While not mentioned as such by HPL, some believe Ubar is another name for Irem, the City of Pillars. That’s what inspired this rather obscure design:
Note the many attractive pillars! Available in tees, mugs, stickers and pins.
From Below the Plane of the Ekliptik
While not mentioned as such by HPL, some believe Ubar is another name for Irem, the City of Pillars. That’s what inspired this rather obscure design:
Note the many attractive pillars! Available in tees, mugs, stickers and pins.
Doing a little digging for my annotations: HPL’s “The Nameless City” was published in 1921, and Howard Carter had not yet found KIng Tut’s tomb, so we can’t blame Egyptomaina for the story (which I quite like, incidentally).
The most likely source of inspiration is The Thousand and One (Arabian) Nights. Checking the contents of the English translations, we find a short story about Irem, a long-deserted wealthy metropolis smote by God (shades of The Doom That Came to Sarnath?) and a more obscure story called “The City of Brass” which contains (among other elements) an ‘archaeological’ expedition across the Sahara to find an ancient lost city, a mummified queen and petrified inhabitants.
I present them here, for the interested reader:
“…and there came to the builders’ hands of all these things so great a quantity as may neither be told nor imagined.”
–Payne’s translation, The City of Irem
Earlier, the narrator counted one thousand trillion (people) (using 100K x 100K x 100K), so this number must have been pretty high indeed :)