The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  let your city become the "dock-yard'-house of the land.*

  Water was a divine gift to any people in the gulf area. Deserts and dry wasteland dominate coasts and islands. Bahrain is a striking exception. On Bahrain water rises from the dry ground in springs and fountains, and flows endlessly into the sea. Around the coast there are even imderwater springs, where divers can swim down to drink sweet water and refill their air-filled jars.

  The amazing way in which nature has brought an abundance of fresh water to this low hmestone island surrounded by the salt sea is almost enough to make anyone who drinks from these springs beheve in miracles. On our way to the tombs Bibby took a side road to a true oasis of palms and green grass. Inside was a deep and divinely beautiful pond of crystal-clear water retained within the ancient stone walls of a circular reservoir. Young Arabs were diving and swimming, and one of them was sitting soaping himself in the water while three women washed clothing. Yet the water was constantly renewed and clear as morning dew. Every one of the smooth stones on the bottom was seen as clearly as if the pool were empty. In the center the water was welling up to the surface like a fountain, and a constant overflow sent the soap suds away down a fast-running drainage ditch formerly used for date palm irrigation.

  Bibby could tell us of several such pools and springs on the island. No wonder that their origin had been ascribed to divine interference. This water came from the distant mountains of the Arabian peninsula, where the rain sank into the naked rocks and was lost for the mainland. Through a freak of nature it filtered into subterranean cracks and fissures, some of which carried the fresh water under the bottom of the gulf to reappear as springs on the island of Bahrain.

  From the slopes of the island's central hills prehistoric engineers had constructed hidden water channels deep under the desert sand. They were walled and roofed with slabs and ran for miles, often twenty feet or more below the surface, to end in formerly cultivated fields. About every fifty yards circular stone shafts rose hke buried chimneys from these subterranean channels up to the surface. Perhaps they had served as gutters for maintenance. Without them there was nothing to disclose the existence and route of these prehistoric pipelines. To Bibby and his colleagues these masterly examples of engineering remained a puzzle. Had the stone-hned aqueducts been built on the ground and the chimneys gradually extended upward as wind-borne sand accumulated over them? Or had they been dug as deep underground passages from the very beginning? This would remain a riddle to me, too, until a few weeks later chance gave me and my reed-ship companions a clear hint when visiting another legendary Sumerian land.

  By the time we had seen "Enki's" wells and pools and the galaxy of burial mounds we reahzed that nothing else in the gulf could

  better aspire to be identified as Dilmun. But Bibby still had his trump cards: Dilmun was more than a playground for the gods and the lesser god-kings of Noah's dimensions. He drove us from the cemetery to a buried city where common people had once made their Uving by such profane activities as trade and shipping. We were told to bear in mind that Dilmun from the days of the Flood continued as a very real place, not only to the maritime Sumerians, but also to their cultural heirs of later Babylonian and Assyrian times.

  On a stele and a clay tablet from about 2450 B.C., King Ur-Nanshe, who founded the powerful dynasty in Lagash, recorded that the ships from Dilmun brought him timber. After him, the mighty Semitic ruler Sargon the Great, who Hved about 2300 b.c. and subdued all nations from the gulf area to the Mediterranean Sea, erected memorial stele and statues at Nippur on which he boasted that ships from Dilmun, Makan and Meluhha docked together in the ports of his capital Akkad. Dilmun continued to figure as a place name in Akkadian documents, and the Assyrian king Tukulti-Ninurta used in his title the epithet "King of Dihnun and Meluhha." King Sargon II of Assyria received tribute from a king in Dilmun named Uperi, and in the days of King Sennacherib soldiers were sent from Dilmun to help raze the rebeUious city of Babylon to the ground.

