The Road to Ubar by Nicholas Clapp Read Free Book Online Page B

of the past, musty and mysterious. Locating "Tabla Sexta Asiae"—Ptolemy's map of Arabia—I saw that hundreds of sites and geographic features were accurately identified.
    Yet understanding Ptolemy's
Cosmographias
was not a simple matter. It took me a while to grasp when and how they were compiled and what exactly they portrayed. To begin with, the
Cosmographias
were not at all what they first seemed. Though compiled in the 1400s, they were
not
the product of the Renaissance quest for knowledge and new horizons. Ptolemy was born in Greece and lived in Egypt circa 110–170 A.D. The Renaissance editions were, in substance,
reissues
of maps produced some thirteen hundred years earlier at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Great Library of Alexandria.
    Sometime around 150 A.D., as overseer of the Great Library, Claudius Ptolemy set out to map the known world. For information, he drew on his library's estimated 750,000 manuscripts, among them a number of "Peripluses" (literally, "round trips"), records of coastlines compiled by seafaring Greek traders. In the case of Arabia, these traders also brought back accounts of inland sites gathered, not firsthand but from local tribesmen. These informants measured camel journeys from place to place in "stages," each equaling a day's ride. Calculating that a stage averaged thirty to thirty-five miles, Ptolemy did his best to estimate the whereabouts of inland cities and towns.
    To plot this and his other accumulated data, Ptolemy not only envisioned the world as round, but invented and set upon it lines of longitude and latitude. Every site was then given identifying coordinates. In Arabia, for instance, Medina (then called Yathrib, or Lathrippa) was at 71° × 23°, and Saba Regio, the royal city of Sheba, was at 73° × 16°. 8 In its original form, Ptolemy's atlas—including his map of Arabia—was a wonder of the world. Nothing so complete, so detailed, so accurate, had been done before. And therefore it was a very sad day when, in 391 A.D. , at the order of the Roman emperor Theodosius I, a religious mob trashed and torched Alexandria's library—and Ptolemy's atlas went up in smoke.
    Nonetheless, fragments of Ptolemy's work survived. At least one copy of his table of coordinates—his listings of landmarks and sites—was saved and passed down through the centuries, until in the late 1400s European mapmakers laid out longitude and latitude grids and plotted afresh Ptolemy's coordinates of coastlines, mountains, rivers, and tribal fiefdoms. They marked his cities and towns with quaint castles or little dots, often in gold. They reconstructed, quite successfully, the world as Ptolemy knew it, as it was not long after the time of Christ.
    On Ptolemy's map of Arabia—if anywhere—I should find Ubar. And sure enough, on most editions, the tribal name "Iobaritae"—Latin for "Ubarites"—appears more or less where Bertram Thomas encountered his road to Ubar. But there was no identifiable
settlement,
only evidence that an Ubarite tribe once may have wandered the region's sandy wastes. No castle or golden dot on Ptolemy's map, no city. And it wasn't as if I could look further into the past. Before Ptolemy, the only maps were very crude and usually local.
    For several weeks there seemed no way to get beyond this impasse. Then, to better understand how Ptolemaic maps were constructed— and to attempt to conjure something out of nothing—I decided to make one of my own, step by step. Working from a table of coordinates printed in Ulm, Germany, in 1482, I plotted nearly four hundred landmarks and towns, just as Renaissance mapmakers had done. The project, which took several evenings, was intriguing, much like working a jigsaw puzzle. But there were no surprises. Except ... a day or two after I'd finished, one of the places I'd plotted popped up in my mind and bothered me. Omanum Emporium, "the marketplace of Oman," appeared