Page 224 - The Tigris Expedition

IVc Search for a Pyramid and Find Mahan
and the mighty city states of Mohenjo-Daro and Flatappa in the
Indus valley, with the gulf island of Bahrain as an mten
trading centre. This was the sailing route Geoffrey Bibby had
challenged me to attempt in a Mesopotamian vessel; a route tna
tempted me almost irresistibly.
But we turned our reed bow to the south instead, and tollowe
the Arabian peninsula. This might not have been the first choice of
prehistoric explorers. The barren, jagged mountain walls of Oman
refused access to all but birds, with hostile cliffs rising straight from
the sea. Yet these cliffs seemed to get less forbidding towards the
south, where they gradually fell off into rolling hills. No early
civilisation comparable to that of the Indus valley had ever been
known to have flourished in Oman. Yet I had a very special reason
to cast my vote with those who favoured following this shoreline in
the direction of Africa. Firstly, according to all weathermen, the
winter wind in this area ought to blow from Asia to Africa and not
turn in the opposite direction until spring. Secondly, and this was
something I could not quite get out of my mind, some unconfirmed
rumours of archaeological discoveries in Oman had reached me the
day before we set sail down the rivers of Iraq. An unknown
messenger, a German reporter with moustaches as big as the
handlebars of a bike, had called on me with exciting news from
Fuad Safar, the Acting Director-General of Baghdad Museum.
According to dependable sources, a Sumerian ziggurat, a stepped
temple-pyramid of the type so far never discovered outside the
river valleys of Mesopotamia had been found in the sand some­
where in Oman, on the Muscat side outside the Hormuz Strait.
I had refused to believe it. It sounded like a joke invented by the
journalist just because we had painted a ziggurat on our sail. But the
German swore he was only bringing the message he had been urged
to pass on. The noted Baghdad archaeologist had been quite
excited, he said, and insisted that we should try to visit Oman. It
was the first time, he stressed, that a Sumerian structure had been
discovered outside Iraq.
I mentioned the strange message to my men. ‘Too good to be
true,’ said Norman. This was my own feeling too. Pyramids are
rare and far between. It is not the sort of thing one stumbles upon in
the sand. Potsherds yes, but not pyramids. In the Old World none
had been found outside Egypt and Mesopotamia. It would be too
much of a coincidence if the first Sumerian ziggurat should be
discovered in a distant land bordering the Indian Ocean, just as we
oisted sail hoping to go that far in a Sumerian boat. Although

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