Page 172 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilmun, the Laud of Noah

The next encounter was unexpected. I stumbled upon the same
technique in the titanic temple walls at Lixus on the Atlantic coast o
Morocco. 1 had come to Lixus to see the local reed-boats before we
sailed away from that coast to America with the Ra, but had never
heard of these impressive ruins. They were assumed to have been
left by Phoenician colonists who settled the Atlantic seaboard on
voyages from Carthage and Asia Minor. If built by Phoenicians, no
wonder the founders of Lixus had known this technique. They
would have learnt it in the Middle East, the only area where it had
been commonplace outside Inca territory and Easter Island. The
finest mcgalithic masonry in the temple walls behind the great
pyramids of Egypt had been made in this way. Yet the real centre
and acme of the art seemed to have been in Hittitc territory. The
Hittites, the extinct, forgotten and recently rediscovered predeces­
sors of the Phoenicians, once inhabited the entire area forming a
bridge between Upper Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean Sea.
Now came the problem. The Hittites had inherited their customs
and beliefs, and nearly all their arts and crafts, from the Sumerians.
But the Sumerians did not build stone walls, none is left in the
territory we know as Sumer.
How then did this art reach ancient Bahrain? Did the early
masons of this one island in the gulf have anything to do with either
the Hittites or the Egyptians? The total lack of any kind of stone
wall in Sumer, where the Dilmun contact took place, seemed to
create a conspicuous blank in the otherwise coherent distribution
pattern. But for this there was a good reason. There was simply no
stone in Lower Mesopotamia, only fertile river silt and clay to bake
into building bricks. But to judge from the clay tablets, Ur and
other Sumerian ports had as much trade and contact up river as
across the sea, and as soon as rock appeared along the upper reaches
of the two rivers, the Mesopotamians carved it, dressed it, and, in
the earliest periods of Hittite-Sumerian contacts, jointed the blocks
together with the peculiar technique that reappeared below the soil
on Bahrain.
The absence of stone in most of Mesopotamia caused the
Sumerians and their followers to build their ziggurats, or stepped
pyramids, from millions of sun-baked bricks. A brick pyramid is a
strange exception in Egypt, where nearly all the pyramids are built
from quarried stone, even the oldest of them all, the Sakara pyra­
mid, which was stepped just like the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. To
many this has seemed a fundamental difference excluding a com­
mon origin. But this would be a hasty deduction. Never had I seen
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