The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  It is hard to say who was most surprised at break of day when we and everybody else in the harbor woke up to discover what was next to us. Black, brown and pale-faced dhow sailors from Africa, from the Arabian peninsula, from Pakistan and India gazed at us, and we at them, as we tumbled out of our respective sleeping quarters to the tiny balconies with a round hole in the floor that hung outboard beside the stem of all our small vessels and permitted us to squat unseen by others, but for our heads, which were offered a perfect view in all directions. Theirs were Hke wooden barrels, painted in vivid colors hke the rest of their wooden hulls right up to the ornamental scrolls of the lofty bows. Ours were only round screens of golden reed matting, to match the rest of the ship. But we had two. One on either side of the stem, to avoid queueing in emergency. It was a splendid retreat with maximum privacy at sea, but in harbor it took some time to get accustomed to spectators in surrounding barrels, gazing at our faces and shamelessly studying our droppings while imperturbably letting their own splash into the calm water from a considerable height.

  Some dhows had entered after us and we were completely shut in; but Said's was far away. Still, the fascination of the surroimdings

  was not primarily the exotic Afro-Asiatic watercraft at our sides, but the majestic scenery enclosing all and forming the harbor with its amazing blend of old and new. Big ships were seen behind the dhows in this large new harbor, named Port Qaboos after the sultan himself. Few ports can be more picturesque. From the modern breakwaters, docks and warehouses dark lava rocks run up to the waUs of a medieval Portuguese fort perched on naked cliffs and dominating the whole harbor. Above the multitude of masts, the ragged ridges soared naked and black against an impolluted blue sky, their shapes eroded into draperies and spires. A sweet fragrance as from mixed incense and tropical spices wafted into the harbor from a row of tall, white-painted Arab buildings at the foot of the cliffs.

  The dark rock above us had barely begun to turn mustard-colored in the first rays of the sun when motorboats loaded with officials came racing between the dhows to he to at our side. First a helpful Swedish agent, then some extremely polite Indian police oflBcers followed soon after by a most cordial Scottish customs oflBcer. Carlo was preparing lunch when we were boarded by turban-covered Indian oflBcers from yet another large pohce boat. They aU assured us that everybody concerned had now approved our landing. It was only up to the sultan in person to sign. OflBcials from various consulates and embassies—even the UN representative in Oman—came to salute us, and finally still another police oflBcer who wanted a new crew Hst insisting that those I had previously made up were for the "detectives" and not for his kind of pohce. The visits ended with some civilian immigration authorities collecting all our passports. The next day, Friday, found no hfe in the docks.

  The next day, four men came on board and pohtely asked for permission to take a look around. They apparently enjoyed the sightseeing and were aU smiles when they came to me and asked if they could also visit the hull. With an equally polite smile I tried to explain that there was no huU, nothing under deck. Nothing but what they had already seen. At first they became serious and afterward hostile when I began to describe how the Tigris was constructed. A bundle boat. A Sumerian ma-gur. Two of them now openly began to sniff around, peeping under mattresses and deck planks. The other two interrogated me like a suspect. No answers seemed to satisfy them. As it became apparent that they were secret

  police or detectives sent for a final checkup before we could enter the sultanate, I fetched a reed-boat model built by our Titicaca Indians, newspaper chppings from other Arab lands, and a letter from the Norwegian Foreign OflBce. The four men still seemed unconvinced about our lack of a hull as they walked ashore. Nevertheless, an English girl was now sent into the guarded docks to make an interview for the Oman Times, and soon afterward the agent came and reported that Sultan Qaboos had signed; we were "under observation," but could visit Muscat and film and photograph anything except the sultan's new palace.

