Atlantis of the Sands: Evidence of a

Previous Civilization in Arabia

Mark Carlotto (mark@carlotto.us)

ABSTRACT

Could climate changes caused by pole shifts explain the rise and fall of ancient civilizations in
certain parts of the world? We explore this possibility in Southern Arabia, where evidence
supports the existence of a previous civilization tens of thousands of years ago in what is now
one of the most inhospitable places in the world.

Introduction
The Arabia Desert, the largest in Asia, and the fifth largest in the world, occupies most of the
Arabian Peninsula. In the south, between Yemen and Oman, lies the Rub’al Khali (The Empty
Quarter), one of the most extreme environments on earth. In the second century BCE, the
Egyptian astronomer, cartographer, and philosopher Claudius Ptolemy drew the first map of this
region, showing mountains, rivers, and cities (Figure 1). One of these cities, Mar’ib, Mariama in
Ptolemy’s map (Brice 1973), was the capital of the ancient kingdom of Saba - the legendary land
of Sheba, whose queen is mentioned in the Bible:

When the queen of Sheba heard about the fame of Solomon and his relationship to the Lord, she
came to test Solomon with hard questions. Arriving at Jerusalem with a very great caravan—with
camels carrying spices, large quantities of gold, and precious stones—she came to Solomon and
talked with him about all that she had on her mind. [1 Kings 10:1-3]

Another city, Shabwa (Sabbatha), was the capital of the Hadhramaut. The Quran [46:21] tells us
that the tribe of ‘Ad lived in the al-Ahqaf – the sand dunes in the southern part of the Arabian
Peninsula. The late 19th-century Muslin scholar Abdullah Yusuf Ali, defines this region as
“extending from Umman at the mouth of the Persian Gulf to Hadhramaut and Yemen at the
southern end of the Red Sea.” He describes its people as being tall in stature and great builders
irrigating their land with canals (Ali 1934). According to the Quran [89:6-13] 1

Did you not see how your Lord dealt with ‘Ad — the people of Iram—with their
great stature, unmatched in any other land; and Thamûd who carved their
homes into the rocks in the Stone Valley; and the Pharaoh of mighty structures?

1
http://quran.com

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 They all transgressed throughout the land, spreading much corruption there. So
your Lord unleashed on them a scourge of punishment.

The punishment is described in Book 29, Verse 40:

So We seized each people for their sin: against some of them We sent a storm
of stones, some were overtaken by a mighty blast, some We caused the earth
to swallow, and some We drowned. Allah would not have wronged them, but it
was they who wronged themselves.

According to the 12th-century Yemeni historian, Nashwān ibn Saʻīd al-Ḥimyarī, “Wabar is the
name of the land which belonged to 'Ad in the eastern parts of Yemen; to-day it is an untrodden
desert owing to the drying up of its water. There are to be found in it great buildings which the
wind has smothered in sand” (Thomas 1932).

Ptolemy’s map, together with these and other ancient references, inspired 19th-century Western
archaeological expeditions. Bertram Thomas, who crossed the Rab’al Khali in 1930, provides the
first clue about the possible locations of a lost city in Southern Arabia (Thomas 1932):

Suddenly the Arabs … pointed to the ground. ‘“Look, Sahib,” they cried, “here is
the road to Ubar. It was a great city, our fathers have told us, that existed of
old; a city rich in treasure, with date gardens and a fort of red silver [gold?]. It
now lies buried beneath the sands in the Ramlat Shu'ait, some few days to the
north.” Other Arabs on my previous journeys had told me of Ubar, the Atlantis
of the sands, but none could say where it lay. All thought of it had been banished
from my mind when my companions cried their news and pointed to the well-
worn tracks, about a hundred yards in cross section, graven in the plain. They
bore 325°, approximately lat. 18° 45' N., long. 52° 30’ E. on the verge of the
sands.

The British explorer John Philby believed Ubar and Wabar referred to the same place. Roughly
250 miles northwest from Thomas’s location lies Al Hadida, where a year later, Philby set out to
find Wabar. Instead, he found five blackened meteor craters filled with sand and declared, “So
that was Wabar, the city of the wicked king ‘Ad destroyed by fire from heaven” (Edgell 2003).

Figure 2 shows the locations of these and other places discussed in this paper.

Climate Change
How did the rich lands of Sheba, and numerous other places depicted in Ptolemy’s map exist in
what is now a harsh, dry climate? Like the Sahara Desert, which once had a wetter climate,

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different global climate patterns could have made southern Arabia much more habitable
thousands of years ago. According to Thomas (1932)

This tradition of ancient trade routes across what is now an almost prohibitive
barrier of sands should not be lightly dismissed as impossible. South Arabia is
held never to have had an Ice Age, so that when the higher latitudes of the
northern hemisphere lay beneath an ice cap, Arabia was enjoying a pluvial
period, from which epoch date the great gorges draining the coastal mountains,
and the limestone fossils washed down to the edge of the sands. This very
different climate may have long persisted in modified form and made possible
a very early civilisation in this region.

