Like Thesiger, the party approached Shisr from the south, along the Wadi Ghudun. In March 1948 a geological party from Petroleum Development (Oman and Dhofar) Ltd, an associate company of the Iraq Petroleum Company, carried out a camel-borne survey of Dhofar province.
The remains of the old fort at Shisr, Dhofar, Oman. The well was the only permanent watering place in those parts and, being a necessary watering place for Bedouin raiders, had been the scene of many fierce encounters in the past, The English explorer Wilfred Thesiger visited the well at Shisr in the spring of 1946, "where the ruins of a crude stone fort on a rocky eminence marks the position of this famous well." He noted that some shards found there were possibly early Islamic. In his view the best way to explore the sands was by airship, but his plans never came to fruition.
He had been told that the Bedu had seen the ruins of the castles of King Ad in the region of Wabar. Lawrence planned to search for the location of a lost city somewhere in the sands, telling a fellow traveller that he was convinced that the remains of an Arab civilization were to be found in the desert. The story of a lost city in the sands became an explorer's fascination a few wrote accounts of their travels that perpetuated the tale. Thomas marked on a map the location of a track that was said to lead to the legendary lost city of Ubar and, although he intended to return to follow it, he was never able to. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), who regarded Ubar as the "Atlantis of the Sands". He found no trace of a lost city in the sands, but Thomas later related the story to T. It was Thomas' ambition to be the first European to cross the great sands but, as he began his camel journey, he was told by his Bedouin escorts of a lost city whose wicked people had attracted the wrath of God and had been destroyed. In 1930, the explorer Bertram Thomas had been approaching the southern edge of the Rub' al Khali ("The Empty Quarter"). However, scholars are divided over whether this really is the site of a legendary lost city of the sands.
Ī contemporary notice at the entrance to an archaeological site at Shisr in the province of Dhofar, Oman, proclaims: "Welcome to Ubar, the Lost City of Bedouin Legend". Sir Ranulph Fiennes, another member of the expedition, declared that this was Omanum Emporium of Ptolemy's famous map of Arabia Felix. The conclusion they reached, based on site excavations and an inspection of satellite photographs, was that this was the site of Ubar, or Iram of the Pillars, a name found in the Quran which may be a lost city, a tribe or an area. The discovery was the result of the work of a team of archaeologists led by Nicholas Clapp, which had visited and excavated the site of a Bedouin well at Shisr (18° 15' 47 N"ĕ3° 39' 28" E) in Dhofar province, Oman. In February 1992, The New York Times announced a major archaeological discovery in the following terms: "Guided by ancient maps and sharp-eyed surveys from space, archaeologists and explorers have discovered a lost city deep in the sands of Arabia, and they are virtually sure it is Ubar, the fabled entrepôt of the rich frankincense trade thousands of years ago." When news of this discovery spread quickly around the newspapers of the world, there seemed few people willing or able to challenge the dramatic findings, apart from the Saudi Arabian press. On a smaller scale, Arabia has its own legend of a lost city, the so-called "Atlantis of the Sands", which has been the source of debate among historians, archaeologists and explorers, and a degree of controversy that continues to this day. In modern times, the mystery of the lost city of Atlantis has generated a number of books, films, articles, web pages, and two Disney features.
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