Page 104 - DILMUN 12

EDITORIAL

Robert Jarman

No issue of this journal would be complete without gratitude being expressed to H.E. the
Minister of Information for all his help to this Society, and in particular for allowing this
journal to be printed on the Government Press. We arc doubly grateful, in this issue, as he has
allowed us to publish some of the Papers presented at the Bahrain through the Ages Confer­
ence, held in Manama in December 1983. The Conference was held in celebration of the
bicentenary of the Khalifas, and it was natural that everything should have been subordinated
to the success of that Conference — including the 30th anniversary of the Bahrain Historical
and Archaeological Society. This issue, then, is a somewhat belated celebration of that
anniversary; and we have taken the opportunity to introduce some changes to this journal —
firstly, we have reduced the page and print size and changed the page format, so that we arc
able to have many more pages; and secondly, we are reverting to the practice of earlier issues
of Dilmun and publishing in English and Arabic.

The contents of this issue follow more or less the design of the Conference. Articles on the
Dilmun civilization, followed by articles on specific aspects of archaeology in Bahrain, and
finishing with a couple of articles on Bahrain’s modem history.

It is appropriate that the first article in our anniversary issue should be written by
Geoffrey Bibby — apart from being the person who more than anyone else has made the name
Dilmun known to the wider public, he was one of the founder members of our Society back in
1953 and helped to re-found it in 1970, and is to this day an honorary member. The other
article on the Dilmun civilization is by Gerd Weisgerber of the German Mining Museum at
Bochum, who has done much to locate the Magan civilization — contemporary to that of
Dilmun—in Oman.

Archaelogical excavations in Bahrain and their interpretation are covered by two articles
— one by Karen Frifelt, a member of the Danish expedition to Bahrain, who discusses their
findings at burial mounds near A’ali. And the other article is by Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky
of Harvard University, who is one of the main exponents today of the theories put forward by
Mackay in 1929 and Cornwall in 1943, namely that the burial mounds contain bodies of
people brought to Bahrain from outside — in many respects, this article is a reply to that by Dr
Bruno Frohlich which appeared in the last issue of this journal.

The historical section starts with an article by Monique Kervran who is the leader of the
French Archaeological Expedition to the Qal’at al-Bahrain (or Portuguese Fort as many
people still refer to it), and whose researches were published by the Ministry of Information in
1982. In this article, she puts the fort in historical perspective. And we finish with two articles
on the more modern history of Bahrain —one by Robin Bidwell of the Middle East Centre at
Cambridge University, on Bahrain in the Second World War, using the unpublished diaries
and reports of the officials who were here at the time; and the other is on Anglo-American
rivalry in Bahrain between 1918 and 1947 by Rosemarie Said Zahlan, the author of the
definitive books on the creation of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

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