Page 249 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
further news about the temple mound, when 1 had a surprise visit
from Paolo Costa and his wife Gcrmana to my home in Italy. They
had then started to excavate the big mound at Tawi Arja. The
centuries of exposure that had eroded the structure itself had not
managed to accumulate humus strata on the hard-packed surface of
the wind-swept and occasionally flood-washed plains on which it
stood, and neither potsherds nor other datable remains older than
the Moslem period had been found. But under the dirt on top of the
pyramid Costa had found the badly eroded remains of a foundation
i
wall of adobe: a small edifice or erection of some sort had stood on
the summit platform, built from big square, sun-dried bricks of the
I type used in ancient Mesopotamia.
As a cautious scholar he refrained from any hasty deductions for
lack of conclusive evidence. There was neither carbon nor written
tablets to help date the strange structure. It remained unique in the
Arabian peninsula, alone as a huge non-Moslem edifice in an area
with forty-six old, abandoned copper mines, the only copper
within reasonable reach of merchant mariners from Ur in
Mesopotamia and their trading partners on the gulf island of
Bahrain.
But even if no Sumerian vase is ever found in the barren
landscape of the wadi and the surrounding mines, geography and
geology combine to argue with rather conclusive strength that
northern Oman was the copper country of Makan to the old
Sumerians. There is no competitor for that honour in the gulf area.
It is anyone’s right to speculate as to the identity of the seemingly
misplaced mini-ziggurat at Tawi Arja. An enormous amount of
labour had been put into its construction. It was not a fort and not an
Arab mosque, but it had all the aspects of a ceremonial structure and
one known in the Old World only in Mesopotamia, with a single
exception in the recently excavated Dilmun mini-ziggurat on
Bahrain. We ourselves had sailed a Sumerian ship from Bahrain to
the ocean coast of Oman. In Sumerian terms, we had sailed a
ma-gur from Dilmun to Makan. It would seem hard to find a
theory more plausible than to suspect that the unidentified structure
discovered by the mining prospectors at Tawi Arja had been built
by, or for the service of, the sun-worshipping merchant mariners
I from the great civilisations in the twin-river country, who had
come here in large numbers because it was the nearest site for
mining and smelting copper.
None of the vestiges of prehistoric ingenuity we saw in Oman
impressed us more than the subterranean falaj. In an area where a

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