Irem_ A Lost City of Giants, Djinn or Nephilim_ (Documentary)

Once upon a time, in the deserts of the Gulf, between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, there existed a city that mysteriously disappeared along with its every inhabitant. Within this lost city, legends say the djinn communed with humans, while religion says real giants called this place home. Today, deep beneath the sands of the empty quarter, this lost city of Iram has now become known as the Atlantis of the Sands, and its reputation is evil. Mentioned in the Holy Quran, due to its practice of idolatry, and even in popular science fictions where the novelist H.P. Lovecraft stated that it is the birth of the place of the cult of Cthulhu, a demonic deity from deep space. Within the Islamic faith, this kingdom is best known for being an ancient metropolis of towering pillars inhabited by a race of giants, who are both intellectually and physically superior to regular humans in every way. But with their power came great arrogance, and with that the wrath of God and their eventual destruction. In the 21st century, could evidence of this city and its giants still exist? Or is something more alien hidden there and across the Arabian Peninsula? In the previous episode of Mysterious Middle East, we looked at the origins of H.P. Lovecraft's fictional book, the Necronomicon. It is in the city of Iran, where this dark text on the magic is said to have had its genesis, before being put into book form in Syria. The dark gothic nature of Lovecraft's work that has been so skillfully reflected in the artworks of H.R. Giger and H.R. Hegel, Isdilisko Piskinski, or however this guy's name is pronounced, have encapsulated what the city of Iran has become. A city of death, decay, and evil. In Lovecraft's work, his doomed city is connected to a race of lizard people, and the home to the cult of Cthulhu, an old one. However, he also says that this is all entirely fictional entertainment, and shouldn't be taken seriously, at all, full stop. Unfortunately, there are some fans and followers of Lovecraft, who do take his work as fact, and believe that he was disguising a dark truth of our world, as palatable fictional entertainment for the masses. In the 2007 book, Secret Societies, conspiracy theorist Philip Gardner states that occult practices in Iran did take place there, and were then put into fictional form in Lovecraft's work. Five years later, in Bob Kern's Lost Lands, Forgotten Realms, a supposedly non-fictional examination of lost civilizations, he says Some traditions say that Iran was built by the jinn themselves, before the time of Adam, and was later inhabited by men. This tradition stems from the name, Iran of the Pillars, the ancient Arabic word for pillar, corresponding to another meaning, namely, the old one. The name, therefore, was a city of the old ones, that is, the jinn. Philip Gardner also believes that the city of Iran is connected to the Watchers. According to Christianity, in the apocryphal book of Enoch, the Watchers were giant angels who were dispatched to Earth to watch over humans. They are also known as the Nephilim Giants among some Christian circles, and aliens in other circles. Whatever they are, according to mythology, these species began to desire human women and eventually a great number of them defected to permanently settle on Earth and procreate with humans. Although such a concept of angels behaving like this is not found in Islam, in some Arabian folklore, the Pillars of Iran seem to have become associated with mythical beings similar to the Watchers, who existed before the Great Flood. The Arab historian, geographer, and traveler, al-Mas'ud, in his book Akhbar al-Zaman, even suggested that some early pre-Islamic Arabs believed that the people of Ad On a side point, please note that this Akhbar al-Zaman is not to be confused with a different book of the same name that dealt with ritualistic magic. For more information about that book, see the previous episode about the Arabian Necronomicon. A link can be found in the below description box. So does the city of Iran even exist? And could it be home to the alien giants? For the answer, we need to go back to the 1970s Syria. In 1973, archaeologists at the site of the ancient city of Ilba in Syria, uncovered the largest collection of cuneiform tablets assembled till that time. The library discovered in Ilba contained writings that are more than 4,000 years older than all the other tablets combined from other sites across the country, and shed some light on the Sumerian, Parthian, Akkadian, and other pre-Islamic empires of the including one nation called Iram, a lost legendary city that is today believed to be buried under al-Rub' al-Khali, otherwise known as the Empty Quarter, an extremely vast stretch of hostile desert spanning the borders of Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, and Yemen. These giants who lived in Iram were known as the Arabian tribe of Aad, while under the rulership of Shaddad bin Aad, were cursed by God. The city goes by several other names, most famously Ubar, and in contemporary fiction, the name The City. Spoken about several times in the Quran, according to the Islamic traditions, its inhabitants were oversized humans that were large enough to uproot trees with their bare hands, and intelligent enough to build a city composed of large buildings, spires, and pillars that reached to the sky, a technological feat far beyond the rest of Arabia at that time. According to some fringe historians, Shaddad bin Aad at one time even brutally conquered the entire Arabian peninsula in addition to Iraq, but probably because of this act, in addition to their idolatry and arrogance, Allah wiped them and their city off the face of the earth, as though they never existed via a huge sandstorm. Also mentioned in the 1001 