  The Danish scientists, under the leadership of the noted archaeologist P. V. Glob, have been responsible for all the amazing discoveries on Bahrain, and for over twenty years Bibby had been the field director. When these archaeologists laid eyes on Bahrain a few decades ago, there were no prehistoric houses to account for the presence of the hundred thousand tombs. The island seemed to have served only as a funerary center for the gulf area. No ruins other than Arab mosques and Portuguese fortifications were seen above the ground. Faihng to find much but shards of a hitherto unknown type of pottery in the plundered burial mounds. Glob, Bibby and their companions had begun to search the island for flint chips, potsherds and irregularities in the naked terrain that might reveal former habitation. Thus they located a buried temple and next an unknovvTi city, which he now wanted to show us.

  There is always something intriguing about a buried city. Stepping down from a present ground level higher than the former roofs is like chmbing through a trapdoor dovm into the unknown past.

  following streets untrodden perhaps for thousands of years, as in the town discovered on Bahrain. On the north coast we were to climb from the sand dunes at the foot of a sixteenth-century Portuguese fort down into a sunken city that had been teeming with life in Sumerian times. The fort on top, now nothing but picturesque ruins on a prominent bluff overlooking the sea, had been built by the Portuguese shortly after they conquered Bahrain from the Arabs in 1521. They had rebuilt a fort originally constructed by early Arabs who came to this island immediately after the days of Mo-hanuned the Prophet. The Arabs, in tiun, had used stones, some of which had been taken from even older buildings of unknown origin, possibly found emerging from the local sand.

  Next to this fort Bibby's party had also been tempted to dig. Here was something hidden under a large sandy mound overlooking the sea, and as the white sand was removed a complete buried city appeared, and under it another, and still another. The streets and buildings were always carefully laid out east-west and north-south. The site witnessed of prosperity as well as disaster. About 1200 B.C. the city had been biuned. Underneath were the walls of buildings dating from 2300 B.C., on which the subsequent town had stood before the fire. This earlier city was contemporary with the mound burials and Sumerian voyages to Dilmun. They dated from what Bibby termed the Dilmun period. We walked together down into the oldest city. We stopped at a huge and solid city wall with a gate directly facing the sea. Here we found oiu*-selves surrounded by tall stone walls, in an open square where a main avenue flanked by stone buildings led to this big gate and the sea. From the open plaza inside the city wall other streets took off at right angles.

  Bibby pointed through the lofty gate. Huge sand dunes had blown up in front to bar the view, but when the wall was built this gate had led directly to the water, which was still right down below.

  "Here ships docked four to five thousand years ago, in the Dilmun period, to load or unload their cargo," said Bibby. He turned from the gate and pointed to the ground in the open square we stood on: "And here we fornid the evidence of oversea trade. Here the cargo was unloaded. It was here and in the streets of the town that we found numerous scraps of unworked copper. Also copper fishhooks, bits of ivory, steatite seals and a camehan bead. All represented materials foreign to Bahrain."

  He added that the nearest source for copper would be Oman. And ivory could only have come from India or Africa. The cameHan bead, and also a very special type of pohshed flint weight found among the ruins, must definitely have come from the now-extinct Indus Valley civilization. The five flint weights found provided a surprising disclosure. It showed that the Bahrainians of the Dilmim period adhered to the weight system of the Indus Valley people rather than to that of the Sumerians.

  As we spoke a fine dusting of sand blew in over the town wall from the dunes along the shore. This was how the ancient port had become a buried city. But this ancient port was on the north coast, and it dawned upon me that the wind had changed. At long last it blew from Iraq.

/>   Bibby adjusted his turban and laughed. "You have had bad luck," he said. "This is the way the winter wind always blows. From the north. How much time do you think you would have needed to come here with this wind?"

  "Three and a half to four days," I said. "We were towed at the speed we sailed to Failaka. But we sailed at right angles to the wind. Probably we could have come faster if we had come straight to Bahrain with the wind at our back."

  "That makes sense. One Sumerian record speaks of Dilmun as thirty double hours away. They reckoned distance in time of travel."

  "They would most certainly have done better than novices like us," I admitted. "Failaka must to them have been almost a home port and in a race from there to here a professional Smnerian crew would imdoubtedly have beaten us by a few hours. We might have needed thirty-five double hours with a good north wind."