  The sultan had built his modem Port Qaboos in the bay of the old town Al Matrah, severed from his own main residence and the capital, Muscat, only by a loop the road made around some narrow mountain draperies. The fish market on the beach and the fruit market among the old buildings of Al Matrah were neither more nor less colorful than other Arab souks in towns not yet opened to tourism, but the human types were outstanding. If Hollywood had assembled men with such long beards and such remarkable profiles for a bibhcal film, I would have criticized the producer for exaggeration. But the sultan had certainly not staged these characters for our benefit. The crowd seemed dominated by hook-nosed old men in turbans and long gowns, proudly displaying curved silver daggers in their belts, each a masterpiece of craftwork. In their foot-length raiment, with turban and full beard, they probably seemed older than they were, though the beards were more often white than black, sometimes spht, and often reaching the waist in competition with Santa Claus and Methuselah. Carlo was desperately operating his cameras, for every single face seemed worthy of a picture.

  The crowd in the souk, in the narrow streets, and everywhere in this land, reflected that Oman was an old melting pot of Semitic, Persian, Pakistani, Indian and African types. To me the faces testified to what we knew of Oman history. Oman had been a maritime center and port of call for sailing vessels from both Asia and Africa since long before the days of the Prophet. The steady monsoon would bring African traders northward to Oman, and even to Pakistan and India, in the summer; and back to Africa, in company with merchant sailors from Arabia and mainland Asia, in the winter

  months. The strategic importance of Oman, with its central position in the Near East sailing routes, was quickly exploited by the conquering Portuguese as soon as Vasco da Gama learned from the Arabs their age-old knowledge of the monsoons.

  Today Muscat is the capital of Oman mainly because of its modem harbor facilities, but the former capital is Sohar, on the open shore farther up the coast, which we had passed. At Sohar early sailing ships could anchor in shallow water ofiF the shore, and from there it was easy sailing to the entrance of the gulf, with Bahrain, Persia and Mesopotamia beyond. Exposed on the open beach without sheltered harbor, Sohar was lost to the world when Sultan Qaboos started modernizing Oman, beginning with the new capital. He built himself a spectacular dream castle, dominating the former harbor of Muscat, and moved all traffic to the adjacent Port Qaboos. His other initial efforts include so far a major international airport, roads, pubUc buildings and residential quarters above all in and near the flourishing capital.

  It was therefore the more interesting to me when the name Sohar was brought up dming our first evening ashore, at a dinner party given us by the English-bom general manager of Port Qaboos, Barry Metcalfe, and his wife Kate. Near Sohar, somebody said, there were supposed to be small boats similar to oiu: own. We were just back hot and exhausted after our first day in the souk, and could think of nothing else when the Metcalfes and two of their neighbors made us dance with joy and gratitude under dean freshwater showers before we sank down, aU refreshed, in deep armchairs, balancing plates loaded with chicken curry and with huge mugs of foaming cold beer.

  It was all so good that it took me a while to realize that the gentleman who had mentioned the bimdle boats up near Sohar was the noted Itahan archaeologist Paolo Costa, inspector-general of the Directorate of Antiquity in the sultanate of Oman. In spite of his pompous title, Costa was a most jovial and earthbound person, and we were soon on first-name terms and way back in the distant millennia before Moslem behefs and architecture had reached Oman. Up north there were copper mines dating from prehistoric periods, said Paolo. There were also imderground aqueducts, and the hills of Oman were full of stone towers. They were burial mounds of the same general period as those we had seen by the thousands in Bahrain.

  In southern Oman some remarkable prehistoric ruins had now been found on the coast near the borders of South Yemen. But we could not go there, for the Peoples Republi
c of South Yemen was conmiimistic and the sultan's worst enemy, so there was an almost constant state of war in the border area.

  I could no longer suppress my curiosity about the rumored zig-gurat, and Norman moved his chair closer as I asked Paolo Costa if it were true that a Sumerian temple-pyramid had been found in Oman.

  "Something has been found," he rephed to my surprise. **Whether it is Sumerian I cannot say, but it shares all its characteristics with a Sumerian zigguratl"

  We wasted no time. By sunrise we were already outside the pohce gates of the port, and with Paolo Costa as guide and the harbor authority bus for transport we began om: view of a part of the world where tourists are not admitted. From the supermodern settlements in the outskirts of Muscat every fifty miles seemed to take us an extra millennium back through the ages until we passed the ancient town of Nizwa and reached the ageless mountain town of Al Hamra, about 150 miles from Muscat. The sultan's new road had just barely reached there, but electricity and water pipes not yet. Nor was there any sign yet of transistor radios, pop drinks or plastic bags. And apart from the fact that all men under forty-five had used the new road to move to Muscat for paid work, life in this attractive town was hardly changed since the days of the ancient Middle East civihzations. The setting was again as out of the Bible, or rather, as out of the Koran.

