Opar (fictional City)

Opar (fictional City)

Opar is a fictional lost city in Edgar Rice Burroughs's series of Tarzan novels.

Burroughs may have taken the name from the Biblical reference to Ophir, whence King Solomon supposedly received a cargo of "gold, silver, sandalwood, precious stones, ivory, apes and peacocks" every three years, via the Red Sea, which was presumably somewhere in Africa, but of which hardly anything else is known.

The city first appeared in the second Tarzan novel, The Return of Tarzan (1913), and was revisited in the fifth, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar (1916), the ninth, Tarzan and the Golden Lion (1923), and the fourteenth, Tarzan the Invincible (1930). Exiles from Opar also appear in Burroughs' juvenile story "Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins, with Jad-Bal-Ja, the Golden Lion" (1936, later published as the second part of Tarzan and the Tarzan Twins in 1963). The events of this story occur between those of Lion and Invincible.