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Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, Ubar was a thriving trading capital for frankincense, the highly valuable resin used in medicines, perfumes and cremations that was second in value only to gold in ancient times. Remains of bodies, he said, would be at the bottom of the city.Ĭalled 'the Atlantis of the sands,' by T.E. The bottom of the city, he said, is believed to reach 30 feet below ground.Ĭlapp said the search team has identified the city through pottery that has been unearthed, but he acknowleged archeologists will not be '100 percent sure' it is Ubar until inscriptions are analyzed. The digging led to the remains of an eight-sided structure, a fortress with 10 foot to 12 foot walls 2 feet thick and 60 feet long, that is believed to have served as the home of the king at the center of what was the tent city of Ubar.Ĭlapp said the digging is continuing, and his team has applied for a five-year excavation permit from the nation of Oman. 'As little as six weeks ago, we were on the brink of total failure.īut then Clapp and his team began gingerly digging at the site where the carvan routes converged - and within days found walls of the ancient city 'within a couple of feet' below the surface.
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'The key clues were the old caravan routes,' Clapp said, referring to the series of submerged desert roads carved out by teams of hundreds of thousands of camels that converged on a single site.
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Ronald Blom, one of the JPL scientists, said that after determining Clapp and his team were serious, scientists scanned more than 50images of the area where Ubar was described by ancient maps and books as being located. But then Clapp read in a magazine about a special radar system that was flown on the last successful mission of the space shuttle Challenger, and approached members of the imaging team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.