Page 55 - Life & Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (Curtis E Larsen)

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Sheep and goat remains from the upper component at al-Markh suggest
that herding of domestic animals was an important part of the subsistence pattern
at that time. There is less reason to suggest an agricultural component to the
overall resource base. Sickle blades may point to the cutting of wild grasses or
reeds in the late fourth millennium, but the presence of late third millennium
pottery near the Group D-'Ubaid sites suggests these artifacts are of later date.
No strong evidence for Uruk, Jemdet Nasr, or Early Dynastic occupations has been
found on Bahrain, leaving an apparent pause in cultural interaction with
Mesopotamia during much of the fourth and early third millennia B.C. This is
surprising in light of recent descriptions of Uruk and Early Dynastic pottery in
eastern Arabia by Adams et al. (1977) and Piesinger (1983).

Early Dilmun

The beginning of the historic era on Bahrain is somewhat easier to describe if not
to identify with certainty through archeological means. Apart from such early
excavators as Bent (1890), on the one hand, who saw Bahrain as the ancestral home
of the Phoenecians, and MacKay (1929), on the other, who considered the island to
be nothing more than a necropolis for people living on the Arabian coast, modern
researchers have presented a great amount of evidence to link both the island and
the adjacent coast to the oft-mentioned third-millennium B.C. land of Dilmun.
Rawlinson (1880) presented this idea after translating an Old Babylonian cuneiform
inscription recovered from Bahrain by Durand (1880), which mentioned a palace for
Rimum, a servant of the god Inzak and a man of the tribe of Agarum. Inzak is
mentioned in Sumerian sources as the son of Enki and husband to Ninsikil, the
tutelary god of Dilmun (Kramer 1963). Rawlinson consequently suggested a
connection between Inzak, Dilmun, and Bahrain. Burrows (1928) added support to
Rawlinson's argument based upon additional textual evidence. He considered
Dilmun to cover the entire coastal area from Iraq to Oman, just as the Arabs
considered al-Bahrain to occupy a similar area. As one form of evidence, Burrows
relied upon Langdon's translation of the Sumerian paradise myths, which related
the dieties Enki and Ninhursag with the occurrence of freshwater springs in