05 February 2003 - Stepping back in history...

But not to terribly far. More on that later in today's update.

Our first real day off on the trip. We had planned on heading out to the desert to do some skiing, and living of the bedouin life. But, in typical journalistic fashion, we lated till the last minute to make our plans, and our plans didn't work out. So we piled into the trucks and headed north to the settlement of Al Zubara.

We were under the impression that Al Zubara was an old fort, near a much older city, that had been built to defend Qatar from the British, and later the Bahrainis. After a few wrong turns, and a stop to chat with a camel herder, we arrived at the fort of Al Zubara. The fort commands a long, flat beachline at the north-west tip of Qatar. Climbing its ramparts, and looking through the gun holes, I immagined the enemy storming the beachhead, swarming towards the fort. Inside some of the rooms are a crude sort of museum. A few coins, a few broken pots, a few pictures of the fort being built...

Wait a second here. I thought this was some ancient bastion of Arab strength against the west and competing tribes and traders. Turns out the fort was acutally built around 1933 to defend against the Bahrainis. Well, so much for my great visions of turbaned troops charging the shores, wave after wave running from their dhows, scimitars waving in every direction.

On to the ancient city nearby. We drive a short distance towards a group of tents. This is the old Al Zubara, home once to a city of 15,000 prosperous traders, pearlers, and fishermen. We drive, quite literally, over the city wall to get to the tents. There we meet the director of the dig, who gives us a tour. The city occupied a small peninsula here, just west of the fort. Protected by an encircling wall featuring 21 towers, the city is now crumbled and largely covered by the sand. Houses, stores, stalls, are all now but piles of rocks and stones. What has been excevated is now haphazardly put back together with new stones and cement.

In the older area they are working now, the focus is on digging out pots and coins. We ask how far back this once great city goes. It is hard to say, we are told, but the best guess is maybe the 18th century. Huh? Only 300 years ago? Yup. I guess this is what qualifies as ancient here.

And it makes sense, in a way. Like the sands that have blown over Al Zubara, until recently the people of the gulf have largely been on the move. Their transient life, the harshness of the environment, the scarcity of resources led them to move from place to place searching for the next oasis, the next trade. Time, technology, and oil have now changed all of that. Water is no longer needed from an oasis or spring; it is distilled on a massive scale from the ocean. Fresh fruit, vegetables, and meats about - from field watered by the same distillers and flown in from abroad. This good life now led by the Arab is only possible with the great sums of money pumped every day out of the ground.

Here at Al Zubara, we are reminded of the power of that oil. For all of the wonderful things that it has brought to Qatar, we can here also see the weapon that oil can be. The expansive tidal flat is ringed by a virtual parking lot, a thick crust of tar laid down by the millions of crude released into the Gulf by Saddam a decade ago.

Click here for Qatar Part 4

a camel herder tending the beasts	Ben meets Camel	Goat man meets Camel man	the fort at Al Zubara
gun holes in the rampart	stairway to the parapet	looking from one of the rooms of the fort	view from a gun hole to the beach
the fort's courtyard	The Fox Team storms the fort	The ruins of Al Zubara	the head of the dig explains their work
Mike Butler, ancient Qatari	Ben at the ruins	showing us one of the artefacts from the dig	oil slick on the Al Zubara beach, courtesy Saddam Hussein