About book The Road To Ubar: Finding The Atlantis Of The Sands (1999)
Gripping Read: Nicholas Clapp's personal account of a brilliant piece of archaeological detective work, and a gripping read in its own right; is called "The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands." Perhaps because I'd imagined Petra for decades, then finally arrived there and explored that 'lost city,' Ubar held personal fascination in 2012, for me. Perhaps, because I lived (in Spain) on the zero meridian line (where Marconi performed discoveries), perhaps the attraction to The Silk Road and loving incense, since Ubar was historically & mythologically know as a jumping off point for Frankincense trade. Another perhaps, I've an insatiable curiosity!Excavations began the following month. After many false starts, dead ends and weeks of digging, 1991 became 1992 and the work went on. But slowly, evidence began to emerge of an octagonal fortified city with 30-foot towers and thick walls. Inside, were many buildings including storerooms. Frankincense burners and pottery shards from various regions were found dating back to about 2000 BC!Ultimately, the author, with his own insatiable curiosity discovered that the legend of Ubar surfaced when the city sank into the sands. And this city collapsed into an underground cavern. Of all the sites in all the ancient world, Ubar came to a unique and peculiar end-an end identical in myth and now-it transpired, in reality.There was no question. It was Ubar -the Atlantis of the Sands. As Clapp says: "Before the discovery, all that was known of Ubar was its myth and legend and that there was a road out in the desert that just might lead to the lost city."The lore of Ubar proved to be a striking match for its reality. Ubar was in the right place, it was of the right age, and it had been destroyed exactly as the myth had described."But perhaps the single most amazing thing about the lost city of Ubar is the way it was found the technology of the future literally unearthing the secrets of the past.As Blom put it following the discovery: "People have written about Ubar for thousands of years, and they hunted for it in the desert all through this century without any luck. And we cracked the case sitting here in Pasadena." (At the JPL.)One day, while leafing through a newspaper, Clapp came across a story about how an aerial radar system had located Mayan ruins buried beneath a dense jungle in Central America.It was as if he had been struck by lightning: if modern satellite technology could do this, could it locate caravan routes buried under a thousand years of drifting sands? Could the technology of the future fast-forward him to the past? Could it find Ubar?The questions had barely formed themselves when Clapp decided to call the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA to find the answers. "I knew how crazy a request like that would sound to real scientists," he recalled. "So I really had to work myself up to it. For a while I just stared at the 'phone and asked myself: am I really going to do something this stupid."Unknown to Clapp, the scientist he would be speaking to moments later had a motto above his computer terminal which implored: DARE TO BE STUPID!From that moment, an alliance was formed between Clapp and research geologist Dr. Ron Blom. Although it would be another 10 years before Ubar was found, that first nervous phone call in 1983, was to prove a pivotal moment.'...Ubar' with the promise I'd read it soon. That was today. I read it in one sitting, with several telephone interruptions I resented. It was the reward read I'd hoped!
Next on my nerdy agenda: I joined a new book club because I needed more literary oxygen and book talk. It’s the Non-fiction Book Group at Falmouth Public Library. Wow—what a smart group of well-read, articulate folks. We just finished reading and discussing a book I probably would never have read on my own: The Road to Ubar by Nicholas Clapp. It’s a fascinating account of Clapp’s attempt to discover ancient ruins whose existence waiver between myth and reality. This book shows the power of intellectual curiosity and the rewards of the inquiry method in practice. Clapp, a documentary film producer, has a fire in his belly to learn all he can about this ancient community. It encouraged me to push beyond the text and check out other resources.More reviews at my blog: www.yarnsista.com
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Answers questions raised by Bertram Thomas's excellent Arabia Felix (1932). This is a non-scholarly (quasi-scholarly? Clapp has no pretensions to being a scholar -- he is a documentary filmmaker -- but his research is thorough and borders on the scholarly) account of the 1990s excavations at Shisur in Oman, and what was found there.A fully convincing answer to the questions of "Did Ubar exist?" and "Where was it?". Scholarly and specialist accounts have been published by Juris Zarins and others, so this book fills a nice niche for the general reader. If prehistoric and ancient Southern Arabia interests you, this is a good book.I found Clapp's voice and sometimes-folksy tone to be a bit grating at times, but he is a thorough-going adventurer and his work instigated the satellite mapping and the eventual expeditions that discovered this important (and very interesting) ancient site, so his personal writing style can be excused.
—Elizabeth Smith
If you like archaeology, anthropology, socialogy, and adventure, read this book. The author, a filmaker and amature archaeologist, sets out to find a fabled lost city of the Arabian desert. Because the writer is not a professional scientist, he avoids the dry language and over-theorizing endemic to many books in the "Searching for Lost ___" genre as written by professional scientists. I won't spoil the ending, but the book is exciting, well annotated and features a helpful bibliography. Next stop..Ubar!
—Sean
