Nicholas Clapp
Documentary filmmaker who led the 1990s search for Ubar
- Born
- 1936
- Died
- 2025, Borrego Springs, California
- Profession
- Documentary filmmaker and author
- Known for
- Search for the lost city of Ubar, Oman (early 1990s)
- Books
- The Road to Ubar (1998); Sheba (2001)
The American filmmaker who used satellite imagery to search for the lost incense city of Ubar and helped identify a site at Shisr, Oman.
What is Nicholas Clapp known for?
Nicholas Clapp was an American documentary filmmaker and author. In the 1980s he became fascinated by Ubar, a lost trading city of the Arabian frankincense trade, which later tradition linked to Iram of the Pillars, the city the Qur'an says was destroyed with the people of 'Ad.
Clapp organized an expedition that drew on satellite and Space Shuttle radar images, with help from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to trace ancient caravan tracks. The team, which included the archaeologist Juris Zarins and the explorer Ranulph Fiennes, identified a fortified site at Shisr in Oman in the early 1990s as a likely candidate for Ubar. Part of the site had collapsed into a sinkhole.
He told the story in The Road to Ubar (1998). Archaeologists accept Shisr as an important caravan stop, but whether it was 'Ubar' is debated; even Zarins came to see Ubar as the name of a region and people rather than one city, and any link to the Qur'anic Iram is a matter of tradition, not evidence.
He led the search that identified Shisr, Oman, as Ubar, the city linked to Iram of the Pillars.
Mentioned on these pages
- Rabbit hole'Ad and Iram of the Pillars
- PersonJuris Zarins
- PlaceUbar (Shisr)
Sources
- Wikipedia, 'Nicholas Clapp'Reference
- NPR, 'Documentary filmmaker Nicholas Clapp' (April 21, 1998)Reference
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