How then did this art reach ancient Bahrain? Did the early masons of this one island in the gulf have anything to do with either the Hittites or the Egyptians? The total lack of any land of stone wall in Sumer, where the Dilmun contact took place, seemed to create a conspicuous blank in the otherwise coherent distribution pattern. But for this there was a good reason. There was simply no stone in Lower Mesopotamia, only fertile river silt and clay to bake into building bricks. But to judge from the clay tablets, Ur and other Sumerian ports had as much trade and contact upriver as across the sea, and as soon as rock appeared along the upper reaches of the two rivers, the Mesopotamians carved it, dressed it, and, in the earhest periods of Hittite-Simaerian contacts, jointed the blocks together with the pecuhar technique that reappeared below the soil on Bahrain.
The absence of stone in most of Mesopotamia caused the Sumerians and their followers to build their ziggurats, or stepped pyramids, from milhons of sun-baked bricks. A brick pyramid is a strange exception in Egypt, where nearly aU the pyramids are built from quarried stone, even the oldest of them aU, the Sakara pyra-
mid, which was stepped just hke the ziggurats of Mesopotamia. To many this has seemed a fundamental difference excluding a common origin. But this would be a hasty deduction. Never had I seen better-dressed stone than the truly giant slabs from Nineveh, with beautiful reed-ship flotillas carved in relief. Nearby was the biblical site of Nimrud, with a colossal manmade hillock, representing the eroded remains of a former pyramid now covered by rubble from Assyrian bricks. No one would have suspected that quarried stone had been used in this structure. Nevertheless the recent removal of part of the Assyrian rubble has exposed a large section of the original wall, built from big quarried stones. Archaeologists estimate that this sun-oriented pyramid, now about 140 feet high, was probably 60 feet higher originally. Inside was found a vaulted chamber 100 feet long, 6 feet wide and 12 feet high, empty. The river Tigris had originally run along the western base of the pyramid, which rose from a 20-foot-high quay of carefully dressed and fitted limestone blocks.^^
The Nimrud pyramid had indeed originally been built from stone blocks, hke those in Egypt. But there was a difference. The pyramids of Egypt were built from blocks all quarried to the same size to simplify work. Not so the Nimrud pyramid. And in addition, while checking the blocks, I found the jointing to be once more the one I was in search of, the one that now struck my eyes as soon as we descended between the excavated Dilmun walls with Bibby.
When Bibby noted my unexpected interest in stonemasonry, he took us back again to one of the colossal Ah mounds, perhaps the largest of them all, not inferior in size, it seemed, to the Nimrud pyramid. Really a lofty hillock to ascend. He took us around to the back where a portion of the limestone rubble cover had been carefully removed, as on the pyramid of Nimrud. Inside emerged the section of a sohd wall of quarried stones. The stones seemed to be of equal size, as in Egypt. These big moimds, said Bibby, had been a sort of round, stepped pyramid.
Nobody had ever doubted that the Ah moimds must have been built as some sort of mausoleum for defunct kings. These giant tombs were of such preponderant size that they had required organized mass labor and thus xmdoubtedly represented the resting place of extremely powerful monarchs. Their numbers were suflBciently restricted to represent successive generations of sovereigns, while the vast adjacent cemetery could have been reserved
for lesser chiefs and anyone worthy of entombment in the vicinity of such important personages.
Gazing over the Arab roofs down below and across the scorched landscape, with tombs everywhere except in the direction of the decapitated date palms, I began to look upon these miserable surroundings with other eyes. This had to be Dilmun. But, admitting this, it was the land recorded by the Siunerians as the one-time abode of their early ancestors, the home of Ziusudra, the venerated priest-ldng praised as the one who by his ship had given eternal life to mankind—the culture hero later borrowed as their own by the Babylonians, Assyrians and possibly the Hittites with the name of Utu-nipishtim. The same important personage who finally found his way into the teachings of Hebrews, Christians and Moslems as Noah.
