07-08-2025
Nicholas Clapp, 89, Dies; ‘Real-Life Indiana Jones' Pursued a Lost City
Nicholas Clapp, a documentary filmmaker and adventurer who was called 'a real-life Indiana Jones' for his consuming but inconclusive quest to find a lost city of ancient Arabia known as Atlantis of the Sands, died on July 30 at his home in Borrego Springs, Calif., northeast of San Diego. He was 89.
His daughter Cristina Clapp said the cause was complications of a stroke.
In 1981, Mr. Clapp wandered into a Los Angeles bookshop looking for a reason to return to the Arabian desert, where he had recently worked on a documentary in Oman about an endangered antelope species called the oryx.
Browsing, he came across a 1932 travelogue by the British explorer Bertram Thomas, 'Arabian Felix: Across the Empty Quarter of Arabia.' The book told of Bedouin guides mentioning a road to a legendary city called Ubar. (Although T.E. Lawrence, the British Army officer and archaeologist, often gets the credit, Mr. Thomas is considered by many to be the first to have referred to Ubar as Atlantis of the Sands.)
The Quran refers to a mythic place named Iram, which Mr. Clapp believed was 'one and the same' as Ubar, though there was not a scholarly consensus.
It described Iram as a 'many-columned city' whose 'like has not been built upon the entire land' — a place that was gloriously rich but sinful and had been destroyed by divine wrath. 'The Arabian Nights' also mentions the columns of Iram and the city's calamitous destruction.
For decades, Western adventurers had sought in vain to find the fabled city. It was believed to have been a trading post along camel routes that, thousands of years earlier, had been an avenue for transporting frankincense, whose resin was prized as a fragrance and a substance used in embalming.
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