  "The bottom shape of your ship with two bundles and a shallow draft is interesting," commented Bibby, and took all of us up on the wall to see the shallow tide flats that reached right up to the sand dune in front of the maritime gate. At high tide the water must have flowed right up to the wall of the city.

  "I can see how a flat-bottomed reed ship could come all the way in at high tide," he continued. "With its twin body it could settle on the limestone bottom without capsizing even when the water went out. While beached at the gate it would be perfect for loading and unloading cargo."

  We had noted that the limestone bed all around Bahrain, and not least off this port, would only permit a maneuver just like the

  one Bibby described: sailing in at high tide and beaching as the tide returned. And Bibby had now seen with his own eyes that a berdi ship would be able to carry a twenty-ton burden, such as had been the weight of some Dilmun cargo according to the early tablets.*

  "But a merchant vessel must be able to return to the port it came from," insisted Bibby. "Do you think they waited half a year for the seasonal wind to change?"

  Maybe. Maybe they even made a point of coming shortly before the wind was to change, to shorten their waiting time. But I did not beheve so. I was afraid the fault was ours, who had not yet been able to imitate the old skills.

  The seasonal winds would at any rate not seem to favor visits to the Indus Valley the way it would with the Sumerian ports. What Bibby had first pointed out years ago was therefore a real puzzle: why had Bahrain used the standard weights of the Indus Valley? The Sumerians and Babylonians used a completely diflFerent system. Not only were the weights different, but they worked in a different ratio, in thirds and tenths and sixteenths. There could only be one of two explanations, according to Bibby: either the first commercial impulses must have reached Dilmun not from Mesopotamia but from India, or else India was a far more important commercial connection with Dilmun than was Mesopotamia.

  One thing was clear to both of us. The reason for Bahrain's importance on the trade route was its convenient location as a unique watering point. Nowhere else in all the length of the gulf could ancient sailors obtain fresh water in unrestricted quantities.

  The scraps of unworked copper had their own story to tell and filled a gap in a jigsaw puzzle. Copper was perhaps the most important of all raw materials imported to Mesopotamia in Dilmun times. As Bibby had pointed out in his book on the quest for Dilmun,^** writing was an extremely important art in ancient Sumer, and the clay tablets found in private houses and shops range from school ex-er9ise books to the account books of the moneylenders. There was also the regular business correspondence of a copper broker hving in Ur. He was referred to as a Dilmun trader and yet it appears from one of the written tablets found in his house that Dilmun was not the place where the copper ore was quarried. Dilmun was only a trading center where copper was bought and sold. The weight of some of the shiploads of copper moving in the gulf in Sumerian times was by no means inconsiderable, to quote Bibby's expression.

  He figured out that in one case the shipment acquired in Dihnun was no less than twenty tons, "which at present prices would fetch something like twenty thousand dollars."

  The correspondence of the copper broker also included a tablet sent him by a discontented customer: ''When you came, you said, 1 will give good ingots to Gimil-Sin.' That is what you said, but you have not done so; you oflFered bad ingots to my messenger, saying, Take it or leave it/ Who am I that you should treat me so contemptuously? Are we not both gentlemen? . . . Who is there among the Dilmun traders who has acted against me in this way?"

  Dilmun was indeed a reahty to our spiritual forebears. And Sumerian merchant vessels must certainly have been among those docking in front of the gate of the now-buried harbor city of Bahrain, because it had the peak of its activity in Sumerian times. This, perhaps, was Enid's "dock-yard-house of the land" referred to in the Dilmun poem, unless another port of the same magnitude hes buried elsewhere on Bahrain. That seemed unlikely. This was a major trading port for such a small island. Ma-gurs from Ur must have been among those that came here to barter copper for Meso-potamian wool and garments, as the records and accounts on the tablets show. It required a considerable trade to keep prosperous such an island city as this. The vast complex of ruins extended inland from the sea wall, v^dth streets and palaces.