What an amazing thought: here I was, probably sitting on top of a mountainous burial mound overlooking the land of Noah. Perhaps this very mound was the burial mound of Ziusudra. It seemed to be the biggest. According to Sumerian texts Ziusudra never left Dilmun, alias Bahrain. It was his descendants that finally came to Sumer. If he ever existed, he would probably be buried in one of these giant mounds. Who could tell. Perhaps I was really sitting on the tomb of Noah.
The idea was not all that crazy. Noah, no. For Noah was only a dressed-up version of Ziusudra. No one landed here with a floating zoo. But Ziusudra was a very real person to the Sumerians in their time. He brought only domesticated cattle and sheep on board, and their bones are foimd from that early period both on this island and in Ur. Ziusudra never returned to his birthplace at Shuruppak on the Euphrates; his tomb logically had to be one of those left in Dilmun.
It would be fooHsh of us today to underestimate the early Sumerians just because they hved five thousand years before our time, when the world at large was peopled by savages. They were not illiterate. From them we learned to write. They were not stupid. From them we got the wheel, the art of forging metals, of building arches, of weaving cloth, of hoisting sail, of sowing our fields and baking our bread. They gave us our domesticated animals. They invented units for weight, length, area, volume, and instruments to measure it all. They initiated real mathematics, made exact astronomical observations, kept track of time, devised a calendar system and recorded genealogies. When they spoke of Dilmun, Makan and
Captions for the following four pages
25. The people of Oman lived in a large country closed to automobiles until the present sultan put his own father in prison seven years ago and began to modernize the nation.
26. A terraced temple mound unlike any Arab structure but closely resembling a Mesopotamian ziggurat with ceremonial ramp had just been discovered in Oman by mining prospectors.
2y. The temple was in the midst of vast prehistoric copper mines; in one of them an entire mountain had been transformed into a valley and the only piece remaining is a monumental gateway left where the long-forgotten miners had first entered the rock.
28. The archaeologist Paolo Costa shows the author and Norman prehistoric slag heaps with a half-consumed mountain in the background. Probably the output from the mines had been brought out to waiting reed ships from Bahrain and Mesopotamia in vessels like these still in local use.
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2Q. Sightseeing in Oman, a nation closed to tourists, the expedition group visits Al Hamra.
30. Rowing a reed ship out of Muscat harbor was a heavy job for eight men.
SI. Thor and Thor. The author at the helm turns to avoid a ship that seems intent upon running us down; as it passes it proves to be the Norwegian merchantman Thor I, a recent replacement of the Thor I that in iQ4y brought the Kon-Tiki raft back from Tahiti,
32. In the shipping lane. In daytime and with wind we could steer away, but at night or in calm weather we had problems. Tigris sailed under the United Nations flag.
Meluhha they knew where these places were; they were well at home in geography. How else could they know where to travel to locate copper, gold, lapis lazuh, carnehan, alabaster and the great many other materials precious to them, unknown locally, and yet firmly imbedded in their material culture? History was to them a major subjec
t. They worshiped their ancestors and their minds were focused on the events and heroes of the past. Royal Hues back through the ages were sacred lessons impressed on growing generations by the priesthood and the learned men. Noah is a legend to us, but Ziusudra was history to them. Dilmun may seem a castle in the air to us, but to them it was a trading center thirty double hours away.
I was brought back from Dilmun to Bahrain by the shrill sormd of a claxon from one of the waiting cars on the plains below. Time to return. Scrambling down the steep rubble hill that concealed the fine stone walls, I drank in the view of the exclusive group of majestic manmade hills around me. This island contained the tombs of the Sumerian forebears. In a wider sense, the tombs of our own spiritual forebears. Would this bring us a step closer to our own lost beginnings?