He goes on to say

Another interesting link in the chain of evidence has been established by

zoologists from the distribution of animal life in South Arabia. The animals I
collected in the Qara Mountains have proved to be mainly African or Ethiopic in
affinity; they form an enclave there, for those I collected to north, east and west
have been found to be exclusively Palaearctic. This enclave may well be a relic
of the former animal population of the entire southern part of the peninsula
when India, South Arabia and Africa had a common climate and fauna. Later,
desiccation may have confined this primitive fauna to the Dhufar province,
which alone in Arabia has continued to enjoy a tropical rainfall and flora, thanks
to an adventitious south-west monsoon, while the denuded spaces round about
have come to be re-populated by another group of animals from the north.

Were Mar’ib, Shabwa, and other places in Ptolemy’s map simply towns along ancient caravan
routes as many scholars believe or were they the vestiges of an ancient prehistoric civilization
whose great cities remain to be discovered beneath the sands of the Arabian Desert?

It is clear from satellite imagery that this part of the word has not always been arid. Extensive
and well-developed drainage patterns seen in satellite imagery prove rivers once flowed
throughout a much different landscape. Crassard et al. (2013) present geochronological data
supporting the existence of a paleolake in the Mundafan region at the western edge of the Rub’al
Khali. Lacustrine samples dated using carbon-14 and optically stimulated luminescence indicate
that the paleolake first formed during the Marine Isotope Stage 5, roughly a hundred thousand
years ago. The presence of freshwater mollusks suggests the lake existed over an extended
period of time.

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Climate Zones
The climate depends on temperature and precipitation, which depend in large part on latitude.
The zone of the tropics (tropics of Cancer and Capricorn), which have warm and wet climates
extend 15-25° from the Equator. Dry climates tend to exist 15-35° from the Equator. In the
Northern Hemisphere, this zone is wider than in the Southern Hemisphere. Arabia, together with
northern Africa, lies in a dry belt approximately 20° wide (from 15-35° N). Australia and Southern
Africa lie in a thinner dry belt that is only 15° wide from (20 to 35° S). Temperate climates are on
average 35-50° from the Equator, and polar climates are above 50°.

If Hapgood’s crustal displacement theory is correct, pole shifts would have caused climate zones
across the globe to change in predictable ways (Figure 3). Considering previous estimated pole
locations (Carlotto 2020), if the North Pole were in the Bering Sea, Arabia would have had a
tropical climate 135,000 years ago. Subsequent crustal displacements that shifted the North Pole
to Greenland and then to the Norwegian Sea would have returned Arabia to a dry climate
between 65,000 and 135,000 years ago. During the last North American Ice Age, with the North
Pole in Hudson Bay, Arabia would again have had a tropical climate roughly 15,000 to 65,000
years ago. The distribution of data collected at Mundafan (Figure 4) is consistent with this
pattern.

Timna
Considered to have been the “Indiana Jones” of his time, Wendell Phillips organized excavations
at Timna and Mar’ib, two archaeological sites along the southern border of the Rub’al Khali in
the 1950s (Phillips 1955). Phillips’s journey led his team west from the Hadramawt to Timna, the
capital of the Qataban, which was a prominent Yemeni kingdom in the first millennium BCE. After
three weeks of work at the south gate of the ancient city (Figure 5), excavations revealed “two
massive towers constructed of rough blocks, some as large as eight by two feet.” The masonry
work was good but not smoothly finished, indicating that the gate was built prior to the Qataban
civilization when more polished work was done. Charred wood was found everywhere,
suggesting “Timna had suffered a catastrophic destruction, in which fire played a major part.”
Copies of a Hellenistic lion statue found in the ruins led Phillip’s archaeologist William F. Albright
to date the site to around 150 BCE. However, the presence of structures that were evidently built
before the Qatabans begs the question of when the city was first established.

According to Phillips, “the moon was the chief deity of all the early South Arabian kingdoms -
particularly fitting in that region where the soft light of the moon brought the rest and cool winds
of night as relief from the blinding sun and scorching heat of day.” Although present-day aerial
imagery does not allow detailed measurements of structures within the ancient city, the site
appears to be oriented toward lunar standstills - the extreme directions of moonrise and
moonset (Figure 6). But even more interesting is the alignment of the site to the Bering Sea pole,
as shown in the figure that implies the original site could be more than 100,000 years old.