  From the mustard-colored clusters of tall Arab mud-brick houses perched on naked rock, barefooted women in colorful costumes walked hke queens, with pottery vessels crowning their heads, along the footpaths to the old aqueducts in the shade of the date-palm plantations. Their tinkhng jewelry, like the silver daggers in the belts of the men, looked like collectors' items. Back from the moist soil reserved for growing crops they reentered the narrow rock streets. Steep and polished to a shine by hoofs and feet, these much-trodden passages climb from the evergreen palm gardens between the sand-colored houses seemingly into the blue sky. The dark and cool arcades were crowded with robed men sitting or standing, thinking or talking, as unconcerned about the clock as were the calmly ruminating desert goats and httle pack donkeys

  sharing the shade with them. Never have I seen so many men resembling the popular image of "Uncle Sam," with mighty beard and prominent nose. Never, except on the pre-Columbian stone reliefs of the unidentified Olmecs who brought civilization to the aborigines in the Gulf of Mexico long before the arrival of the Europeans. Something in the bearing and the tolerant expression of some of these relaxed men made them look like old and learned sages. Their indulgent comportment as we tramped about in their arcades made us feel like schoolboys playing in front of professors assembled to ponder upon the mysteries of life. These men could probably not write. But men just like them had first invented script. Their ancestors had started the busy clock of civilization ticking and had passed it on to us, who have made it tick a thousandfold faster and barely have begim to see our own fallacies which we now send out to all customers at the ends of our roads. Al Hamra had been built on rock and the impressive buildings will siuA^ive to be seen by generations of tourists who may come to future Oman. But the houses will appear hke empty snail shells on the beach, for not even an omnipotent sultan can drive young men backward along the road built to the streets of Muscat.

  The hving past we experienced in some of the still-inhabited towns and villages of Oman's moimtain valleys gave warmth and meaning to the empty prehistoric ruins we were shown in their immediate vicinity. Most significant to us from Tigris were the remarkable vestiges of former activity at Tawi Arja, in the dry river plains of Wadi al Jitti in northern Oman. To get there Paolo Costa drove us in his Land Cruiser northward along the Batinah plains, the coastal lowlands we had seen from the sea. We recognized our anchorage off Suwadi islands, and continued northward on a good road until we reached the modest outskirts of the onetime capital, Sohar, about three hours' fast driving from Muscat. Here another new road left the coastal plain and led straight inland toward the wild mountains we had first seen from the opposite side, while sailing to escape from the gulf. Rolling hills began to rise around us and we saw to our excitement that all were capped with rows of old stone towers strikingly like those of Bahrain. Costa confirmed that many of these round towers had now been opened; they were burial mounds, and dated from the third millennium B.C., Sumerian time, as on Bahrain. Not only were they contemporary with those of Bahrain, they even had the same cross-shaped inner stone cham-

  bers. These prehistoric towers ahnost seemed like cairns set on either side of the wadi to mark the road inland toward the temple structure to which we were heading.

  Before long Costa drove sharply oflF the road and we biunped along the bottom of a canyon with nothing but camel tracks that wound ahead into a hidden world of dried-up riverbeds and small alluvial flats where nothing grew except some sparse and twisted thorn trees with inedible berries. In the whole area we saw not a single house, but in a few places far apart we passed seminomad famihes hving in a sort of symbiosis with a desert tree. Their primitive dwellings consisted of simple platforms suspended among the crooked branches of big thorn trees and waUed in hke a nest by smaller branches. All the sparse clothing and utensils of the residents hung about on the branches safely above the reach of the goats, and the tree seemed to thrive from the rent paid by the tenants. We were told that even when these roaming tree dwellers moved into a real house they would leave the floor empty and hang all their possessions from the ceiling and on the walls.

