Page 171 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition

If they had, they would have discovered, like me, that they were
I unable to do it. Not even with iron tools. And the Dilmun people
had no iron. In other words, the walls left by the first city builders
on Bahrain had something to tell us. The founders of this port
included masons from one of the very few areas where the secrets of
this utterly unmanageable art were known and commonplace.
Reed-boats and carved stones seem to be separate topics and a
reed-boat sailor should not care about stone walls. Not so in ancient
times. Life-long research had shown me that reed-boat builders
t • very often have had something to do with stone walls of this very
kind. Usually they were the people who had made them.
I
Bibby looked rather surprised when I kneeled down to examine
the perfectly plane and smooth surfaces of his Dilmun blocks and
the way they were fitted together. The stones were carved with
right angles but no two of them were alike, and some had inturned
corners, but all were made to fit adjacent blocks with such precision
that no crack or hole was left between them. My friends from Tigris
looked at me like some kind of Sherlock Holmes trying to find
fingerprints or tool-marks that might lead us on the track of those
who did it. The beautifully dressed stones were shaped and joined
together in a special manner I began to know all too well by now. I
had to tell my puzzled companions why these stone walls had any
bearing upon our voyage and upon the voyage to this same island
by the people who had once made them.
It was clear to all that this intricate and specialised masonry
technique had to represent some aesthetic or perhaps magico-
religious tradition and was not dictated by any practical need.
Never, in any period, had walls been built in this manner in Europe
or in the Far East. The distribution nevertheless spanned two
oceans, but in doing so followed a clear pattern. In a most conspicu­
ous manner it followed the distribution of the peoples who had
built reed-boats.
I had come close to such walls for the first time among the
reed-boat builders on the world’s loneliest inhabited speck of land:
Easter Island. There unknown master-masons had used this tech­
nique in some of the oldest mcgalithic temple terraces supporting
the large statues.111 found them again among the reed-ship builders
of South America, among the same people who had helped us build
the Ra II and Tigris. Here the technique appeared as the character­
istic note distinguishing the mcgalithic temple walls of pre-Inca and
Inca Peru, the area from where we ourselves sailed the Kon-Tiki
down-wind past Easter Island to Polynesia proper.

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