Wabar and the lost city of Ubar
A legendary city destroyed by fire from heaven, and the craters an explorer found while looking for it.
Key facts
- People and tradition
- Arabia
- Region
- Arabia
- When
- Legend; craters a few hundred years old
The story
Arabian tradition tells of a rich city in the sands, ruled by a proud and wicked king, that was destroyed by God as punishment. In the Qur'an the people of 'Ad and their city Iram 'of the pillars' are destroyed for their arrogance, and in later stories the lost city became known as Ubar or Wabar, buried under the Empty Quarter.
In 1932 the explorer Harry St John Philby crossed the desert in search of it. His Bedouin guides took him to a place they called Wabar, where black glass and lumps of iron lay among the sand. Philby thought he had found the ruins of a volcano, perhaps the fire that destroyed the city.
What science says
What he had found were meteorite craters, made when an iron meteoroid broke up and struck the sand. The black glass is sand melted in the impact, and the iron is the meteorite. The craters are probably only a few hundred to a few thousand years old. The legend of Ubar is much older, so the craters cannot be the city's destruction, but it is easy to see why a field of black glass in the desert became linked with a tale of fire from heaven.
Did you know?
In the 1990s, remains of an ancient trading settlement in Oman were proposed as the real Ubar, far from the Wabar craters.
An iron mass of about 2.2 tonnes was found at Wabar in 1965.