عيسى وآدم
يقول تعالى: (إِنَّ مَثَلَ عِيسَى عِنْدَ اللَّهِ كَمَثَلِ آَدَمَ خَلَقَهُ مِنْ تُرَابٍ ثُمَّ قَالَ لَهُ كُنْ فَيَكُونُ) [آل عمران: 59]. هذه آية عظيمة وردت فيها كلمة (مثل) مرتين، فسيدنا عيسى يشبه سيدنا آدم من عدة نواحي، فكلاهما خُلق من دون أب، وكلاهما نبي، وكلاهما كانا معجزة في الطريقة التي خلقا بها، بشكل يختلف عن جميع البشر. هذا ما قلناه في مقال سابق وهو أن هذا التماثل بين عيسى وآدم لا يقتصر على الأشياء السابقة، بل هناك تماثل في ذكر كل منهما في القرآن. فلو بحثنا عن كلمة (عيسى) في القرآن نجد أنها تكررت بالضبط 25 مرة، ولو بحثنا عن كلمة (آدم) في القرآن لوجدنا أنها تتكرر 25 مرة أيضاً، وأنه لا يمكن لمصادفة أن تصنع مثل هذا التطابق1!!

Interview with Dr. Juris Zarins
September 1996




NOVA: Have you been back to Shisur since the time of our filming?

JZ: Yeah, we put in two-and-a-half more years of excavation at the site.

NOVA: Are you still confident that you found Ubar?

JZ: There's a lot of confusion about that word. If you look at the classical texts and the Arab historical sources, Ubar refers to a region and a group of people, not to a specific town. People always overlook that. It's very clear on Ptolomy's second century map of the area. It says in big letters "Iobaritae" And in his text that accompanied the maps, he's very clear about that. It was only the late Medieval version of The One Thousand and One Nights, in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, that romanticized Ubar and turned it into a city, rather than a region or a people.

NOVA: Then what did you find?

JZ: Well, there was a tribal group of people, the Iobaritae or the Ubarites, who lived in the area, and the Shisur site is one of probably three or four major centers from that period. It was a key site with regard to the trade that was coming and going along the edge of the great Empty Quarter. And it's one of those major sites with water. So, there was a lost city of Ubar and we did find it!

NOVA: What were the most interesting artifacts that you found at the Shisur site?

JZ: I think the most interesting artifacts were the "red polish" pottery wares. My previous work had been in northern and central Arabia, so we weren't familiar with this style of pottery. When we first found it, we thought it was kind of Roman-like, but we soon got our bearings and realized that the pottery showed a clear Parthian influence.

NOVA: Does this means the Ubarites were Parthian?

JZ: No, it just mean that the Parthians were one of their clients. The Parthians were contemporaries of the Ubarites and dominated what is today northern Oman from across Mesopotamia and Iran—and they also exerted some influence on northwest India, as well. We were surprised to find this Parthian pottery at the Shisur site because, originally, we thought that the Ubarites would be allied with the West. But upon excavation, it looks like most of the pottery wares have an eastern orientation.

NOVA: What's the significance of this?

JZ: Traditionally speaking, most people think of the Roman and Greek influence as coming from the south Arabian city states. And this western influence is what's been assumed to have controlled the incense trade, because the west is where most of our historical sources come from. But when we got down to the nitty gritty and actually excavated and surveyed, we discovered that assumption was erroneous. You kind of have to see Arabia as a buffer zone—half of Arabia belongs to the west and half of Arabia belongs to the east. And, in fact, Mesopotamia goes right down the middle. The Romans never conquered the Parthians, and so the dividing line between the Roman empire was right there.

NOVA: Does the pottery tell you anything about how the Ubarites lived?

JZ: Well, we know how they lived from day to day because we've got the bones and vegetable remains that have been analyzed by the people at the British Museum of Natural History. But the interesting part is they seem to have had an outpost out here that tied in a whole network of outposts that linked together a region—either trading in Frankincense and Myrrh or trading in Arab horses—all of them seemed to be good candidates. We hadn't suspected that.

NOVA: They traded in horses too?

JZ: Later on in medieval times, there are accounts that say that they continued to trade horses out of this region onto the coast and then shipped them to India. And since we do have this link now with India on this pottery, it seems to be that maybe that's one of the other products that they traded out of here.

