From: babak@athena.mit.edu (Babak Ayazifar)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.islam
Subject: MUST READ: Remote Sensing Discovery of Iram, Mentioned in the Qur'an
Keywords: Iram, Ubar, Oman, Remote Sensing, JPL
Date: 16 Oct 92 18:27:16 GMT
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Salaam Aleikom,

		       I URGE YOU TO READ THIS.

The following is an article which a colleague of mine brought to 
my attention. It has been taken from the September 1, 1992 issue of
"American Way," which is the on-board magazine of American Airlines.
It recounts the discovery of the ancient city of Iram (or Ubar as the
Westerners call it) which is mentioned in Surat al-Fajr in the Qur'an.
The city has been buried for thousands of years. I thought it may be
as exciting a reading for you as it was for me; it certainly was for
my colleague who sent this to me, and he isn't even a Muslim!!!!

One more Qur'anic account/prediction which has been confirmed by
non-Muslims ...  after 1400 years ... 

Although expected, it simply is remarkable ...

The article is somewhat long so you may want to save it into a file
and read it at your leasure.

Wassalaam,

Babak.

**********************************************************************

			ATLANTIS OF THE SANDS

				 by 

			    Ken McAlpine	


The first shots were curious. Ostensibly they were of a bleak strip of
the Sahara desert between Egypt and Sudan. There were no recorded
rivers in the area. Yet there they were, three riverbeds of
substantial size, etched across the radar image like scratches on a
weathered photograph.

``The immediate thought was that somebody had grabbed the wrong roll,
that this was really someplace else,'' recalls Ron Blom, a geologist
specializing in spacecraft remote sensing and one of the first to see
the surprising radar pictures from the space shuttle Columbia. `` The
radar images didn't look anything like the surface.''

It wasn't. What those 1981 radar images recorded was the first solid
surface they encountered. Simply put, the space shuttle imaging radar
pierced the thin veneer of desert sand as if it didn't exist,
revealing a surface that had basked in the sun in wetter times,
hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Those radar images jump-started a fantastic tale - a search mixing myth
and technology, fortuitous circumstance and sweat equity, fact and
fable - orchestrated by an oddball assortment of researchers whose most
common bond may have been pigheadedness.

Their aim was to find the lost city of Ubar, celebrated in the Koran
as ``the many-towered city of Iram,'' thought to be a center for the
lucrative frankincense trade as far back as 3000 years before Christ.
>From this fortress rising out of the desert, legend said, Ubar's
residents distributed frankincense - an aromatic gum made from the sap
of a scrubby desert bush - a commodity in great demand as medicine,
perfume, incense, and embalming oil, so valued it was presented as a
gift to the Christ child. A place of inestimable wealth, and equal
amounts of sin, Ubar/Iram was buried, according to the Koran, by a
sandstorm sent by an angry God, its disappearance so abrupt that
author T. E. Lawrence dubbed it ``The Atlantis of the Sands.''

In 1981, when scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena, California, first examined Columbia's radar images, and the
seemingly ill-placed riverbeds, they were surprised, but not stunned.
Radar imaging of this sort - sending radar pulses down from space where
they would measure surface irregularities on a regional scale - dated
back to the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Scientists knew they probably
could pick up subsurface images if conditions were right.
Unfortunately, the criteria for subsurface imaging are more stringent
than a car warranty. The surface must be bone-dry. The sediment layer
has to be fine-grained and homogeneous; a mix of sand and larger rocks
will scatter the radar signals. Whatever is below the surface can't be
too deep; signals generally can't penetrate deeper than six meters.
Finally, whatever lurks below the surface has to be irregular or it
won't be imaged; a radar reading of a smooth image appears black.

JPL geologist Blom and fellow JPL scientist Charles Elachi got
involved in the hunt for Ubar early in 1982 when Blom fielded a
curious phone call from Nicholas Clapp. An Emmy award-winning
documentary filmmaker and lifelong Arabophile, Clapp had already done
substantial research on Ubar. By piecing together historical records
and the failed efforts of other adventurers, Clapp was reasonably
certain that the fabled city has been in southern Oman, somewhere in a
cast chunk of desert known locally as the Empty Quarter.
Unfortunately, Clapp's estimate still encompassed a 30,000-square-mile
expanse of inhospitable, and largely unmapped, desert. The last
archaeologist to wander about Oman had ended his research abruptly
when he drove over a land mine. Would JPL, asked Clapp, be willing to
use space imaging to help him look for a lost city?

Apparently these sorts of calls aren't entirely unusual around JPL,
where they periodically field requests from folks looking for
everything from enchanted pyramids to Noah's Ark. What differentiated
Clapp from the completely mad crowd were his credentials and the fact
he had already done a lot of homework. It was also fortunate that Blom
picked up the phone. An affable fellow, Blom has a soft spot for the
unconventional. A poster board on the wall of Blom's
office-cum-cubicle at JPL is splattered with yellow Post-its. One
stands separate from the rest. ``Dare to be Stupid!'' it says. Blom
admits this could very well be the credo he and his colleagues applied
in their search for Ubar. When the Challenger space shuttle took to
the skies in 1984, the JPL scientists asked for several radar images
of the Empty Quarter.

