The presumptuous city swallowed by the sands
The eighty-ninth surah of the Quran asks: have you not seen how your Lord dealt with 'Ad — Iram of the pillars, the like of which was never created in the lands? The text says no more. Commentary and legend supplied the rest: 'Ad was an ancient South Arabian nation of giants who rejected the prophet Hud, and their king Shaddad, hearing Paradise described, swore to build his own on earth — walls of gold and silver brick, pillars set with gems, channels running with water, milk and honey, centuries in the making. As he approached the finished gate, a single cry came down from heaven and city and people were annihilated together. Iram was buried in sand, somewhere, tradition holds, in the Rub' al-Khali, the Empty Quarter of southern Arabia.
The Thousand and One Nights includes a finding-tale: Abdallah ibn Abi Qilaba of Yemen, searching for a strayed camel, wanders into a colonnaded jewel city empty of any living soul, pockets what he can carry, and the report reaches the Umayyad caliph Mu'awiya, whose scholars identify the place as Shaddad's Iram — stumbled upon by chance, never found by search.
The twentieth century gave the city an archaeological echo. Ubar, the lost caravan city of the sands, long conflated with Iram and dubbed the Atlantis of the Sands, drew explorers for decades; in 1992 a team led by Nicholas Clapp and Ranulph Fiennes, guided by space-shuttle radar imagery, excavated at Shisr in Oman a fortress waterhole that had collapsed into a limestone sinkhole beneath it. Whether it seeded the legend cannot be proven, but a city swallowed by the ground rhymes oddly well with the judgement in the old commentaries.
