Archaeological sites Oman

The port and walled city of Sumhuram were founded in the 3rd century BC. In the stone, on the bronze, its occupants left moving traces of the extinct Sudarabic language, which is now extinct. Established to control the incense trade in Dhofar, the site is identified in the 1st century as the Moscha Limen of the Eritrean Sea Journey, where Indian sailors who brought cotton cloth, corn and oil in exchange for incense spent the winter, waiting for the favourable monsoon winds to return home. During the first and second centuries AD, the port was the heart of the merchant settlement on this coast, enriched by its close links with the powerful Shabwa of Hadramaut in Yemen. At that time, it was a small walled town, two metres wide, covering about 1 hectare on a natural eminence. The decline began in the first half of the 4th century and ended at the end of the century.

On the spot, one discovers foundations that were once supposed to support a palace protected by walls and decorated with grandiose staircases, and which undoubtedly housed large incense storage stores. Excavations have revealed coins with Alexander's profile, earthenware jars, conservation jars (some of them in Roman style), bronze objects and a large incense burner. The precious resinous gum was transported by nomadic caravans from the interior and was shipped to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and India. In exchange, ships loaded with products from Asia docked.

One can move freely in these ruins rustled with all the noise of history, without forgetting, near the car park on the right, to also follow the path that leads to a small temple near the water - a construction quite recently identified without it being possible to know with certainty which cult was practised there.

Shaped and occupied for 800 years, the site overlooks the beautiful Rori Lagoon , separated from the sea by a sandbank during the dry season and submerged during the monsoon. One could not talk about Khor Rori without mentioning the dozens of camels that come here, attracted by its greenery and freshness, as well as the numerous birds. The lagoon is indeed a nature reserve which serves as a habitat for more than a hundred species of birds including pelicans, storks, spoonbills, pink flamingos, ibis, grebes, cormorants, etc.. Fed by the wadi Darbat, it is also home to several varieties of fish and plants.

After the heatstroke of the visit and the fifteen minutes that one will devote to the small museum located 300 meters from the site, it will be time to go to the sea. From the museum car park, take the track towards the mouth of the river. Depending on the capacity of your vehicle, you will approach more or less and finish on foot to reach one of the most beautiful beaches of the sultanate: 200 metres of virgin sand between the sandstone jaws that partially block the entrance to the lagoon. To your left, the rocky spur is called Al Hamr Al Sharqiya and archaeologists have found the remains of a 700-metre long defensive wall punctuated by towers facing the sea, testimony to a late occupation between the 8th and 10th centuries, at a time when the city of incense was long since abandoned. In the heart of this site inhabited by ghosts, you will take a masterful bath!

Like those of Bat, the tombs of Zukait bear witness to the expansion of an ancient civilization present on Omani territory as early as 3000 BC. Overlooking the village, the site has several cylindrical towers of tightly packed stones without mortar, each pierced by an entrance and topped by a roof composed of flat stones (beehive tombs). The archaeological missions carried out in the immediate vicinity testify to the ancient existence of a vast Hafit-style necropolis, composed of hundreds of burials similar to those of Zukait.

Unlike the remains of the ancient port cities of Al Balid (5 kilometers from downtown Salalah) and Sumhuran (about 30 kilometers away), both of which are quickly accessible by car, the site of Shisr, found about 180 kilometers north in the sands of the Rub al-Khali, is a semi-expedition in its own right that requires a 4x4, a good GPS.. and, if possible, a certain amount of imagination, or a sufficiently developed fantasy to virtually recompose, from a handful of remains, what the city could have been.

In the heart of the great emptiness, along the roads and tracks, the access road is, in itself, a powerful experience. We know that there is nothing visible or almost on the ground, but we know that there is something underneath: more than 2 000 years of history, discovered almost by chance at the beginning of the Nineties while the British explorer Ranulph Fiennes excavates the ruins of a fortification of the XVIth century. Photos taken in 1983 by the Columbia spacecraft clearly showed several traces of destroyed cities all along the incense route. Researchers then used data from satellites equipped with ground-penetrating radar and NASA's Landsat, as well as the Spot satellite, to identify the ancient camel routes and their points of convergence. Approaching the goal without convincing everyone, documentary filmmaker Nicholas Clapp made the front page of the Times and published The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands. It is this same Nicholas Clapp who, during the excavations, put forward the idea that the destruction and thus the end of the city would have been caused by the repeated work of the underground water table which would have ended up generating the collapse of the limestone cavities on which the fortress had been built.

The archaeological remains are in fact located near a large dome of collapsed limestone, sheltering a cave where a perpetual spring flows. According to the Omani Antiquities Department, the site covers a total area of 0.36 hectares. A wall 90 cm thick, in the shape of an irregular pentagon, encircles a central complex on a rocky outcrop. It is reinforced at regular intervals by short buttresses of similar dimensions. The remains of two towers at the northeast and southwest corners, which are part of the original construction, can also be seen, as well as two horseshoe-shaped towers that were incorporated later. The wall has partly disappeared due to the collapse of the underlying limestone. Wall stumps indicate that the enclosure was divided into two parts, the smaller of which was located in the northwest corner. It was dominated by a large building, oriented towards the points of the compass, according to what may be a tradition in southern Arabia. This building underwent several alterations and modifications in the Middle Ages, which would suggest that the site was occupied until the 14th century. The larger enclosure has not been archaeologically studied, but traces of several structures are discernible.

Archaeologists associate these remains with the ancient city of Ubar, which refers to the city mentioned in the Qur'an as Iram, although its exact identity is unknown. It is also mentioned in two stories from the Arabian Nights which describe it as a place of great splendor, adorned with precious materials and surrounded by lush gardens... According to the legend, God decided to punish the inhabitants of Ubar, whose wealth had become such that it encouraged them to a depraved lifestyle, and made the city disappear under the sand. At the time of its splendor, in the heart of the incense trade, all the caravan routes converged there. Unearthed from the sand, the fortress reveals little by little its mysteries. It seems to have been built around 150 BC. Numerous objects were found near the site: tools, pottery, ceramics, an incense burner, some jewels, a thousand-year-old soapstone chess set, etc. So many secrets still... The diversity of their origins attests to the commercial vocation of the region and its relations with outside peoples: Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans. The study of these vestiges seems to show however that the site was known well before the construction of the city and probably occupied more than 5000 BC. This theory deserves respect when we know that the inhabitants of Dhofar started to exploit incense more than 8,000 years ago. The trade of this precious gum, transported from Oman to Sumer, Bahrain and Iraq by boat, played a very important role in the relations between the regions of the Arab world and the civilizations of Asia and Africa.

Since 1995, the site of Ubar is listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The entrance is free and the visit can be completed by the visit of the museum, where the objects discovered near the fortress are exposed. For more information and excitement, read Fiennes' gripping account, Atlantis of the Sands: The Search for the Lost City of Ubar.

The question of whether the site is worth the trip from Salalah does not arise, as this place is the product of its own legend, a concentrate of dreams of lost cities and the object of desire of every explorer.

Al-Manzifat is an ancient city surrounded by a defensive wall. Although only ruins remain, they look good and retain some semblance of vaults decorated with oriental motifs and several two-storey houses with elaborate window openings. These dwellings form the outline of the ancient city of the Zanzibar Moguls. Given the narrowness of some of the narrow streets, leave the car behind and stroll along them, admiring the mud-brick watchtowers at the top of the hills.