Page 174 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilmun, the Land of Noah
decapitated date palms, I began to look upon these misery
surroundings with other eyes. This had to be Dilmun. But, admit
ting this, it was the land recorded by the Sumerians as t e on
abode of their early ancestors, the home of Ziusudra, the venerated
priest-king praised as the one who by his ship had given eterna 1 c
to mankind - the culture hero later borrowed as their own by the
Babylonians, Assyrians and possibly the Hittites with the name of
Utu-nipishtim. The same important personage who finally found
his way into the teachings of Hebrews, Christians and Moslems as
Noah.
What an amazing thought: here I was, probably sitting on top ofa
mountainous burial mound overlooking the land of Noah. Perhaps
this very mound was the burial mound of Ziusudra. It seemed to be
the biggest. According to Sumerian texts Ziusudra never left
Dilmun, alias Bahrain. It was his descendants that finally came to
Sumer. If he ever existed, he would probably be buried in one of
these giant mounds. Who could tell. Perhaps I was really sitting on
the tomb of Noah.
The idea was not all that crazy. Noah, no. For Noah was only a
dressed-up version of Ziusudra. No one landed here with a floating
zoo. But Ziusudra was a very real person to the Sumerians in their
time. He brought only domesticated cattle and sheep on board, and
their bones are found from that early period both on this island and
in Ur. Ziusudra never returned to his birthplace at Shuruppak on
the Euphrates, his tomb logically had to be one of those left in
Dilmun.
It would be foolish of us today to underestimate the early
Sumerians just because they lived five thousand years before our
time, when the world at large was peopled by savages. They were
not illiterate. From them we learnt to write. They were not stupid.
From them we got the wheel, the art of forging metals, of building
arches, of weaving cloth, of hoisting sail, of sowing our fields and
baking our bread. They gave us our domesticated animals. They
invented units for weight, length, area, volume, and instruments to
measure it all. They initiated real mathematics, made exact
astronomical observations, kept track of time, devised a calendar
system and recorded genealogies. When they spoke of Dilmun,
Makan and Meluhha they knew where these places were; they were
well at home in geography. How else could they know where to
travel to locate copper, gold, lapis lazuli, carnelian, alabaster and the
great many other materials precious to them, unknown locally, and
yet firmly imbedded in their material culture? History was to them
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