NOVA: Did you find storage vats for the frankincense at Shisur?

JZ: We didn't find vats at Shisur. But we actually found pieces of frankincense—little crystalline forms. The vats were found at another site further to the east. So there definitely were storage facilities in this region.

NOVA: Can you tell us more about the satellite campsites around the town?

JZ: At the time of Ubar, you had nomadic groups moving across the region in the form of caravans. Remember, this is pretty remote out here in terms of water resources. So the caravans are traveling from station to station. The site that we uncovered at Shisur was a kind of fortress/administration center set up to protect the water supply from raiding Bedouin tribes. Surrounding the site, as far as six miles away, were smaller villages, which served as small-scale encampments for the caravans. An interesting parallel to this are the fortified water holes in the Eastern Desert of Egypt from Roman times. There, they were called "hydreumata." Steve Sidebotham of the University of Delaware and Sharon Hebert have done work on this.

NOVA: What do you make of the thick walls and towers at the Shisur site? Do they indicate that this was a hostile environment?

JZ: Thick walls and towers are generally put in place because of a hostile environment. We know from present day activity that any permanent source of water is always under threat in the desert. Plus they would have had money in there, because they were conducting trade in frankincense and what have you. And so there was always a temptation to rob people.

NOVA: What evidence did you find of the practice of agriculture at the Shisur site?

JZ: We recovered the bones of domestic animals—cattle, for example. Even, and I hate to say this, pig (laughs)—of course, absolutely outlawed today—sheep and goats—fish brought in from the Indian ocean. And then we got indirect evidence by finding grinding stones for plants like barley and dates, which are traditional to the area.

NOVA: How could they have grown anything?

JZ: They had the water, which went out into an irrigation scheme. When Bertram Thomas came through there in the 30's and Thesiger in 40's, he remarked upon the presence of faint field lines, which are now destroyed as a result of modern activity.

NOVA: Why did such an amazing site remain undetected for so many years?

JZ: Well, the site had just almost completely disappeared under dirt and rock and sand. So, for years, people used to say well there's nothing there but a little tiny observation post that was put in there about 200 years ago. People wrote it off and said there's nothing there.

NOVA: Were the pottery shards the clue that led you to believe this might not be the case?

JZ: Yeah. We began to walk around there and find pottery shards that were definitely not Islamic in date. So, to me, it indicated that the site was either classical or Iron Age or something. Something different.

NOVA: What are the challenges of pulling off an archaeological dig in the middle of the Omani desert?

JZ: Logistics are the biggest problem. The idea that you have to bring people out there. They need somewhere to stay. You have to feed them. Fortunately, the Bedouins, with the help of the government of Oman, provided us access to some of the new houses that they had built out there, so we actually were able to stay on site. Our food, however, came from an hour or two away, depending on where we went.

COLLECTIONS

The Frankincense Route Emerges From the Desert


By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: April 21, 1992
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THE archeologists who recently announced the discovery of the legendary lost city of Ubar in the Arabian Peninsula have found the remains of another major emporium in the ancient frankincense trade: the ruins of an even larger city near the coast of the Indian Ocean.
The new discovery is considered a significant step in establishing the full scope of the frankincense traffic at its most prosperous time, at the height of the Roman Empire in the early centuries after Christ, and at one of its major sources, in the Qara Mountains of southern Oman. This seems to remove any remaining questions about how and where the prized commodity was shipped across the Arabian desert by a network of caravan routes to Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean and by ships across the sea to India.
The new find, at the base of the Qara Mountains, is at a site with the modern name of Ain Humran. The discoverers identified it as the ruins of the fortified trading center called Saffara Metropolis on the maps of Claudius Ptolemy, the Alexandrian geographer of the second century A.D.





