Page 176 - The Tigris Expedition

To Dilmun, the Loud of Nook
found it by digging a test pit into the lowest of a whole string of
sandy mounds larger than even the biggest of the gravel mounds at
Ali. Their interest in this particular mound had been fired when
Bibby’s Danish companion, Professor Glob, noted two colossal
blocks of shaped limestone protruding from its slopes. The blocks
proved to weigh over three tons each and stood on a paving of
limestone slabs. Two square depressions cut in the top suggested
they might have served as pedestals for big statues. Trenching the
wide mound inwards along the elevated stone paving they struck a
wall forming a step up to another terrace where the stone flooring
slabs continued until they struck another wall forming a step up to a
terrace higher still, where the stone paving led again to yet another
wall enclosing the tallest central part of the structure. What amazed
the archaeologists was that there had never been an open space or
temple enclosure inside these walls. The building had been a
compact, solidly filled elevation with right-angled corners, rising in
steps above the terrain like a Sumerian temple-pyramid. The facing
slabs of each of the superimposed terraces were blocks of fine,
close-grained limestone, laid in three courses and carefully cut to fit
together without mortar. The stones on the top platform were
different; they were perfectly shaped like the tapering ice-blocks of
an Eskimo igloo, to form a circular enclosure only six feet
approximately in diameter.
Excavations revealed that four thousand years ago the original
ground surface on which the structure stood must have been eight
or ten feet lower. The central temple must then have been much
more imposing, standing on its platform above sheer terrace walls
oriented to the movements of the sun. As excavations revealed the
staircases and ramps that led up to the summit temple, Bibby
realised they had hit upon a religious structure that began to qualify
as a ziggurat, the terraced temple mound of Mesopotamia.
With the Sumerian deluge story in mind, Bibby found it highly
significant that they had discovered a temple on Bahrain
with Sumerian affinities.13 Nowhere in the gulf area outside
Mesopotamia had structures resembling a stepped ziggurat ever
been found. And the excavations of the temple uncovered quan­
tities of potsherds, lapis lazuli beads, alabaster vases, copper bands
and sheet copper, a copper figure of a bird, a cast bull’s head with
originally inlaid eyes, and, the final proof of Sumerian contact, a
little copper statuette of a naked man with large round eyes and
shaven head. He stood in the special attitude of supplication typical
of Mesopotamia between 2500 and 1800 bc. One of the alabaster
151