The Arabian subcontinent is a vast and mysterious place.  It is six times the size of the British Isles, four times the size of Texas, one third of the size of Australia.  It is a forbidding and inhospitable place.  Few enter into the interior.  Those that do multiply the rumours and exaggerate the stories associated with this place.

Saudi Arabia remains off limits to the infidel so our investigation best start with a satellite overflight of the territory.

Source: Wikipedia

From space we can see that the peninsular is bounded to the South and West by mountains. Behind these mountains vast expanses of desert sands.  The mountains, particularly in the South, receive sufficient rain to support lush vegetation. The interior and eastern quarters lie in the raid shadow and are arid.  In the southeast lies the particularly arid inhospitable empty quarter.  There is no water in the empty water. It is said to be impassible due to the combination of searing heat and soaring sand dunes.

One school believes that the Arab people come from the south of the continent.  In the mountains of Yemen there is ample sun, rain and fertile soil to build an agricultural paradise. The queen of Sheba may have lived here.  The great Marib dam was built to hold back waters for irrigation purposes.  When this failed some 50,000 people were displaced into Arabia.

Wadi Shab, Oman showing the fertility of the area. Source: Wikipedia

Quite apart from agricultural prosperity the territory that we now know as Yemen was a great trading centre in antiquity.  It lies on the trading route between India and Europe. and at a cross roads between Egypt and Asia. There was an active coastal trade that took goods from India along the coast of the Red Sea towards Europe.  There was also a lucrative transhipment service whereby goods from the East were transported by camel train across the Arabian continent. 

Scholars have identified the ancient caravan trails.  These are shown on the following map.

Source: Wikipedia

One more factor contributed to the wealth of Yemen in antiquity.  A very special tree grows in the Handrammat which is the easternmost province of Yemen.  It is Boswella Sacra, the incense tree.

Boswellia sacrainside Biosphere 2. Source Wikipeda

At first glance the Frankencense tree seems an unimpressive scrappy sort of plant but twice a year it can be tapped to yield an aromatic gum.  For centuries this gum was vital to embalming and other religious rites in Ancient Egypt, Rome, Greece and other civilisations.  Weight for weight it was more valuable than gold. 

Lucrative camel convoys took the commodity through the Arabian highlands to the Mediterranean coast. At the northern end of Arabia where the desert gives way to the fertile crescent the Nabateans grew rich on the trade. The Nabateans added value by mixing frankincense with bitumen obtained from the nearby Dead Sea. The result was a sacred embalming fluid which was sold to the Pharaohs.

The capital of the Nabateans, Petra, is now well known on the tourist trail.  It was introduced to the West by the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812 and is famously described as ”a rose-red city half as old as time”. 

Less well known are Nabatean sites within Saudi Arabia. Mada’in Saleh, the second city in the Nabatean world. Although the site was declared an archaeological treasure in the early 1970s very limited excavation has taken place at the site.

Characteristic Nabatean rock cut tombs at Mada’in Saleh. Source: Wikipedia

The source of the best frankincense is hotly contested.  The product comes in a range of colours, purity, aromas, and age.  The sweetest smelling product in the dank conditions of Western Europe is not necessarily the best product in Arabia.  Nevertheless the Oman product from the Dhofar region is generally considered superior to that of the Yemen. 

 Access to the Omani product would have required the ancients to establish a trade route into Oman.  One thought is that the Omani trade might have travelled across the Empty Quarter towards the Persian Gulf.  Such a route would have kept the trade out of the control of the Nabateans.   This is a conjecture for which it is difficult to find any written evidence.  A  tradition of secrecy runs very deep among Arabian people.  Secrecy enhanced the mystique of the incense trade and protected the trade.  Should the whereabouts of an oasis become common knowledge then the lucrative camel caravans would be  vulnerable to attack.  Rather than seek out written records the historian might be better advised to seek physical evidence.  The Omani trade would have required a market centre for exchange and would have needed a network of forts to control vital oases along the trading routes. 

This raises the question. could there be a lost city in the Empty Quarter, or in Oman itself?  There have been persistent rumours since antiquity of a fabulously wealthy city called Ubar, or The City of One Thousand Pillars. There is a mention in the Qu-ran which claims that the city was destroyed by God by drought and wind because of the worship of idols.  

These rumours came to the attention of Ranulph Fiennes while he was acting as an intelligence officer for the Sultan during the Dhofar Rebellion.  Notes from Bertran Thomas who explored the Empty Quarter in the 1930s seemed to suggest that there a well engineered ancient road led out to the desert, but this proved difficult to find.  It was long since buried under shifting sand dunes. Fiennes left military service in Oman before he could find the city.

In his book “Atlantis of the Sands” Ranulph Fiennes claims that he spent much of his life searching for the city.  He claims that his world famous expeditions to the Poles were means to an end, raising funds for an eventual return to Oman.  These explorations allowed him to return to Oman in 1992.  By that time he had aroused the interest of NASA who provided satellite images using ground penetrating radar. This radar which was capable of looking under the sands showed evidence of the Thomas Road but did not reveal an obvious candidate for the lost city. 

Ultimately, Fiennes and his colleagues decided that the lost city lay in the oasis of  Ash Shisar in Oman. The site contained artificacts from far and wide and was built on top of a large limestone cavern which would have served as the water source. The expedition found evidence that the water source had run dry causing the cavern to collapse sometime between 300 and 500 AD, which might relate to the reference in the Qu’ran. 

The ruins at Ash Shisar showing the collapsed well.. Source: Wikipedia

I feel confident that there are man y other ruined towns to be discovered in Arabia.