The English researcher Thomas described these tribes at length and claimed that he found the traces of an ancient city founded by one of these tribes.
In addition, the people living in this region produced and distributed "frankincense," an aromatic resin from rare trees. The Greeks called this area "Eudaimon Arabia" and medieval Arab scholars called it "Al-Yaman as-Saeed." 226 All of these names mean "Happy Yemen," because the people living in that region used to serve as middlemen in the lucrative spice trade between India and places north of the Arabian Peninsula. Arabia Felix was the Roman designation for the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula which today includes Yemen and much of Oman. This book was Arabia Felix, written by the English researcher Bertram Thomas in 1932. 225 Being an Arabophile and a winning documentary film maker, Clapp had come across a very interesting book during his research on Arabian history. It was Nicholas Clapp, a noted documentary filmmaker and a lecturer on archaeology, who found this legendary city mentioned in the Qur'an. Such people could not conceal their astonishment at this phenomenal discovery. Many people had previously suggested 'Ad was a legend or that the location in question could never be found. They believed they found Ubar.At the beginning of 1990, press-releases in the well-known newspapers of the world declared "Fabled Lost Arabian city found," "Arabian city of Legend found" and "The Atlantis of the Sands, Ubar." What rendered this archaeological find particularly intriguing was the fact that this city is mentioned in the Qur'an. Ubar and its location continued to fascinate people around the world, and it seemed as though its secrets would remain hidden beneath the Arabian sands until the 1980s, when a photojournalist named Nicholas Clapp became interested in the city. Working backwards from the few scant historical and geographical accounts that portray Ubar as a prosperous city or kingdom in the centuries before Islam, Clapp and his team narrowed their search to a location on the edge of the Arabian Desert in the Dhofar region of Oman. In modern times there were a few attempts to locate the lost city, but, for the most part, they were futile.
Later Islamic historians and geographers describe Ubar as being somewhere in the Arabian Desert, in what is today the nation-state of Oman. As such, Ubar became a metaphor for how good Muslims should not act, and what could happen to non-believers, especially when allowed to congregate in a specific area. The city is mentioned as a den of iniquity that was destroyed by God, both in the Quran as well as the mythical Arabian Nights. One of these lost cities is that known as Ubar, Wabar or Iram, names which are all believed to refer to the same, possibly mythical, location. They play a major role in the identity of certain groups, at least in how certain groups identify with these mythical places.Īlthough many, if not all, of these locations are mythical, they may have been based on actual locations, even if modern scholars are yet to definitively discover any such places. Besides being cities and kingdoms that have been lost, often through some sort of catastrophe, all of these places are mentioned in religious texts or as part of a peoples' national history.
The annals of world history are filled with intriguing, although often outlandish stories of lost cities and kingdoms, and in addition to Atlantis, there are also Hyperborea, Shambhala, and Aztlan, to name just a few.