Atlantis of the Sands
Atlantis of the Sands refers to a legendary lost place in the southern deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, known as Ūbār/Awbār (أوبار) or Wabār/Wubār (وبار) in Arabic, thought to have been destroyed by a natural disaster or as a punishment by God.
In February 1992, The New York Times announced a major archaeological discovery in the following terms: "Guided by ancient maps and sharp-eyed surveys from space, archaeologists 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.
[4] 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 (18° 15' 47 N" 53° 39' 28" E) in Dhofar province, Oman.
[4] 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".
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.
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.
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.
[16] 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.
"[1] Most tales of the lost city locate it somewhere in the Rub' al Khali desert, also known as the Empty Quarter, a vast area of sand dunes covering most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula, including most of Saudi Arabia and parts of Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
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.
[20] 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 an extinct volcano half-buried in the sands or, possibly, the remnants of a meteorite impact.
[20] Geologist H. Stewart Edgell observed that for the "last six thousand years the Empty Quarter has been continuously a sand-dune desert, presenting a hostile environment where no city could have been built.
[3] Ranulph Fiennes, explorer and adventurer, was a member of Clapp's expedition and speculated that Ubar was identified on ancient maps as "Omanum Emporium".
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".
Aware that Mayan remains had been identified from aerial photographs, Clapp contacted NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and obtained satellite images of Dhofar.
It was only the late medieval version of One Thousand and One Nights, in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, that romanticised Ubar and turned it into a city, rather than a region or a people.
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.
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 northeast of Izki in modern-day central Oman.
A 2001 report for UNESCO states: "The Oasis of Shisr and the entrepots of Khor Rori and Al-Balid are outstanding examples of medieval fortified settlements in the Persian Gulf region.
