Page 169 - The Tigris Expedition

Tlw Tigris Expedition
returned. And Bibby had now seen with his own eyes that a
berdi-ship would be able to carry a twenty-ton burden, such as had
been the weight of some Dilmun cargo according to the early
i tablets.9
:
‘But a merchant vessel must be able to return to the port it came
from,’ insisted Bibby. ‘Do you think they waited half a year for the
seasonal wind to change?’
Maybe. Maybe they even made a point of coming shortly before
the wind was to change, to shorten their waiting time. But I did not
believe so. I was afraid the fault was ours, who had not yet been able
to imitate the old skills.
The seasonal winds would at any rate not seem to favour visits to
the Indus valley the way it would with the Sumerian ports. What
Bibby had first pointed out years ago was therefore a real puzzle:
why had Bahrain used the standard weights of the Indus valley? The
Sumerians and Babylonians used a completely different system.
Not only were the weights different, but they worked in a different
ratio, in thirds and tenths and sixteenths. There could only be one of
two explanations, according to Bibby: either the first commercial
impulses must have reached Dilmun not from Mesopotamia but
from India, or else India was a far more important commercial
connection with Dilmun than was Mesopotamia.
One thing was clear to both of us. The reason for Bahrain’s
importance on the trade route was its convenient location as a
unique watering point. Nowhere else in all the length of the gulf
could ancient sailors obtain fresh water in unrestricted quantities.
The scraps of unworked copper had their own story to tell and
filled a gap in a jig-saw puzzle. Copper was perhaps the most
important of all raw materials imported to Mesopotamia in Dilmun
times. As Bibby had pointed out in his book on the quest for
Dilmun,10 writing was an extremely important art in ancient
Sumer, and the clay tablets found in private houses and shops range
from school exercise books to the account books of the money­
SSSSggSSIf
lenders. There was

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