  In this barren landscape we reached the biggest of the dry riverbeds, known as Wadi al Jitti. Like a broad motorway paved with smooth pebbles, it wound through a sandy plain flanked by hiUs and peaks where worked chips of jasper and a prehistoric stone circle were the only trace of man to be seen between the sparse thorn trees. Along the inland horizon, still far away, were the tall jagged crests of the west coast mountain chains, rising one behind the other in ever-higher rows, as if set to block the passage to both Saudi Arabia and the gulf. In contrast, the wide wadi ran like a flat gravel road in the opposite direction, straight to Sohar and the open seaside beach from where we had now come. Without a road we drove on until we rounded a black, conical peak that served Costa as a landmark, and on the open plain before us lay what we had come for.

  We were still in the Land Cruiser when some large chocolate-colored boulders, superimposed to form the terraced wall of a partly buried building, struck my eyes before Costa even had time to point in that direction. It was difficult to remain calmly seated until we came to a stop at close range. This was what I had hoped for but had not dared to believe. There was so longer any doubt.

  As Norman and I walked up to the structure with Costa, Norris rushed into position with his sound camera to record the first ar-

  rival in untold centuries of reed-boat voyagers from Mesopotamia at what may once have been a Sumerian sanctuary. We stood at the foot of a partly ruined, manmade mound, stiU weU enough preserved to show its main form. While we were gazing at the big, brown boulders in the walls, Costa opened with a solemn speech: "Unless we can make a thorough excavation of this site," he said, "we caimot say whether it is possible to date it to the third millennium B.C., but we can say that this huge structure is a unique feature, square, stepped and made of random stones with perfect masonry work; it is in the middle of a plain surrounded by hills and in this position is obviously not a fortification, so we can say that it is certainly a temple."

  Norman and I listened and swallowed the big mound with our eyes as Costa took us to the side where a long, narrow ramp led from the ground up to the top terrace. Gherman was almost beside himself with excitement; this was a stepped pyramid of the type we had so often seen together among pre-Columbian ruins in Mexico. At the same time, the whole concept was that of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. As Costa emphasized, nothing Hke it was known in any other pari: of Oman or the entire Arabian peninsula. Huge natural boulders had been used to wall in a rectangular structure that rose above the plain in compact, superimposed terraces, four of which were seen above
ground. The four comers pointed in the cardinal directions, and the well-preserved, stone-lined ramp led centrally up one side in the fashion characteristic of the temple-pyramids of the sun worshipers of Mesopotamia and pre-Columbian America. Whoever might have built it did not follow Moslem norms, but it struck me that the concept was also the same as that of the Dilmun temple GeofiErey Bibby had excavated on Bahrain and described as a mini-ziggurat.

  It was impossible to say how much of the structure, if any, was lost in the ground, but, barely emerging from the hard-packed terrain, the top of a boulder wall was visible, enclosing a rectangular temple court extending from one side of the terraced moimd. Nobody had yet attempted excavation. There were vestiges of other walls and an elaborate system of aqueducts all aroimd. Even traces of stonemasonry on a nearby hill, directly overlooking the temple-pyramid. I was amazed that nobody had started digging.

  Costa shrugged his shoulders. TTiere had been no time. With his assistants, two of whom came with us and saw the temple-

  mound for the first time, Costa was busy surveying archaeological sites all over Oman. This discovery was new; the site was stumbled upon when the sultan recently permitted a general archaeological and geological survey of Oman. Four years ago the wadi had been visited by a group of mining geologists representing Prospection Oman Limited. They operated with Land-Rovers as part of a mineral exploration program started by Dr. C. C. Huston in collaboration with His Majesty Sultan Qaboos. The sites discovered had been reported by Prospection Limited to the Oman Government, but as the report was mainly concerned with mining possibilities, the news of the temple mound had barely begun to leak out. A Harvard expedition, led by J. Humphries, had visited the temple site and briefly reported the existence in the mining area of "a ziggurat of Mesopotamian type."^ The survey was mainly of interest for economic minerahzation. The early Arabs had clearly tried to benefit from the presence of some of these prehistoric mines, but there was still much to be extracted if the long-forgotten mines were reopened.