Page 118 - The Tigris Expedition

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reached that had foreign gods and a different culture. Only modern
excavations have been able to show us that, when Alexander the
Great came to Failaka over two thousand years ago, the Sumerians
had been there over two thousand years before him.
The Greeks who named the twin-river country and the gulf
islands had never heard of Sumer. Sumer disappeared as a political
entity with the destruction of Ur about 2050 bc. The Sumerians,
their language and their culture were erased from the memory of
man until their buried ruins with cuneiform records were un­
covered and deciphered by archaeologists who thus brought the
Sumerians back to life in the last century.
Yet it was not until our own generation that archaeologists dug
on Failaka Island and found that the continental Sumerians had been
there too. And not only the Sumerians; before them the Akkadians,
and after them the Babylonians. Although the never-ending
sedimentation of silt from the rivers has since Sumerian times
brought Failaka closer to the growing mainland of Iraq by a good
hundred miles, the island had never been beyond the reach of
continental cultures since the days when civilisation was first
established in Mesopotamia.
I had read about Failaka for the first time in a book by the
British-born archaeologist, Geoffrey Bibby. He described how he
and his Danish colleagues had dug up large numbers of potsherds
and stamp seals from the many ruins and refuse mounds on the little
island. The seals especially served as unmistakable fingerprints.
They were incised with special symbols and motifs that linked them
to specific areas and epochs of the outside world.
Most of these finds differed from those of nearby Mesopotamia.
Nothing linked them to mainland Kuwait, which was extremely
poor in archaeological remains. But an impressive number of the
Failaka remains belonged to a lost civilisation that flourished on the
island of Bahrain about four thousand years ago. There seemed to
have been an intimate seaway contact between these two prehis­
toric island cultures 250 miles apart.
Bibby had been field director of a Danish archaeological ex­
pedition to Bahrain. They brought to light hitherto unknown
harbour-cities and temples that rivalled those of Egypt and Sumer
in antiquity. Their excavations had convinced Bibby and most
other scientists that Bahrain, and not Failaka, had been the Dilmun
of Sumerian records. But Bibby had begun to speculate as to
whether Dilmun could not have been an extensive maritime empire
that embraced the whole island area from Bahrain to Failaka.
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