Page 157 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
tombs buried in the sand of this island, testifying to merchant
activity and maritime trade with remote countries more than five
thousand years ago.
Bibby had flown down from Denmark when lie learnt that we
were heading for Bahrain. He wanted to get a personal impression
of a ship built after the earliest type known in the gulf area. He
reminded me laughingly that I had followed his advice. Long ago,
in a review of my book on the Ra expeditions for the New York
Times, he had challenged me to test a Mesopotamian reed-ship next.
He reminded us of Captain Igor by the cheerful way he stepped on
to our deck and enjoyed the unusual craft. Bibby’s interest was
deeply rooted in his own work. His discoveries on Bahrain proved
that seafaring had been a basic element in human society since the
very beginning of civilisation. He had done more than anyone else
to demonstrate that Bahrain was identical with the distant trading
centre of Dilmun, recorded in ancient Mesopotamian inscriptions.
He repaid his visit to our ma-gur by lecturing to the Tigris crew on
the island’s prehistory. And during the next couple of weeks he
took us to the sites of his main excavations.
When Geoffrey Bibby in his picturesque turban came to fetch us
the following day, and we drove in two cars away from the
Manama city area and the asry docks, we plunged with space-craft
velocity back through five thousand years of human history. The
world’s biggest in ships and aeroplanes and most expensive in
luxury hotels were quickly exchanged for a few modest Arab
dwellings of braided palm-leaves and sun-baked bricks, all ready to
vanish with the bulldozer’s shovel. Then we passed through a
similarly doomed plantation of beheaded date palms, resembling a
graveyard of telephone posts. With their majestic crowns removed
and their roots dug free, the dying palm-trunks seemed to have a
message for the hurrying passer-by; the oil pumps may draw their
sap from the ground for several decades, but for thousands of years,
since the days of Dilmun, it had been the roots of the date palms that
drew the sap that had fed the nation. With oil and industry a better
bargain-than agriculture, it seemed as if no one on Bahrain cared to

17. The archaeologist Geoffrey Bibby shows the author a survival
from Bahrain’s antiquity, the boat is made from palm stalks and
Toru uses the same material to repair the bow of Tigris.
18. Prehistoric burial mounds on Bahrain are estimated to number
one hundred thousand; a few arc as big as pyramids and lined with
dressed stones as shown by Geoffrey Bibby.
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