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Mar’ib
Later, Phillips’ team conducted excavations at Mar’ib, the capital of the kingdom of Saba (Figure
7).

At our first inspection it seemed to us that ten Timnas might easily fit into the
area of Marib. The present Arab village occupied only a small portion of the
ancient city area. Columns, walls, and pillars extended everywhere as far as our
eyes could see, in an endless crescent. At one point, present-day Yemenis had
already dug deep for the beautifully cut Sabean stones from which they had
built their ugly fortress and portions of their houses. They had gone down about
seventy feet through one stratified layer after another. This depth, when
compared with our cut of fifty-one feet at Hajar bin Humeid [near Timna],
suggested that Marib was considerably older than the Qatabanian cities…

One of the team’s first discoveries was at the ancient dam:

Most amazing was the way the great stone walls had been put together. Huge
boulders were so perfectly dressed that they fitted into each other like pieces in
a jigsaw puzzle. We saw no trace of mortar of any kind, yet we looked at
portions of the wall that were more than fifty feet high…

Moving on to the temple area, partially buried limestone pillars over thirty feet tall stood in the
sand. At the conclusion of their work, which was cut short by growing tensions with the local
population, more than thirty feet of sand had been removed, revealing “an ovoid temple about
1,000 feet in circumference, its long diameter being about 375 feet and its short diameter about
250 feet. There was an elaborate and complicated peristyle hall and complex of buildings
terminating in a row of eight tall columns.” The wall of the temple “was about thirteen and a half
feet thick, constructed of perfectly fitted ashlar masonry, with a sand and rubble fill. In places,
the wall was preserved to a height of more than twenty-seven feet above the floor of the
entrance hall. Unfortunately, there was no way of knowing how high it had originally been or
how the top was finished. Portions of the wall displayed variations in workman-ship, indicating
the different contractors or technicians involved and suggesting that the wall had been built over
a long period of time…” Inscriptions revealed the “temple itself was called Awwam, and the god
Ilumquh to whom it was dedicated was the Sabatean version of the moon god common to all
South Arabian religions.”

A large mound-like structure that is part of the ancient city to the northwest of the Awwam
Temple appears to be aligned in the direction of minor lunar standstills. It also appears to be
cardinally aligned relative to the Hudson Bay pole. Both alignments are indicated in Figure 8. The
Temple of Awwam itself is not currently aligned to the sun or moon. However, if the North Pole
were in Hudson Bay, the Awwam Temple would be oriented in directions consistent with solstices

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and lunar standstills relative to the former pole, as shown in Figure 8. That the alignments of the
ancient city and the Awwam Temple both reference the Hudson Bay pole suggest Mar’ib could
be 15,000 to 65,000 years old.

Shabwa
Although Phillips flew over Shabwa, they were unable to excavate there. However, like Mar’ib,
certain structures at Shabwa appear to be aligned to the moon relative to the direction of the
Hudson Bay pole (Figure 9).

Shis’r
One has to wonder if the Temple of Awwam could have been the “Iram of the Pillars” mentioned
in this alternative translation of the Quran [89:6-8]

Have you not considered how your Lord dealt with ʿAad With Iram - who had
lofty pillars, The likes of whom had never been created in the land?

It is generally assumed that Iram was Ubar, or Wabar, the lost city sought by Thomas, Philby, and
more recently by a team guided by Ranulph Fiennes in the 1990s. Fiennes’s life-long search for
Ubar led to the 1991 excavations at Shis’r that are thought by some to be the ruins of the ancient
city of Ubar (Fiennes 1992). Media hype at the time stated that satellite imagery helped the team
locate the site. Although the images do show ancient as well as more recent tracks that seem to
converge at Shis’r, they provided no direct indication of anything beneath the sands. However,
subtle features in an L-band SIR-C radar image (which can penetrate several feet of dry sand)
over the area suggest a possible buried linear structure over five miles in length (Figure 10). The
impression of a linear structure could be the result of a chance alignment of natural features or
be evidence of an artificial construction, perhaps a wall.

What is particularly interesting is that the long dimension of this feature is aligned in the direction
of the Bering Sea pole.

Discussion
Given the historical importance of the moon in South Arabian kingdoms, it seems no coincidence
that structures at Timna and Mar’ib appear to be aligned to the moon. That structures at Shabwa,
Mar’ib, and even possibly Shis’r also appear to reference the moon but at an earlier time, that is,
relative to the Hudson Bay pole, suggest the moon was also important to earlier people who lived
in this part of the world before the last Ice Age.

