The Road to Ubar (30 page)

As they learned of the holiness accorded frankincense, the People of Ad may have ritualized its gathering. Pliny tells us that the individuals selected to harvest it were "called sacred, and ... not allowed, while pruning the trees or gathering the harvest, to receive any pollution, either by intercourse with women, or coming in contact with the dead; in this way the price of the commodity is increased owing to the scruples of religion."
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Though the religious (versus economic) ardor of the 'Ad may be a little suspect in this case, they almost certainly would have had a belief system drawing on both their Semitic heritage and practices in Mesopotamia observed in the course of their incense trade. When times were good, as they had been for as long as anyone could remember, the 'Ad probably took their gods for granted, paying them minimal heed.

Then, sometime around 2500
B.C.,
bad times came to the People of'Ad. The rains ceased to fall at Shisur. First one year, then another, then every year the monsoon rains failed to crest the Dhofar Mountains and water the land beyond. At Shisur the 'Ad would have, in all earnestness now, turned to a rudimentary temple. It may have been a sacred tent, a brush-walled enclosure, or perhaps just a low wall of uncut stones outlining a
haram,
a sacred space. In its precinct frankincense would have been placed in small burners—miniature fire altars—and offered to an uncut stone, a betyl, which was the dwelling place of Sada, the bringer of rain.

The slow-moving river near Shisur dried up, and any frankincense trees around Shisur died off. The god Sada failed the 'Ad. It was then that in large numbers the People of 'Ad withdrew to the south and settled in the highlands of the Dhofar Mountains. There frankincense still flourished, and there was water. Where three springs flowed from a low ridge, the Bronze Age mountain town of Hagif arose. Considerable effort went into its domed houses built of branches set in megalithic foundations. There was a sense of permanence here, new to southern Arabia. As one generation gave way to the next, new houses were built and older ones converted to impressive graves; Hagif became a rambling assembly of the dead and the living, sprawling three miles across the incense land.

In the desert beyond, all was not abandoned. At this time a small clan of the People of'Ad achieved a new importance. The prototypical people of Ubar controlled the oasis and spring at Shisur, now the only place where fresh water flowed. In thirsty Arabia, water became a major economic determinant. Caravans could still venture across the Rub' al-Khali, but not without stopping at Shisur to rest and—for the appropriate tribute—to water their camels.

Though Shisur may still have been the modest place it had been since the discovery of frankincense, now it was the
only
settlement of consequence beyond the Dhofar Mountains. In contrast to the 'Adites living in the mountains, the Ubarites dwelt not in stone and brush houses but in tents. Compared to the cramped, smelly structures at Hagif in the mountains, tents were spacious and airy. Their flaps could be adjusted to bar a sandstorm or to capture a gentle breeze. They could be relocated when garbage accumulated. When in summer the desert heat became truly oppressive, the Ubarites could fold their tents and retreat to the higher elevations of the Dhofar Mountains, to live with their 'Adite kin and help with the frankincense harvest.

For several hundred years, Arabia baked and dozed in the sun, "fiery hot and scorched," in the words of Strabo. The incense trade continued with few innovations, few ups and downs, few threats. Then, between 1400 and 900
B.C.
, the picture changed. To the west of Shisur, toward the Red Sea, four new kingdoms rose and prospered: Ma'in, Saba (or Sheba), Qataban, and Hadramaut. These city-states raised dams, dug irrigation channels, and developed an impressive agriculture. They also sought a share of the incense trade. They harvested some aromatics themselves, including myrrh and low-grade frankincense. But for the finest frankincense, they were reliant on the People of'Ad.

In about 950
B.C.
, the Bible tells us, a queen of the Sabaeans journeyed north to Jerusalem to the court of King Solomon to work out a trade agreement to supply incense to Israel and other countries of the eastern Mediterranean. (The Israelites would serve as brokers.) Solomon's knowledge of the precise origin of the finest frankincense was probably hazy, and the queen was not about to set him straight.

