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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.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ubar/zarins/zarins2.html
اقتباسNOVA: 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.
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