Lost Cities of Arabia

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.