  It was clear at a glance that the city had been rebuilt. It was equally clear that the best stonemasons had lived in the earlier period, diat is, the original Dilmun period, contemporary vdth the burial mounds. Superimposed on the older city blocks were younger walk, some of which were ascribed to Assyrian times. There was a majestic interior gate known among the archaeologists as the "Assyrian doorway," built from perfectly fitted quarried blocks with a single threshold stone bigger than a double bed and with a roimd indentation in one comer, to hold a doorpost.

  The Assyrians are famous for their stonework. But on Bahrain they had been excelled by their Dilmun predecessors. Could this mean that the Dilmun people had come from a stonecutting area with a higher development or longer tradition in the stone-shaping art than the Assyrians? There were, indeed, such people in the ancient world. But they were not terribly many. Archaeologists are experts on pottery, and can with remarkable accinracy recognize cultural ties by identifying ceramic ware, even when found in shards. But I doubt if any archaeologist has ever tried to shape a stone

  block like those left on Bahrain from the early Dilmun period. If they had, they would have discovered, hke me, that they were unable to do it. Not even with iron tools. And the Dilmim people had no iron. In other words, the walls left by the first city builders on Bahrain had something to tell us. The founders of this port included masons from one of the very few areas where the secrets of this utterly unmanageable art were known and commonplace.

  Reed boats and carved stones seem to be separate topics and a reed-boat sailor should not care about stone walls. Not so in ancient times. Lifelong research had shown me that reed-boat builders very often have had something to do with stone walls of this very kind. Usually they were the people who had made them.

  Bibby looked rather surprised when I kneeled down to examine the perfectly plane and smooth surfaces of his Dilmun blocks and the way they were fitted together. The stones were carved with right angles but no two of them were alike, and some had intumed corners, but all were made to fit adjacent blocks with such precision that no crack or hole was left between them. My friends from Tigris looked at me like some kind of Sherlock Holmes trying to find fingerprints or tool marks that might lead us on the track of those who did it. The beautifully dressed stones were shaped and joined together in a special manner I began to know all too well by now. I had to tell my puzzled companions why these stone walls had any bearing upon our voyage and upon the voyage to this same island by the people who had once made them.

  It was clear to all that this intricate and speciahzed masonry technique had to represent some aesthetic or perhaps magico-religious tradition and was not dictated by any practical need. Never, in any period, had walls been built in this manner in Europe or in the Far East. T
he distribution nevertheless spanned two oceans, but in doing so followed a clear pattern. In a most conspicuous manner it followed the distribution of the peoples who had built reed boats.

  I had come close to such walls for the first time among the reed-boat builders on the world's loneliest inhabited speck of land: Easter Island. There unknown master masons had used this technique in some of the oldest megalithic temple terraces supporting the large statues." I found them again among the reed-ship builders of South America, among the same people who had helped us build the Ra II and Tigris. Here the technique appeared as the characteristic note distinguishing the megalithic temple walls of pre-Inca

  and Inca Peru, the area from where we ourselves sailed the Kon-Tiki downwind past Easter Island to Polynesia proper.

  The next encounter was unexpected. I stumbled upon the same technique in the titanic temple walls at Lixus on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. I had come to Lixus to see the local reed boats before we sailed away from that coast to America with the Ra, but had never heard of these impressive ruins. They were assumed to have been left by Phoenician colonists who settled the Atlantic seaboard on voyages from Carthage and Asia Minor. If built by Phoenicians, no wonder the founders of Lixus had known this technique. They would have learned it in the Middle East, the only area where it had been commonplace outside Inca territory and Easter Island. The finest megahthic masonry in the temple walls behind the great pyramids of Egypt had been made in this way. Yet the real center and acme of the art seemed to have been in Hittite territory. The Hittites, the extinct, forgotten and recently rediscovered predecessors of the Phoenicians, once inhabited the entire area forming a bridge between Upper Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean Sea.

  Now came the problem. The Hittites had inherited their customs and behefs, and nearly all their arts and crafts, from the Su-merians. But the Sumerians did not build stone waUs, none is left in the territory we know as Sumer.