It is hard to conceive of how Sheba and other ancient kingdoms not only survived but once
prospered in and around the Rub’al Khali unless the climate was much different than it is today.
That Hapgood’s theory can account for climate change in this and other parts of the world and

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for the alignment of ancient structures such as those discussed in this and previous papers whose
orientation is otherwise hard to explain may also be no coincidence.

References
Bertram Thomas (1932) Arabia Felix: Across the Empty Quarter of Arabia.

Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1934) The Holy Qur'an: Text, Translation and Commentary. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holy_Qur%27an:_Text,_Translation_and_Commentary

Wendell Phillips (1955) Qataban and Sheba: Exploring Ancient Kingdoms on the Biblical Spice
Routes of Arabia.

William C. Brice (1973) “The Construction of Ptolemy's Map of South Arabia,” Proceedings of the
Seminar for Arabian Studies, Vol. 4, Cambridge, June 1973, pp. 5-9.
See https://www.jstor.org/stable/41223130

Ranulph Fiennes (1992) Atlantis of the Sands: The Search for the Lost City of Ubar, Bloomsbury.

H. Stewart Edgell (2003) “The myth of the "lost city of the Arabian Sands," Proceedings of the
Seminar for Arabian Studies, Vol. 34, London, 17-19 July 2003, pp. 105-120.
See https://www.jstor.org/stable/41223810

Re m
́ y Crassard, Michael D. Petraglia, Nick A. Drake, Paul Breeze, Bernard Gratuze, Abdullah
Alsharekh, Mounir Arbach, Huw S. Groucutt, Lamya Khalidi, Nils Michelsen, Christian J. Robin,
and Je ŕ e m
́ ie Schiettecatte (2013) “Middle Palaeolithic and Neolithic Occupations around
Mundafan Palaeolake, Saudi Arabia: Implications for Climate Change and Human Dispersals.”
PLoS ONE 8(7): e69665. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0069665.

Mark Carlotto (2020a) “A New Model to Explain the Alignment of Certain Ancient Sites,” Journal
of Scientific Exploration 34(2):209-232. DOI: 10.31275/20201619.

Mark Carlotto (2020b) “Ruins in the ‘Stans: Evidence of a Lost Civilization in Central Asia.”
Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3677452.

Mark Carlotto (2020c) “Revising History (Again?) - Evidence of an Even Older Civilization in India.”
Available at SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3704530.

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3882093

Figure 1 Map from Ptolemy’s Geographia published in 1578. (https://www.wdl.org/en/item/2916)

Figure 2 Places in southern Arabia discussed in this paper. (Google Earth)

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 Current pole

Hudson Bay

Norwegian Sea

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 Greenland pole

Bering Sea pole

Figure 3 Climate zones corresponding to current and previous poles. The red line is the Equator. Orange,
yellow, and green lines are ±20°, ±35°, and ±50° from the Equator and delimit the dry subtropics,
temperate, and polar climate zones.

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 35

30

25

20

15

10

0
0 50 100 150 200

Histogram of dated lacustrine samples at Mundafan from Crassard et al. (2013).

Histogram superimposed on a color-coded chart of previous geographic pole epochs where magenta,
yellow, green, and red denote the hypothesized periods of the Hudson Bay, Norwegian Sea, Greenland,
and Bering Sea poles. The black curve shows sea levels over this period. Arabia would have been in the
tropical zone at the time of the Hudson Bay and Bering Sea poles.

Figure 4 Paleolake data at Mundafan consistent with climate changes resulting from pole shifts.

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 Figure 5 South gate at Timna excavated by Wendell Phillips.

Figure 6 Alignments at Timna. Red/blue lines are current directions of minor lunar standstills. White lines
denote cardinal directions relative to the Bering Sea pole. (Apple Maps)

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Figure 7 Temple of Awwam excavated by Wendell Phillips at Mar’ib.

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Alignments at ancient Mar’ib to minor lunar standstills (red/blue) and cardinal directions relative to Hudson Bay
pole (white).

Temple of Awwam oriented to sun and moon at the time of the Hudson Bay pole.

Figure 8 Alignments at Mar’ib. (Apple Maps)

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 Tempel

Palast

N
0 20 40 60 80 100
m

Figure 9 Alignment of structure at Shabwa to lunar standstills relative to the Hudson Bay pole (top) labeled
“Palast” in a map of French archaeological expedition (bottom). (Apple Maps/Creative Commons2).

2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabwa#/media/File:Shabwa_map.svg

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Figure 10 L band SIR-C synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image acquired over Shis’r in 1994 (top). Linear
feature is to the left of the red line, which is in the direction of the Bering Sea pole. Coregistered false-
colored Landsat-TM image acquired in 1990 (bottom).

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