Lost cities - The Atlantis of the Sand

 

Lost worlds and lost citirs are infinite sources for our blog and a great source of inspiration for writers. There are famous ones like El Dorado that we covered in our previous post (you can read it here (link)) or Troy from Illiad but today I like to introduce a lesser known one, known as the “Atlantis of the Sands”: the city of Iram. The idea for this post came from a very interesting Youtube video, and since our own work features something similar, I thought it’d make an excellent topic for today.

I. The City of Pillars

Iram appears in the folklore of pre-Islamic arabia but is also mentioned in the Quran as Iram of the Pillars, because the city was known from its huge pillars and towers. They were so big, that they thought the city was build by giants, or another race technologically more advanced than humans were at that times. Once source called the people of ʿĀd, other tales claim they were actually djinns, or even nephilims, giant hybrids of humans and angels. (Note that they appear in the Bible, but not in the Quran.) Like in the story of Atlantis, the ʿĀd became corrupted by their own wealth and power. In the legend, a prophed named Hud was sent to them to spread the word of Allah, but the ʿĀd haven’t converted to Islam, and still worshiped their old gods. Allah punished them and sent a sandstorm lasting seven nights and eight days, submerging the city with all its marvelous pillars and inhabitants under the sand.

As legends go, this is quite fascinating – but can any of this actually be true?

Well, in this case, yes.

The first mention of the city of Iram was found on the Ebla tablets. These clay tablets were found in Syria in 1973 in the Ebla excavation site, which is the largest collection cuneiform writings ever discovered. They dated from approximately 2500 BCE to 2250 BCE and among many other things they described the trading connections of the city. Among these trade partners was Iram, so we can be sure that a city with this name existed.

II. The City Under the Sand

That singular point was enough for many, many people to go looking for this city of giants. One example of this was in 1930, when the explorer Bertram Thomas was approaching the southern edge of the Rub' al Khali  - or "The Empty Quarter" in English. This is a very hostile area at the borders of today’s Saudi-Arabia, Oman, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates, with no water, only dunes and sandstorms. Thomas wanted to be the first European to cross the great sands and he was told by his Bedouin escorts of a lost city whose evil people had attracted the wrath of God and had been destroyed. Thomas found no trace of a lost city in the sands, but later he told the the story to T. E. Lawrence  - also known as "Lawrence of Arabia", who gave Iram the name „Atlantis of the Sands”. Thomas marked a map with the location of a track that was said to lead to the legendary lost city of Ubar (sometimes considered another name for Iram, sometimes an etirely different city) but he was never able to return and search for it himself. Lawrence also planned to search the area, but he never did, only told the tale of the lost city to fellow adventurers, and that the Bedu had seen the ruins of the palace in the region of Wabar. Later an English explorer named Wilfred Thesiger found traces of a settlement, or most likely a fort when he visited the Well of Shisr in 1946. Two years later, geologists working for the Petroleum Developement Ltd. also approached the fort, and saw that it was built above a quary-like cave, made of the same rock as the ruins. They couldn’t enter, however, becace the entrance was obscured by a dune.

The break-through happened when Nicholas Clapp, a documentary filmmaker called in modern technology to help him. He decided to enlist NASA’s help because of its expertise in applying remote sensing, with which they already found Mayan ruins in Central America. Images from the Landsat and SPOT remote sensing satellites showed distinct tracks through the desert. The researchers identified these tracks as old caravan routes that converged at Shisr, where they found the fort ruin in the ’40s. They also found several walls and towers, so job done, we found the lost city of Ubar, time to celebate!

III. The City That Remained Hidden

The thing is… this findings didn’t really resemble the City of Pillars. The Shisr Fort was the size of a caravanserai, with no evidence that it had ever been anything larger. Several critiques arose that the excavation site wasn’t Iram but rather the city of Ubar (in this case a smaller, less epic lost city different from Iram). THey also found no hint at sandstorm damage, rather the aftermath of an earthquake.

Some say that there might have been two cities, Ubar (the ruins they have found) and Iram (the real city of pillars, still hidden). Others stated that Ubar was really a region not a city and only the 1001 Nights romanticized it so it became a city in the mind of the people.  On Ptolemy’s map from the second century the area is called „Iobaritae” with big letters, that further supports the claim that it’s actually a part of the land rather than a single city.

It’s quite interesting how tales can romanticize something, portraying things grander in scale and more mysterious than it actually is, but I find it even more fascinating that how many people can work hard just to find a city from tales and folklore. Tales indeed have power over us. May be the tale of Iram and the ʿĀd was a tale just like Atlantis, a cautionary fable about how arrogant kingdoms will fail, or to avoid rejecting God and his messengers because it can and will spell certain doom. But I sometimes wonder, what if there is really something under the sand so deep the satelites can’t see it?

The tale of Iram also inspired H. P. Lovecraft. I know, he was a terrible person, but you have to admit that he created an incredible mythos. In his writings, Iram was the birthplace of the Cult of Cthulhu and was also visited by the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred just before he wrote the Necronomicon.

So, at the end of this short series, why did we spend so much time on lost cities and lands? Other than the fact that they’re absolutely fascinating and awe-inspiring myths, naturally. Well, our own work, Spirits of Seiran features our version of a lost land phantasised about, so if you’re curious about how we implemented all the good and bad part from these real-life tales, stay tuned!

Stay safe,

Lory