Page 102 - DILMUN 12

“THE LAND OF DILMUN IS HOLY . .

Geoffrey Bibby

I have taken the title for this somewhat speculative talk from the best-known of all the
references to Dilmun in the cuneiform corpus, the passage from the commencement of the
myth of Enki and Ninhursag. You all know how it goes on — how Dilmun is a land where the
lion kills not, and the wolf docs not devour the lamb, a land where the sick say not “I am sick”,
and the old man says not “ I am an old man”. Dilmun is a blessed land, where natural ills and
sickness and death do not exist. That this description of Dilmun lies behind the Biblical story of
the Garden of Eden may well be true, and there have been attempts to construe Dilmun as the
Sumerian Eden and as the Sumerian paradise. The Danish Sumcrologist, Bcndt Alstcr, has
recently pointed out that this is going much too far. He quite rightly states that the idea of an
Eden, a land where man lived in bliss before all the curses of civilization were heaped upon
him, is completely foreign to the Sumerians, who considered civilization to be a blessing
bestowed upon mankind by the gods; and that Paradise, a place of eternal happiness beyond
death, was equally outside their philosophy. This, I think, we must accept. But we must not
throw out the baby with the bath water. We are left with some very specific statements, that
Dilmun is a pure land, a Holy Land, a land immune to the ills to which flesh is heir.

But if Dilmun was a Holy Land to the Sumerians, did they do anything about it? Mackay’s
old idea, that the stupendous number of burial mounds on Bahrain must mean that people
from outside the island were brought here for burial, has recently been revived by Carl
Lamberg-Karlovsky. Quite apart from the fact that there are serious faults with his mathema­
tics, this is simply not tenable. Even with the most optimistic view of the number of persons
buried in the mounds, even aided by the sensational discovery of the large burial complexes on
the edges of the mound fields, and even with the most pessimistic view of the length of time
that the mound fields were a-building, it is still impossible to deduce a population figure higher
than the number of people who were living quite happily on Bahrain a hundred years ago,
under probably more adverse climatic conditions than prevailed four thousand years ago. And
Alster has pointed out, very truly, that burial overseas is an idea that would have been
abhorrent to the Sumerians — and that, had they indulged in it, we should find it recorded in
the tablets.

There is, of course, another possible Sumerian course of action. For hundreds and
thousands of years pilgrims have sought the holy places of their faith in order to increase their
chances of Eternal Life — and normally do not stay to be buried there. Was Dilmun a place of
pilgrimage in the ancient world? There again the answer is clearly No. If it had been so, it
would have been recorded. We know of only two Sumerians who came to Dilmun for purposes
other than trade, Ziusudra and Gilgamesh. And while one admittedly settled here, he
specifically did not die here. Anyway, both are very clearly portrayed as exceptions to the
general run of humanity.

But is it perhaps wrong to look for holiness brought in from outside? Did Dilmun receive
its reputation for holiness because it was holy to the Dilmunites? This is worthy of serious
consideration. Because there are some very odd things about Bahrain, archaeologically
speaking.

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