Page 101 - DILMUN 12

The most striking of these oddities, of course, arc the burial mounds. Once we have come
over the initial shock of seeing these unending thousands of mounds we rather tend to take
them for granted. They just arc there. But you can’t just dismiss the largest burial field in the
world like that.And from one point of view the size of the population that built them is
immaterial. Whether they were built by a small population over a large number of centuries or
by a large population over a small number of centuries, one thing is clear — that the population
spent a large part of its available wealth and energy burying its dead. Looking at the burial
practices of other contemporary peoples one can only compare thcDilmun preoccupation with
death and the afterlife with that of Egypt. We know in Egypt — because the Egyptian climate
has preserved the written records — how sophisticated was the religion that manifested itself
in an elaborate care for the dead. Can we postulate a similar sophistication in Dilmun’s
religious life? We arc at least forced to postulate a comparatively large corps of professional
tomb-builders continually at work raising the stone chambers and the mounds. And it was not
merely time they were willing to devote to the dead, it was also space. The mound fields cover a
very appreciable amount of at least grazing ground. We can sec today the quite impossible
dilemma of the Antiquities Department, where it is impossible to extend a town, or build a new
one, to expand a garden or build a road, without destroying a whole raft of burial mounds. That
this situation was also reached in antiquity is strongly suggested by the burial complexes on the
edges of the mound fields. They arc just as elaborate as the mounds, just as monumental with
their ring walls and stone chambers, but they did use less ground, which apparently was then
beginning to be in short supply.

But it was not only death that interested the Dilmunites. When in 1953, just thirty years
ago, we started looking for the settlements of the mound builders we found a promising tell at
Barbar. We dug it, and found a temple. Just how imposing a temple it was, even by Mesopota­
mian standards, you have heard from the excavators. We dug a mound close by to the north
east — and found another temple. Some years later the British expedition dug another
apparent settlement not far away to the south west — and found another temple. And half a
mile away, at Umm as-Suj ur, we had already dug what was traditionally supposed to have once
been the largest well on Bahrain. It was a very cursory reconnaissance dig, and all we found,
apart from a very considerable quantity of large fine squared blocks of cut stone lying jumbled
below water level in the centre of the hollow, was a little underground chamber approached by
a staircase and containing a very finely made well, with a wellhead formed of one single
immense block of chiselled stone. And the sacred character of the well was shown by the
decapitated statues of two rams found on the stair. I am more than half convinced that Umm
as-Sujur, when it is dug, will turn out to be a temple that can well have outshone Barbar. So
there we have four temples, all found almost casually while looking for something else, and all
dating to the time of the mound builders, to the centuries around 2000 B.C.

Now, I don’t know what it all means. But it does seem as though the ratio of temples to
settlements is just as unusual as the ratio of burial mounds to settlements. In fact in the
northwest comer of Bahrain nothing has been found but temples. They are very different, the
one from the other, but two at least of them are fundamentally associated with fresh water. It
makes one wonder whether all the fresh-water springs of Bahrain were holy springs, whether
the people of Diimun themselves believed that their abundance of artesian water was due to
the especial favour of Enki, the god of the waters under the earth. Did they believe that they
were a Chosen People, blessed in this world and the next? Did the Sumerians believe that
Diimun was a Holy Land because the people of Diimun told them so?

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