Looking for the legendary City of Ubar.

Many have heard and some might even have visited Petra, "the rose red city half ad old as time", carved out of solid rock and situated in southern Jordan. But not so many will have heard of the city of Ubar. Ubar was described by Lawrence of Arabia as "the Atlantis of the sands". He wanted to mount an exhibition to search for this wonder but died before he could. Ubar is located in the Rub Al Khali , or Empty Quarter. This area of desert situated in southern Arabia is nominally a sea of sand, and is dominated by giant sand dunes some of which can reach heights of 600 feet. Ubar appeared on Geek geographer Ptolemy's second century map of Arabia. The city was famed for the production of frankincense which in those days was a treasure that commanded a huge price on the open markets of Alexandria, Jerusalem and Damascus. Frankincense was taken from the sap of trees that grew in the region. It was used a powerful antiseptic in medicine and also played a role in the embalming process. The city is reputed to have grown and prospered enormously from this trade. Legend tells us, however, that Ubar, like Sodom and Gomorrah was a "place of lewdness and sin" and had invoked the wrath of God. He had destroyed the city and all trace of it as a punishment, and thus it had sunk forever beneath the undulating sands of " the Empty Quarter". Not so, however, for in the 1980s Nicholas Clap, a LA filmmaker and amateur archaeologist, set out to find the city. He enlisted the help of NASA who agreed to share the imaging radar system that had been developed for the space shuttle, So with this and the aid of the two satellites Landsat and Spot they were able to discern the ancient caravan routes that converged on the eastern edge of Rub Al Khali. The place where this web interconnected was Ash Shisr. Two expeditions one in 1990 and the other in 1991 were put together and sent to the region. One of them included the British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes. Their excavations unearthed a large octagonal fortress with 10-foot thick walls and eight towers. Pottery shards dated the construction as at least 4,000 years old. They had found the mythical city of Ubar. Oh, it had not been destroyed by the hand of God, either. The fortress had been built over a cavern that had given way and caused the construction to collapse into the earth. So it is true to say it had been swallowed by the sands of the Rub Al Khali. Interested in this subject? Try this link for more of the same