It was almost with a feehng of awe that I descended to the ground and walked back to the cars across a terrain that must have seen strange processions. Here mighty leaders had been carried to rest. This plain had probably witnessed the funeral ceremony of some mighty seafaring hierarch whose maritime adventures, in ever more embellished versions, were to survive the ages and be retold even in my own childhood classroom. The vessel that became the "ark" had probably been a ma-gur beached on this coast. The fabulous procession of disembarking animals had probably been a few cows, a buU and a Httle flock of sheep. Lowing and bleating after days on board, they must have waded across the shallows from the broad and sturdy reed ship, searching for the nearest waterhole. Man and beast survived here because the god of the venerated priest-ldng had let sweet cold water from the distant mainland mountains well out of the ground.
I looked with horror at the hmestone burners digging away at some of the biggest of the giant mounds. While all the Arabs on this island emirate enter their mosques to pray, while they read about their progenitor Noah in their holy Koran, these Moslems were
burning lime by assaulting with pick and shovel a notoriously ancient mausoleum that in fact might once have been venerated by Ham, Shem and Japhet as their father's tomb.
The early Bahrainians had been a rehgious people. From the nameless seaport Bibby brought us westward along the coast to a locahty known as Barbar. Here his team had made their first major discovery: a temple. And it was a very special temple. They had found it by digging a test pit into the lowest of a whole string of sandy mounds larger than even the biggest of the gravel mounds at Ali. Their interest in this particular mound had been fired when Bibby's Danish companion, Professor Glob, noted two colossal blocks of shaped limestone protruding from its slopes. The blocks proved to weigh over three tons each and stood on a paving of limestone slabs. Two square depressions cut in the top suggested they might have served as pedestals for big statues. Trenching the wide mound inward along the elevated stone paving they struck a wall forming a step up to another terrace where the stone flooring slabs continued until they struck another wall forming a step up to a terrace higher still, where the stone paving led again to yet another wall enclosing the tallest central part of the structure. What amazed the archaeologists was that there had never been an open space or temple enclosure inside these walls. The building had been a compact, sohdly filled elevation with right-angled comers, rising in steps above the terrain like a Sumerian temple-pyramid. The facing slabs of each of the superimposed terraces were blocks of fine, close-grained limestone, laid in three com-ses and carefully cut to fit together without mortar. The stones on the top platform were different; they were perfectly shaped like the tapering ice blocks of an Eskimo igloo, to form a circular enclosure only six feet approximately in diameter.
Excavations revealed that four thousand years ago the original ground surface on which the structure stood must have been eight or ten feet lower. The central temple must then have been much more imposing, standing on its platform above sheer terrace walls oriented to the movements of the sun. As excavations revealed the staircases and ramps that led up to the summit temple, Bibby realized they had hit upon a rehgious structure that began to qualify as a ziggurat, the terraced temple mound of Mesopotamia.
With the Sumerian deluge story in mind, Bibby foimd it highly significant that they had discovered a temple on Bahrain with Su-
merian affinities.^^ Nowhere in the gulf area outside Mesopotamia had structures resembhng a stepped ziggurat ever been found. And the excavations of the temple uncovered quantities of potsherds, lapis lazuh beads, alabaster vases, copper bands and sheet copper, a copper figure of a bird, a cast bull's head with originally inlaid eyes, and, the final proof of Sumerian contact, a little copper statuette of a naked man with large round eyes and shaven head. He stood in the special attitude of supphcation typical of Mesopotamia between 2500 and 1800 B.C. One of the alabaster vases was of a shape used in Mesopotamia in the final centuries of the third millennium b.c.