Actually, the space shuttle radar imaging was only the first step in
the remote-sensing barrage that eventually helped locate Ubar. After
scanning the shots from Challenger, Blom and Bob Crippen, a JPL expert
on image processing, decided they needed more detail. Blom and Crippen
had used Landsat satellite photography extensively in their geological
work, using Landsat maps to study vast tracts of Southern California
desert. The Landsat photos offered two big advantages. Unlike the
shuttle imagery, which only delineated narrow strips of land, a single
Landsat map covered about 12,000 square miles. Plus, Landsat photos
work in the infrared part of the spectrum, making it easier to see
subtle terrain features. Blom and Crippen also made use of photos
taken from a French-owned satellite appropriately named SPOT, which
offered three times Landsat's resolution. They combined the Landsat
and SPOT photos, then tinkered with them on the computer screen to
sharpen up the images. The desert floor came to life.

``When we began using the Landsat images, all sorts of tracks started
popping out,'' says Blom. ``We'd look at the tracks and our initial
reaction was, 'Oh, of course these are modern.' Then we'd stare at
them some more and realize that some of the tracks went right under
enormous sand dunes.'' 

Buried under the shifting sands of millenia, what Blom and Crippen
were seeing were tracks beaten by hundreds of thousands of camels
laden with frankincense.

>From the beginning, those involved in the project had known that
remote sensing technology would only take them so far. Shooting from
space, the odds of locating Ubar itself were infinitesimal, akin to
peering over the rim of the Grand Canyon in hopes of sighting a hair
on the canyon floor. But the tracks were different. Arcing across vast
stretches of desert, they could be seen easily. It was not
unreasonable to expect that they led somewhere.

``We realized if we could find and track the old caravan routes, we'd
have a fighting chance of finding the place,'' says Clapp, who
painstakingly pieced together the remote-sensing imagery provided by
Blom and Crippen. ``You wouldn't have a city without a way to get to
it.'' 

Space-age technology did not eliminate the need for old-fashioned
legwork and blind luck, either. In July 1990, the Ubar team -
including Clapp, Blom, and Soutwest Missouri State University
archaeologist Juris Zarins - journeyed to Oman where they poked about
a number of potential sites, then hunkered down and had coffee
virtually on top of the spot where they would discover Ubar the
following year. The location, a tiny village known as Ash Shisr,
aroused their suspicions. Though they had never examined the area via
satellite photos, on the ground they noted a fairly steady water
supply, as well as a curious sinkhole filled with a vast amount of
rubble.  But when the Ubar expedition visited Ash Shisr, the local
sheik engaged most of their time in small talk and coffee.

Doubly ironic, this was not the first near miss. Sixty years earlier,
British explorer Bertram Thomas, also searching for Ubar, had come to
Ash Shisr where he had made note of a ``rude fort'' at the site.
Villagers told Thomas the fort had been built by a local sheik only
300 years earlier. This was true. What they didn't know was the sheik
had built his fort on the rubble of Ubar, using some of Ubar's
original limestone blocks in his own construction.

Still the Ubar team was intrigued enough by its brief visit to Ash
Shisr to order a Landsat image of the area. It arrived in September
1991. A satellite image taken in 1986, it gave Blom and Crippen a
jolt. 

``When we put the image up on the computer, we saw old, old roads all
over the place, all converging on Ash Shisr,'' recalls Blom. ``They
came from everywhere.''

And so, in November 1991, the Ubar expedition returned to Oman, and
Ash Shisr. That initial dig, and ongoing excavations, has unearthed
what they believe to be Ubar. To date they have discovered stone
tools, artifacts, and pottery that appear to date back as far as 3000
BC. Perhaps most convincing, they have uncovered the remains of a
fortress ringed by a two-foot-thick wall and topped at various points
by the crumbled remains of towers that once may have stood thirty feet
tall; a many-towered city built, in all likelihood, to keep
frankincense in and invaders out.

How did this grand creation meet its end? Archaeologist Zarins
believed Ubar was constructed over a large limestone cavern.
Ultimately the weight of the city  and the declining water table
caused the cavern to collapse into a huge sinkhole.

It will probably be another year or two before all the findings have
been unearthed, and the facts presented to the scientific community at
large. Zarins is convinced the city is indeed Ubar, and he thinks
archaeologists would have eventually found it anyway. But, he says,
the ability to peer down from the skies will tremendously aid
archaeology.

``Remote-sensing technology has really opened a whole new era for
archaeology,'' says Dr. Farouk El-Baz, the director of the Center for
Remote Sensing at Boston University. ``Before, archaeologists were too
close to the forest to distinguish the trees. Remote sensing has added
a kind of three-dimensional eye to the archaeologist's view.''

El-Baz expects even more exciting discoveries in the future, as
scientists develop more sophisticated instruments and methodologies
for scouring the earth's past. ``We're really at the dawn of using
this high-tech equipment for the investigation of the human remains of
the past,'' he says.

Blom, too, is convinced that remote sensing will lead to other finds,
though its scope will be more limited than it was in the ideal
conditions provided by the Sahara. Apparently, Blom and El-Baz aren't
the only ones excited by remote sensing's possibilities. Not long ago,
Blom received a letter from a group working in Iran. Though the
details were vague, the suggestion was familiar.

Blom smiles.

``I'm not sure exactly what they were looking for,'' he says. ``The
letter I got said a similar civilization may have existed ...''

			      ****



California-based freelance writer Ken Alpine's work has appeared in
Sports Illustrated and other magazines.
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