Page 166 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilmun, the Land of Noah
beginning? This would remain a riddle to me, too, until a few weeks
later chance gave me and my reed-ship companions a c ear in
when visiting another legendary Sumerian land.
By the time we had seen ‘Enki’s’ wells and pools and the galaxy
of burial mounds we realised that nothing else in the gulf could
better aspire to be identified as Dilmun. But Bibby still had his
trump cards: Dilmun was more than a playground for the gods and
the lesser god-kings of Noah’s dimensions. He drove us from the
cemetery to a buried city where common people had once made
their living by such profane activities as trade and shipping. We
were told to bear in mind that Dilmun from the days of the Flood
continued as a very real place, not only to the maritime Sumerians,
but also to their cultural heirs of later Babylonian and Assyrian
times.
On a stele and a clay tablet from about 2450 bc, King Ur-Nanshe,
who founded the powerful dynasty in Lagash, recorded that the
ships from Dilmun brought him timber. After him, the mighty
Semitic ruler Sargon the Great, who lived about 2300 bc and
subdued all nations from the gulf area to the Mediterranean Sea,
erected memorial stele and statues at Nippur on which he boasted
that ships from Dilmun, Makan and Meluhha docked together in
the ports of his capital Akkad. Dilmun continued to figure as a
place-name in Akkadian documents, and the Assyrian King
Tukulti-Ninurta used in his title the epithet ‘King of Dilmun and
Meluhha’. King Sargon II of Assyria received tribute from a king in
Dilmun named Upcri, and in the days of King Sennacherib soldiers
were sent from Dilmun to help raze the rebellious city of Babylon
to the ground.
The Danish scientists, under the leadership of the noted
archaeologist P. V. Glob, have been responsible for all the amazing
discoveries on Bahrain, and for over twenty years Bibby had been
the field director. When these archaeologists laid eyes on Bahrain a
few decades ago, there were no prehistoric houses to account for the
presence of the hundred thousand tombs. The island seemed to
have served only as a funerary centre for the gulf area. No ruins
other than Arab mosques and Portuguese fortifications were seen
above the ground. Failing to find much but sherds of a hitherto
unknown type of pottery in the plundered burial mounds, Glob,
Bibby and their companions had begun to search the island for flint
chips, potsherds and irregularities in the naked terrain that might
reveal former habitation. Thus they located a buried temple and
next an unknown city, which he now wanted to show us.

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