Page 162 - The Tigris Expedition

To Diltnun, the Land of Noah
harvest dates or till the land. With the money that poured in from
development areas one could buy the dates, fruits and vegetables.
The city markets and shop windows excelled in fresh and colourful
garden products. Flown in from three continents, however. And as
modest dwellings and tall palms fell before the mechanical shovel,
modern housing area and suburban industry moved across the
green fields ever closer to the edge of the barren desert that today
dominates the island. We quickly reached this open wasteland.
‘This is Dilmun,’ said Bibby and pointed with his pipe towards a
landscape of giant pimples which stretched like a choppy sea of
fossil wave-tops to the horizon and beyond. ‘You can see why Peter
Glob and I were tempted to come here and start digging.’
Prehistoric tombs. Burial mounds. According to the estimates
there were supposed to be about one hundred thousand such
man-made mounds on Bahrain. This was the largest prehistoric
cemetery in the world. On this island there had been more to cope
with than Bibby alone could handle, so over eighty archaeologists
of half a dozen nationalities, but most of them Danes, and several
hundred workmen from almost every Arab land had worked with
him. Their first effort had been distressingly fruitless: not one of the
numerous tombs opened had been spared by ancient grave-robbers.
Apparently every one had been dug and plundered, an indication
that their stone-lined burial chambers had contained more than
withering human bones. All that had been left for the archaeologists
were bones, the shell of an ostrich egg, potsherds, a couple of
copper spearheads and fragments of a copper mirror. These tombs
had evidently belonged to people who believed in a life after death
and therefore left personal treasures and other funerary gifts in the
grave for the deceased to use in his after-life.
The tombs varied greatly in magnitude. We first came to an area
named Ali, where a large cluster of them exceeded the pyramids of
Egypt in number and compared favourably in size with a
medium-large Mesopotamian pyramid. Arab houses of one, two
or even three floors, were built between them and were com-

19. Under the sands of Bahrain Danish archaeologists have dis­
covered a long-lost port city with walled harbour basin dating back
to Sumerian times.
20. The quarried and beautifully fitted stones of a mini-ziggurat and
associated sacred well on Bahrain were of a kind of rock unknown on
this island and hence brought by prehistoric mariners in Sumerian
times.

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