Page 54 - The Postal Agencies in Eastern Arabia

BAHRAIN

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago, when North America
was emerging from the Ice Age, a small island off the east coast of
Arabia enjoyed a pleasant, temperate climate, was well stocked with
game and was surrounded by seas with abundant supplies of fish. It
attracted tribes of Neanderthal hunters who settled in villages and
chipped cutting tools from the limestone rocks, and even practised
rudimentary agriculture.
These early settlers had long been forgotten when, around
3000 B.C., the island entered its first period of greatness in the Copper
Age. Within 200 years it had become an essential link in the trade
routes between the Indus Valley and Mespotamian civilisations. By
2000 B.C. it was already identified in Mespotamian legend as the
fabled Dilmun Paradise, and a Sumerian Hymn called it a “holy land,
blessed by Enki the god of sweet water.”
For another 1,500 years this small island remained the hub of
the vast Dilmun trading empire; even to the extent of being the site of
the workshop that produced the famous steatite stamp-seals found far
away in Mohenjo-Daro and Mespotamia. In 710 B.C., Sargon of
Assyria recorded that he had received gifts from “the King of Dilmun,
a land which lies like a fish, thirty double hours away in the midst of
the sea of the rising sun.”
Throughout this long period of power the wealth of this small
island was so great, and its culture so advanced, that all were accorded
burial in the style elsewhere reserved only for kings and nobles. In the
north-west of the island there are still to be seen many thousands of
burial mounds, every one covering one or more stone-built chambers.

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