Kingdoms in southern Arabia,
350
B.C.

She professed to be dazzled by his wisdom and, deal done, went on her way.

Incense had become indispensable in the Israelites' rituals. Even as a wanderer in the wilderness, Moses told his people to "take every man his censer, and put incense in them" (Numbers 16:17). Later, in the face of a plague, he told his brother Aaron, the high priest, to "take his censer and carry it quickly among the congregation, and make atonement for them.... And he stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was stayed" (Numbers 16:46–48). In the Great Temple of Jerusalem, frankincense alone among incenses was reserved for the worship of Yahweh; any misuse or profanation of it was punishable by death.

At Shisur, the needs of Israel and the other civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean had their impact, as did the uncomfortable proximity of Arabia's new city-states, especially the kingdom of the Hadramaut. There was an impetus for the Ubarites to assert themselves in trade—and in their standing with the unseen, with their gods.

Sometime after 1000
B.C.
, a cluster of stone, mud, and brush buildings rose on the hilltop overlooking Shisur's spring. Juris Zarins dubbed this "Old Town." At its heart was a small temple. This modest complex to some extent echoed the faraway, highly developed religion-centered architecture of Mesopotamia. The mythologist Joseph Campbell has made much of the Mesopotamian "hieratic city." Rather extravagantly, he declares:

The whole city now is conceived as an imitation on earth of the celestial order—a sociological middle cosmos, or mesocosm, between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of the individual, making visible their essential form...[It is] the sanctuary of the temple, where the earthly and heavenly powers join. The four sides of the temple tower, oriented to the four points of the compass, come together at this fifth point, where the energy of the pleroma enters time.... And this mesocosm is the entire context of the body social, which is thus a kind of living poem, hymn, or icon, of mud and reeds, and of flesh and blood, and of dreams, fashioned into the art form of the hieratic city state.
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How much of this the Mesopotamians actually had in mind is uncertain, and how much of it rubbed off on the Ubarites is even more questionable. Yet it was from Mesopotamia that the hieratic design of cities disseminated, and that design dovetailed with a belief, common to kings and commoners, that the gods dwelt in a celestial realm that was more splendid, more ordered than life in the dust of the earth. At one time man may even have enjoyed that life, but no more; he had long since sullied the earth's primordial harmony.

In temple and city building, early civilizations sought to re-create or at least mirror a celestial realm. To the Israelites, the Mesopotamians, and the Ubarites alike, there was no question that life was fragile, shadowed by mortality. Yet if men built houses—temples—as their gods built houses, couldn't they then share their enviable power?

As legend has it, Ubar became "an imitation of Paradise." And so it may have been. Its verdant oasis would have been a striking contrast to the surrounding parched, dead, and dying landscape. The focus of that oasis was now not only a life-giving spring but a temple that, however small and simple, was oriented to the cardinal directions (as Campbell mentioned) and looked upward to the heavens and eternity.

What gods the Ubarites saw as ascendant in the heavens is unclear. A rain or storm god called Sada appears to have had some importance, but he may have fallen into disfavor, considering how little he'd done in centuries of merciless drought. By the same token, the Ubarites would have had quite enough of the sun god favored in the Fertile Crescent (where that god brought warmth and fertility rather than heat and death). A moon god was almost certainly preeminent, his strength and power symbolized by the crescent-horned bull. But it is doubtful that the Ubarites worshipped the bull as a graven image; they would have been content to burn frankincense before an elemental, uncut rock. Or they would, in the coolness of the night, have looked skyward as the moon itself rose and dominated the night sky. The phases of the moon were carefully observed, and a phase of the quarter moon—
II
or
llah
—came over the centuries to be taken as a general term for God; it is the root of the Hebrew
El
or
Elohim
and of the Arabic
Allah.

