purely archaeological discoveries that are emerging from Shisr are of the greatest importance for south Arabian archaeology in the own right... The archaeological integrity of the site should not be allowed to be affected by possible disputes regarding its name.
See Also
Iram of the PillarsIram of the Pillars
Iram of the Pillars , also called Aram, Iram, Irum, Irem, Erum, Wabar, Ubar, or the City of a Thousand Pillars, is a lost city on the Arabian Peninsula.-Introduction:Ubar, a name of a region or a name of a people, was mentioned in ancient records, and was spoken of in folk...