Arabian Nights, archaeologists and historians believe that Iram was most likely established around 3000 BC, before being lost in a cataclysmic event, but it has only been in the past 80 years where a sudden interest in its location has arisen. In 1930, the explorer Bertram Thomas was told by local Saudi Bedouin that a once rich, beautiful, but now lost city might be found beneath the sands in an area called Ramli Cha'it. His associate T.E. Lawrence, also known as the Lawrence of Arabia, became interested in the city and famously nicknamed it the Atlantis of the Sands, had devised a plan to search for it himself before dying in an accident in 1935. Over the next decade and a half, interest in the city persisted but without any officially documented sightings. However, in 1948, a geological party from Petroleum Development Ltd, who also became lost in the area, claimed to have accidentally found a massive wall in an ancient fort or citadel in Dhofar, Oman, as well as a cave entrance beneath it leading down into, and I quote, the darkness of the earth. Unfortunately, they simply made a note of the discovery and moved on. It was not until 1992, using satellite images, that solid tangible proof for the lost city of giants was found beneath the desert on the edge of Oman. An excavation of was headed by the amateur archaeologist Nicholas Clapp, the man who made the initial discovery after studying images captured by NASA. Although what he initially found did not equal a sprawling metropolis of ancient buildings, Clapp did find a mysterious fortress that composed of eight heavy limestone walls, measuring 10 to 12 feet high and about 60 feet long, and four immense towers, each 10 feet in diameter and 30 feet tall. However, could this really be a remnant of the lost city of Iram? Although Clapp was convinced that this was the city, his critics noted that this archaeological site lacked the scale of the city described in the Quran and local folklore. This was not a city of pillars as described. According to some skeptics, maybe he had found the city that inspired the story of Iram, but not Iram itself. We mentioned earlier that the city also went by the name of Ubar. Some academics believe that this could have actually been an entire separate city from Iram. Therefore, the city Clapp had discovered could have been Ubar and not Iram. Earlier we mentioned the ancient ones, or the old ones as products of H.P. Lovecraft's imagination. Recently, there has been renewed interest in the archaeological evidence of people, or beings known as the Old Men, that were discovered right across the Arabian Peninsula. In 2004, the Saudi archaeologist Dr. Abdalal Saeed made a discovery of three-foot high stone walls that appeared extremely ancient in origin. Four years later, satellite photos revealed that 400 stone enclosures made up of these three-foot high stone walls can be seen stretching for hundreds of kilometers at intermediate points, therefore making it hard to see that they are part of a larger pattern that some believe may be supernatural in origin. Between 2015 and 2017, the international media began to report on these archaeological anomalies, where it was revealed that more were originally discovered in the neighboring Kingdom of Jordan in 1927, and were nicknamed by the local Bedouins as the Works of the Old Men, a phrase eerily similar to the so-called Old Ones or Ancient Ones in Lovecraft's work, and thus could have been a source of inspiration for him. Across the Arabian Peninsula, thousands of stone structures that form low geometric patterns have recently become more visible due to Google Maps and Google Earth, with archaeologists finding geoglyph patterns dating back some 9,000 years, making them some of the oldest geoglyphs found on the planet. Although the exact purpose of the glyphs is uncertain, research indicates that some may be related to astrology, while others could have been cemeteries. Others may be connected to large-scale farming, while most simply remain a complete anomaly. Ancient astronaut theorists who believe that aliens visited Earth hundreds of thousands of years ago argue that the height of these stones are simply too short in height for farming, therefore incapable of hurting any animals. Furthermore, the strange pattern that they make which can be only seen from high altitude suggests that these may be a form of communication with extraterrestrials. Another connection to aliens, or at least a pre-human race of people that may have been giants, can be found in the 14th century book Al-Khitat, written by the Egyptian-Arab historian Al-Maqrizi. Here he referred to one scholarly opinion that stated that Egyptians believed that the pyramids themselves had been built by Shaddad bin Aad. Although this was not Al-Maqrizi's opinion himself, this link between ancient Egypt and giants is just one of the many theories that have existed over the last couple of thousand of years. And today, in the 21st century, many believe that these giants could have been alien in origin, and could even be responsible for the strange markings found across the Arabian Peninsula. Whatever the case may be, local folklore and modern mythology will continue to blur the lines between fantasy and history. What is your opinion? Have you heard of Iran? Do you believe it existed? And if so, who built it? Giants? Aliens? Djinn? Or just regular humans? Thank you for watching. Many of the older videos on this channel have already been removed from YouTube, but can be found on Facebook. There is a link in the description box below. Please subscribe to my friend The Mysterious Middle East, and hit that notification button. And also, head over to my personal channel where I have uploaded a video giving my personal take on the Mandela Effect. As a skeptic who is affected by it, but at the same time doesn't believe in it.