With their first temple, the Ubarites staked their place in the cosmological world and in the temporal world as well. The temple served several down-to-earth purposes. On its roof, lookouts could stand watch over a 360-degree view of the surrounding desert. As in the biblical Song of Songs (3:6), the Ubarites could look to the far horizon and ask, "What is this coming up from the desert like a column of smoke, breathing of myrrh and frankincense?" Most often it would be friendly caravans. Though marauders were an occasional problem, they would think twice before attacking Ubar. If they as much as tried to water their animals at the Shisur spring, they would be met by a hail of arrows from the stone structures and temple above.

With their temple, the Ubarites were both reaching for the heavens and protecting their flanks. The temple compound would have served as a lockup, a safe deposit for whatever gold or treasure the Ubarites possessed. Even better, it became a means of acquiring wealth, for the temple's existence justified the demand for tolls on passing caravans. The Ubarites had probably long benefited from the needs of passing caravans. Now the gods needed to be fed, and what did they appreciate more than frankincense, the very "food of the gods"? Judging from accounts of similar caravansaries, the toll demanded (subject, as always, to negotiation) could have been a tenth of a caravan's cargo.

At the time Ubar's Old Town was built, a distinctive written alphabet appeared in southern Arabia. It was used by the newly risen kingdoms of Ma'in, Saba, Qataban, and Hadramaut. But in the land of the People of 'Ad this alphabet was expanded; eight more letters were needed to record the more complex language spoken there. The language of the 'Adites, then, may well be Arabia's oldest, for it is a general rule of linguistics that languages simplify—and lose sounds and letters—as they evolve.
⁷

The origin of the 'Adites' ancient language is reflected in its construction. It is clearly an early Semitic language, yet it appears to incorporate Mesopotamian-inspired verbs and word endings. Such were the People of 'Ad: a Semitic group with long-standing ties to Mesopotamia. Those ties, though, may not have always been friendly. A Mesopotamian inscription from circa 720
B.C.
tells us that the armies of Tiglath-pileser III marched down the incense trade route and pushed back the Arabians. The Arabians in question were probably not the 'Adites themselves, but their trading partners to the north, the Gerrhans. Originally a pack of shepherd-brigands exiled from Babylon, the Gerrhans not only overran the oasis at Jabrin (directly across the Rub' al-Khali from Ubar), but piratically infested the waters of the Persian Gulf. In 694
B.C.
, Sennacherib put them down and, for a time, confined them to their city of Gerrha. But they were soon out roaming the desert and opening up caravan routes across northern Arabia.

The Gerrhans and the 'Ad, one suspects, were cut from similar cloth. Accepting the lot dealt them by life in the desert, they were ardent and not altogether trustworthy traders. They were intolerant of restraint, a thorn in the side of classical civilizations, whose wealth they considered their godsend.

Classical authorities tell us that for several centuries, the Gerrhans transshipped the frankincense of the People of'Ad to both Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. The demands of the Greeks, then the Romans, became prodigious. In the early era described in Homer's
Odyssey,
the Greeks made do "with the fragrance of flaming cedar-wood logs and straight-grained incense trees." When frankincense made its way up from Arabia, they were enthralled. The goddess Aphrodite was especially appreciative of frankincense, as was Alexander the Great, the first ruler known to have it burned in his honor.

As well as an offering to the gods, the Romans used frankincense as a balm to the body in this life and a means of easing it into the next. It was an ingredient in cosmetics and perfumes. It was materia medica, good for "broken heads ... and to bind bloody wounds and assuage malignant ulcers about the seat."
⁸
The Romans' most copious use of frankincense was in their rites of cremation, for it pleased the gods, and, as down-to-earth Pliny notes, disguised the odor of burning bodies. He tells us that an entire year's production of Arabian frankincense was heaped upon the funeral pyre of Poppaea Sabina, Nero's wife. Pliny sums it up: "It is the luxury of man, which is displayed even in the paraphernalia of death, that has rendered Arabia thus happy."
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