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With its discovery, archeologists now think they know three principal sites engaged in shipping frankincense: Saffara Metropolis, at the mountains where the aromatic resin is grown; Ubar, or Omanum Emporium on Ptolemaic maps, across the mountains on the edge of the Empty Quarter and so the nexus for the trans-desert trade, and finally, the ancient seaport of Moscha, discovered and excavated in the 1950's. Saffara Metropolis is only seven miles inland from the Moscha site, which is 25 miles east of the modern port of Salalah.
In announcing the find yesterday, Dr. Juris Zarins, chief archeologist of an American-British-Omani expedition, said preliminary excavations at Saffara Metropolis produced pottery and other artifacts indicating that it was occupied at the same time as Ubar, which was settled some 5,000 years ago and was a bustling caravan center as early as 2000 B.C.
"This opens up a whole new area that hasn't been looked at before in exploring frankincense trade," he said.
Dr. Zarins, a professor of anthropology at Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield, said the towers, interior walls and other aspects of architecture at the newly discovered site were virtually identical to those at Ubar. The central part of the city stood stark and unburied on the top of a hill. Its crumbling walls encompassed an area about 300 feet by 350 feet.

The Planet Earth:
Satellite-Led Expedition Finds Atlantis of the Sands

Shuttle Endeavour radar image of desert around the lost city of Ubar in the modern nation of Oman. The outpost assembled caravans transporting frankincense across the desert, from 2800 B.C. to 300 A.D. Magenta depicts large sand dunes. Green is limestone rock on the desert floor. White is a wadi, or dry riverbed.
Observation satellites staring down from space have penetrated 600-ft. mountains of windswept sand to make a startling find on the fringe of the Arabian Desert. The faint shadow of a lost civilization has turned up like a ghost in computer-enhanced radar images of ancient ground under the Rub al Khali desert in the sultanate of Oman. A timeworn network of roads under the dunes seems to point to the burial place of the legendary society of Ad.

Referred to in the Koran, the tales of The Arabian Nights and the Holy Bible, Ad probably was the bustling hub of the world's frankincense trade 5,000 years ago. Biblical archaeologists suggest wise men traded there for frankincense they bore as gifts for the infant Jesus.

Frankincense is an aromatic resin from the sap of Middle Eastern and East African trees -- an incense used ages ago by monarchs and common folk alike, in cremations, religious rituals, ceremonies and imperial processions.

Back in the 1930s, the grinding sand of the Rub al Khali had defeated a water-short British explorer's search for Ad's ancient trade routes. Modern archaeologists still are unable to search the entire perilous desert. Instead, they work in shirtsleeves in laboratories, feeding data from satellite radar to computers searching for long-lost clues.

Ubar. In observation satellite photos made in the 1980s, archaeologists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California were able to see a 100-yard-wide, hoof-trodden path hidden under tons of sand in giant dunes.

Backed by in 1990 a wealthy businessman, a scouting expedition of NASA, British and private explorers tracked the trail they had concluded was formed by frankincense traders riding camels. Following their satellite map, the party looked for geological evidence of a trail through the now-barren land to the once-thriving city of Ubar.

The explorers stumbled upon Ad artifacts- 900 pottery shards and flint pieces -- on the trade route in the sprawling Rub al Khali desert in 1990.

The adventurer T.E. Lawrence once described Ubar as the "Atlantis of the sands." Frankincense was an important commodity in the ancient world before the rise of Christianity when Ubar may have been the main shipping center of Ad. Worldwide shipments of frankincense to markets as far away as China and Rome could have started at Ubar.

Ad society lasted from 3000 B.C. to the 1st century A.D. In the end, it was victimized by politics, economics and climate after a drop in demand for the frankincense fragrance as Christianity preached burying bodies instead of burning them. The abandoned villages of Ad eventually were inundated by tides of shifting sands, and eventually dunes reaching heights of 200 to 600 feet.

Shifting Sands. The world's largest desert fluctuated in size during the 1980s, according to a NASA study of observation-satellite data.

The Sahara Desert was observed in red light and infrared light reflected from the desert surface up to four orbiting American weather satellites, NOAA-6, -7, -9 and -10.

Desert fluctuations depended on the amount and distribution of the rainfall in the area. Rainfall controls the amount of vegetation seen from space. Scientists suggest changes in global desert area may be tied to global climate changes.

The Atlas Mountains and Mediterranean Sea make up a nearly immovable northern boundary, but the Sahara's southern boundary moved south 80 miles between 1980 and 1990.

