A very strange and morbidly enchanted city appears in several stories of the Arabian Nights and the Qur’an, and goes by the name of Iram (or Irem.) In the Qur’an, God repeatedly warns us to abide by his word, or the same fate may befall us as happened to the tribe of ’Ad, for whom Irem was their capital city.
"Hast thou not seen how thy Lord dealt with Ad, at Irem adorned with pillars, whose like have not been reared in these lands!"
This very city appears in several tales of the Nights that concern a once wealthy city whose proud inhabitants, exemplified by their King Shaddad, have either died or been turned into stone; and remain surrounded by their wealth.
Historians and travellers have noted that another set of tales told by the Bedouin about a city called Ubar are very similar to those told about Iram. Like Iram, Ubar was supposed to have been a city of the descendants of Ad and it had attained a substantial status in local mythology. Towards the end of his life T.E Lawrence expressed great interest in an attempt to find it, and he tried to urge the British air ministry to route the maiden voyage of the R101 airship over the Arabian empty quarter en route for India. Several attempts were made to find the city, including one by Bertram Sidney Thomas who dubbed Ubar "the Atlantis of the Sands".
It was documentary film-maker Nicholas Clapp who, coming to the conclusion that the cities of Ubar and Iram were one and the same, organised two expeditions containing people of various skills, including the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes, leading to the successful discovery of Ubar in 1992. They located Ubar in the central southern part of the Arabian peninsula in Oman; an area known more recently as the site of a remote water-hole called Shisur. Clapp and Fiennes have both published books on the subject.