It was fascinating to visit this temple-mound with Bibby and hear how he Hnked it to long-range Sumerian sailing and Dilmun trade. This had indeed not been an isolated island civilization. And much more was to be found under the ground. In fact, stairs led down the south wall of the sun-oriented structure to a deep excavation at its foot. Down there, below ground level, was a basin enclosed by a cellarlike wall, and we were only halfway down into it when I caught myself exclaiming: "The fingerprintl"
There it was again, and in an even finer version, the masonry I had been looking for. Stone blocks of uneven size squared as if cut with a laser beam. Some intentionaUy shouldered, all dressed and polished almost to a shine and fitted together without cement so exactly that hardly a knife blade could be inserted between them. Again the temple walls of Vinapu on Easter Island stood clearly before me, and the whole series from the pre-Inca walls in Vinaque and Tiahuanaco to Lixus and the Hittite walls of Bogazkoy. This was deep below the ground, built as a catchment basin to hold what had probably served as sacred water for ceremonial functions conducted on the structure above. Since the temple architects could hardly have found this spring merely by digging at the feet of the temple stairs, it must be assmned that the temple had been placed there because of the presence of the spring. This would again mean that the splendidly fitted wall of the basin dated from the first building phase of the temple. This observation was supported by the fact that the temple itself showed evidence of more than one building phase, and, as in the buried port city, some of the finest carved stones in the rebuilt structure appeared to be reused from an earher period. But more was to be deduced from these dressed stones. The people who quarried them must have been sailors. The masons had benefited from the choice of the most suitable kind of stone and the knowledge of where to find it.
*A really fine limestone they used," I remarked to Bibby.
"Right," he said, "and there is no such stone on Bahrain. They probably went to Jidda to fetch it."
"Jidda?" I sensed evidence of marine activity.
"Jidda is a small island some five kilometers from the northwest point of this island.**
"Have you looked for quarries there?" I asked.
"No. There are supposed to be traces of that sort, but no one can go there as Jidda is the prison colony of the emirate."
My interest in that island was fired and I felt an irresistible urge to go there.
I went straight to my new acquaintance, the friendly Minister of Information, and decided to attack this bastion from every possible angle. In the meantime there were more urgent problems to solve.
We had come to Bahrain with a huge hole in our bow. Little was visible above waterline, but Gherman came up horrified from a dive and told us there was room for himself inside the cavity. The ropes were not broken but hung in loose loops and the inner bundles were exposed. We had to repair the hole, otherwise there was nothing to stop the continuous loss of reeds until the whole ship came apart.
We carried a modest quantity of spare reeds with us for minor repairs, and we could also use some of the berdi fenders to fill the hole. But it would still not be enough. What could we use? If we stuffed wood or ot
her hard materials into the hole they would gnaw on the reeds and wriggle loose in violent seas. We had to look for something suitable in the meager vegetation still growing on the island.
I had an idea and started skimming through a copy of Bibby's book, which was part of the Tigris library. In it he had a Hne drawing of a bundle boat with sail and double rudder oars astern, resem-bhng those of Failaka. It was the caption I was looking for: "These boats, about 15 feet long and made of bundles of reeds, are used by fishermen of Bahrain. They are buoyant but not, of course, watertight (and are therefore technically rafts). Similar boats of papyrus reeds were in use in Egypt over 4,000 years ago."
I ran to Bibby. Nobody else I talked to had seen anything but tankers, yachts and motor vessels on Bahrain. Bibby clearly recalled having seen the craft he sketched and mentioned in his book. To-
gether we drove across the island, past cemeteries with tens of thousands of mounds I had not seen before, and reached the tiny fishing village of Malakiya near the southwest coast. Women and children with gold teeth, jingling with jewelry, came out of small cement houses in colorful draperies, pointing out the trail to the sea. Bibby recalled having seen nicer and healthier houses of woven date-palm stalks when he was there a few years earher. Plastic and modem refuse tossed about reflected sudden wealth, as did the half-eaten food thrown away to the benefit of buzzing clouds of flies. Our Arab driver assured us that these people had now so much money that their main problem was to find ways of spending it. We left our car at the fine motor road where no horses or donkeys had been seen, and passed through a shady palm forest with evidence of former intensive irrigation and cultivation, till we stood in the baking sun on a long and beautiful sandy beach. Outside were anchored a few small dhows without masts. Drawn up on the white sand lay a small raft-boat of the type I knew so well. It had just been pulled up from the water's edge and was still wet. We caught sight of an old man with white turban and mustard-colored cloak about to escape in between the palm trunks with a bundle of shiny fish. We called him back and he came willingly. Willing also to answer all our questions, for this was his fishing boat and he had built it himself. It was his farteh, and only four men on the island still knew how to make one.
The Tigris Expedition Page 19