After moving to the south between 1981 and 1984, the Sahara retreated northward 88 miles from 1985 to 1986. However, it migrated 34 miles south in 1987. The southern boundary retreated 62 miles to the north in 1988, then expanded 46 miles to the south in 1989 and 1990.


How The Expedition Found The Lost Arabian Society.
Radar satellites staring down from space at the local topography along remote reaches of the globe penetrated 600-ft. mountains of windswept sand to make the startling find on the fringe of the Arabian Desert.

A faint shadow of the lost civilization of Ad was turned up like a ghost in a computer-enhanced image of ancient ground under the Rub al Khali desert in the sultanate of Oman. The timeworn network of roads under the dunes seemed to point through the desert to the burial place of the legendary Ad society, believed to be the bustling hub of the world's frankincense trade 5,000 years ago.

Ad is referred to in the Koran, in the tales of The Arabian Nights, and in the Holy Bible. Some biblical archaeologists suggest wise men traded there for frankincense they bore as gifts for the infant Jesus.

The grinding sand of the Rub al Khali had defeated water-short British explorer Bertram Thomas looking for Ad's ancient trade routes in the 1930's. Today, unable to search the entire perilous desert environment, modern archaeologists have worked in their laboratories, feeding data from satellite radar pictures to computers searching for long-lost clues.

In the satellite photos, Charles Elachi and Ronald Blom of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, were able to see a 100-yard-wide hoof-trodden path hidden under tons of sand in giant dunes. A 1990 scouting expedition tracked that trail which may have been formed by frankincense traders riding camels.

Atlantis of the sands. Frankincense is an aromatic resin from the sap of Middle Eastern and East African trees. Ages ago, it was an incense used by everyone, monarches and common folk alike, in cremations, religious rituals, ceremonies and imperial processions.

Backed by wealthy businessman Armand Hammer, the Ad expedition included Blom, Elachi, British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, Los Angeles attorney and part-time explorer George Hedges, and an archaeologist, geologist, computer scientist and documentary filmmaker.

Following their satellite-drawn compass, a scouting expedition looked for geological evidence of a trail through the now-barren land to the once-thriving city of Ubar, once the main frankincense shipping center of Ad. The adventurer T.E. Lawrence once described Ubar as "the Atlantis of the sands." The city was a starting point for worldwide shipments -- to markets as far away as China and Rome -- of frankincense, an important commodity in the ancient world before the rise of Christianity.

Ad society lasted from 3000 B.C. to the 1st century A.D. In the end, it was victimized by politics, economics and climate after a drop in demand for the frankincense fragrance as Christianity preached burying bodies instead of burning them. The abandoned villages of Ad eventually were inundated by tides of shifting sands. Today those dunes reach heights of 200 to 600 feet.

Subtle signs. There have not been many scholarly writings about Ad. Because of a lack of ruins to study, many archaeologists have said the Ad civilization was mythical. The JPL scientists found both modern tracks and ancient ones in their satellite maps. The new ones go around the dunes while the old ones go underneath. The main 100-yard-wide path seen in satellite photos is very subtle with the ground worn slightly into the desert floor.

The explorers had been preparing for six years to start excavating in January 1991 when they stumbled upon Ad artifacts -- 900 pottery shards and flint pieces -- on the trade route in the sprawling Rub al Khali desert during a three-week scouting expedition in July 1990. High winds drove the team away, leaving the artifacts in the hands of Oman's Department of National Heritage until the expedition returns. The main expedition in 1991 will try to prove the Ad people existed.

The winds of war in the Middle East delayed the main expedition in 1991. Oman, once known as Muscat and Oman, is a sultanate on the southeast side of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bounded on the north by the Gulf of Oman and on the east and south by the Arabian Sea. To the southwest is Yemen. To the west is Saudi Arabia. On the northwest border is the United Arab Emirates. The Rub al Khali desert extends into the western area of Oman, but is mostly in Saudi Arabia.

About one million people live in Oman. Besides commercial quantities of oil found in 1964, they export dates, limes, cereals and fish.

Oman was ruled for centuries by emirs controlled by a caliphate at Baghdad. Later it was controlled by Portugal followed by the British government of India. Today, the ruling sultan has close ties with Great Britain.


Learn about other
ancient Sahara caravans