Page 164 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilmun, the Land of Noah

tion or even decadence. In Peru the famous Inca culture never
attained the height of its Tiahuanaco or Mochica predecessors,
cither in art or in magnitude of architecture. And now one was left
with a similar impression on visiting the Ali cemetery.
I had seen groups of burial mounds and prehistoric cemeteries in
many parts of the world, but nothing like this. There was just
nothing like it. And from now on Bibby did not have to argue to
convince me that Bahrain was Dilmun.
One of his premises had been that Dilmun was to the Sumerians a
holy land, a land blessed by the gods who gave it to mankind after
the flood. Dilmun was the place where man, in the story of
Ziusudra, the Hebrew Noah, was given eternal life. The symbolic
meaning is probably that Ziusudra’s ‘seeds’ were given eternal life
while all other men drowned. In the oldest of all known epics, King
Gilgamesh of Uruk, the Biblical Erek, sailed to Dilmun in an effort
to seek the flower of eternal life in the sacred home of his fore­
fathers. A Sumerian poem says:

The land of Dilmun is holy, the land of Dilmun is pure,
the land of Dilmun is clean, the land of Dilmun is holy.7

For ancestor-worshippers with this belief it would seem tempt­
ing to bring, or even to ship, deceased persons of some importance
to Dilmun in a funeral party. In Dilmun the spirit of the dead person
would join the ancestral gods. Many, like Bibby, had found it
difficult to see why the little island of Bahrain should house the
world’s largest cemetery, dateable to Sumerian times, unless the
local soil at that period had a very special importance to people even
outside the island itself.
The same Sumerian poem has another useful reference to Dil­
mun. The sea-faring god Enki had asked the supreme god of the
heaven to bless Dilmun with fresh water:

Let Utu (the sun god) stationed in heaven
bring you sweet water from the earth, from the water-sources of
the earth;
let him bring up the water into your large reservoirs (?);
let him make your city drink from them the water of abundance;
let him make Dilmun drink from them the water of abundance;
let your wells of bitter water become wells of sweet water;
let your furrowed fields and acres yield you their grain;
let your city become the ‘dock-yard’-house of the land.8
139