Such discoveries possibly can shed some light on the early history of the region, which has been shrouded in myth, according to George Hedges, a Los Angeles lawyer who with 53-year-old filmmaker Nicholas Clapp was one of the leaders of the expedition. Most of it was destroyed and the rest was abandoned. Ultimately, the weight of the city caused the cavern to collapse in a massive sinkhole. In building his "imitation of paradise," the legendary King Shaddad ibn 'Ad unknowingly constructed it over a large limestone cavern. Researchers "documented how the city fell, and that it did not appear to be by divine retribution for wickedness. Ubar's rulers became wealthy and powerful,Ī legend says that the city's residents became ao wicked and debauched that God destroyed the city, allowing it to be swallowed up by the restless desert. It was used in cremations and religious ceremonies, as well as in perfumes and medicines, frankincense was as valuable as gold. Some explorers theorized the remains of the old fort at Shisr could be the rests of the Iram of the Pillars.īuilt nearly 5,000 years ago, Ubar was a processing and shipping center for frankincense, an aromatic resin has grown in the nearby Qara Mountains. When they started digging at Shis'r, near an old Arab fort, they began to uncover a large ancient structure. "Using a combination of high-tech satellite imagery and old-fashioned literary detective work, they discovered the fortress city buried under the shifting sands of a section of Oman so barren that it is known as the Rub'al Khali or Empty Quarter. In 1992 The New York Times published an article announcing the Atlantis of the Sands has been discovered by a Los Angeles-based team of amateur and professional archaeologists. Since then many other explorers attempted to locate the city buried beneath the sand. Lawrence became fascinated with the lost city of the sands and kept looking for it, but he never found it either. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), who regarded Ubar as the "Atlantis of the Sands". He found no trace of a lost city in the sands. One of his Bedouin escorts told him the story of a lost city whose wicked people had attracted the wrath of God and had been destroyed. One of them was Bertram Thomas (1892-1950). Several explorers have tried to determine the lost city's true location. This covers most of the southern third of the Arabian Peninsula, including most of Saudi Arabia and areas of Oman, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. According to most legends and myths, the Atlantis of the Sands is located somewhere in the Rub' al Khali desert, also known as the Empty-quarter. ![]() Over the years, various names have been given to this lost city, the most common being Ubar, Wabar, and Iram of the Pillars. "Is the city of Ubar identical to Iram of the Pillars or is the legendary lost city still buried beneath the sand?" Still, many feel this intriguing question remains unanswered: They found shards of pottery and other evidence of the trade routes, but nothing to show they had definitively found the city." The team made a brief, preliminary expedition to Oman last summer, searching about 35 sites. Derivative work, credit: Shaibalahmar - Public DomainĪrmed with this information, they enlisted archeologist Juris Zarins of Southwest Missouri State University and British explorer Sir Ranulf Fiennes, who had served with the British military in the deserts of Oman and fought with the sultan's forces. Satellite photograph of South Arabia showing hypothetical locations of lost cities. Junctions, where the trade routes converged or branched, seemed likely locations for the lost city. Using the imagery, the team picked out the ancient trade routes, which were packed down into hard surfaces by the passage of hundreds of thousands of camels. The radar could "see" through the overlying sand and loose soil to pick out subsurface geological features. Clapp persuaded JPL scientists Charles Elachi and Ronald Blom to scan the region with a unique shuttle radar system flown on the Challenger's last successful mission.
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