#The lost city of ubar story series

Regaling the reader with assorted myths, tales, rumors and some archeological history.Īfter ruling out several possible sites for Ubar, the team found themselves back at the ruined fort that marked a small oasis known as Shisur the fort had been described by earlier explorers like Thomas and Thesiger, but was written off asīeing no more than a few hundred years old. Clapp describes such encounters with lots of comic verve, while Once on the ground in Oman, the expedition encountered a host of practical problems: poisonous scorpions and snakes, gun-toting shepherds and debilitating, brain-frying heat. Identify ancient camel tracks, hidden beneath the desert's blowing sands. Juris Zarins, a specialist in Arabian archeology - persevered, using the space images they'd obtained to He helped assemble - including Blom Sir Ranulph Fiennes, a British explorer with close ties to the Sultan of Oman, and Dr.

#The lost city of ubar story series

On the way there would be a series of delays, dead-ends and difficulties, ranging from antenna problems with NASA radar to sandstorms in the Arabian desert to a little complication known as the Persian Gulf war. Clapp's quest to find Ubar was on its way. AmazinglyĮnough, his call was transferred to a geologist named Ron Blom who said he would try to help. Having read a newspaper story about an airborne radar system that had located some Mayan ruins, Clapp put in a call to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to ask whether the space shuttle could be used to help locate the ruins of Ubar.

The city would have been a vital trade stop on the incense road, used by caravans bringing frankincense from a far corner of ancient Arabia across the desert to the great markets of Petra, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Damascus and Rome. Clapp and his wife, Kay, had been looking for an excuse to return to the Arabianĭesert - they had recently been in Oman, doing a documentary on an endangered animal called the oryx - and the book's talk of the elusive city of Ubar set the filmmaker to thinking.Ĭlapp began researching the lost city in the library stacks at the University of California at Los Angeles, and began to wonder whether Ubar might be the city identified as Omanum Emporium on a map of Arabia drawn by the Alexandrian geographerĬlaudius Ptolemy in the second century A.D. The result is a delightfully readable, if often highly speculative, volume that's part travel journal, part Walter MittyesqueĪs Clapp tells it, his search for Ubar began one day in a Los Angeles bookshop, where he stumbled across a book called 'Arabia Felix' by Bertram Thomas. Road to Ubar,' Clapp sets down his account of his quixotic quest, and its improbably happy resolution. It would be a complete amateur - a documentary filmmaker named Nicholas Clapp - who helped put together the expedition that found the ruins of a lost Arabian city in 1992, a city identified in all probability as Ubar. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) was reportedly contemplating a search for Ubar, in the days before his death in a motorcycle accident in 1935. O'Shea, all made forays into the region, and a few years after World War II, an American adventurer named Wendell Phillips put together a team to try to find the mythical city.Įven T.E. Over the years, the explorers Bertram Thomas and Wilfred Thesiger, as well as a British airman named Raymond

Philby was apparently not the only explorer to search in vain for this legendary city, known variously as Ubar, Wabar, Qidan and Iram. Of his riotous pleasures to ashes and desolation!' John Philby, the flamboyant Arabist, wrote: 'He had waxed wanton with his horses and eunuchs and concubines in an earthly paradise until the wrath came upon him with the west wind and reduced the scene It was, the legend went, a magnificent city of enormous riches and indulgence, a city abruptly destroyed, like Sodom and Gomorrah, by the wrath of God, and since covered by the windswept sands of the Arabian desert.

The Koran, the Arabian Nights and countless Bedouin tales have recounted the story of a fabled city known as 'the Atlantis of the Sands,' a city hailed as 'first among the lost treasuries of Arabia.'

Stumbling Upon the Desert's Secret By MICHIKO KAKUTANI