The Tigris Expedition

by Heyerdahl, Thor

  Mines. This rang a bell. A stone's throw from the temple-mound the sun shone on some unusual piles of stone chips or cinders of pretty colors; red, brown, violet, yellow and green. This was slag.

  "Remember I told you about the prehistoric copper mines," said Costa. "They are here!"

  The parts of a long-unsolved puzzle seemed to fit logically together, and it made me hold my breath a moment as Costa pointed to a nearby mountain, behind the hiU overlooking the temple-mound. It looked like a huge, rotten, rusty-red tooth, almost worn through at the middle. This was no eroded crater. Not the work of nature. What he pointed to was clearly the work of man.

  "One of the prehistoric quarries," said Costa. "Everywhere in this vicinity you will see evidence of early copper mining activity."

  I began to see a meaning in the strange location of a seemingly Sumerian ziggurat. Fresh in my mind since my researches in Iraq and our days with GeoflErey Bibby in Bahrain were the texts of some of the old Sumerian clay tablets. I began to add two and two together and could hardly keep my suspicions to myself.

  Costa told us that an estimated 40,000 tons of slag were scattered about the foot of that one mountain. Prospection Limited crews had discovered a total of some forty-six such ancient mine

  sites in northern Oman. Costa was itching to take us farther inland to another site where an estimated 100,000 tons of slag were heaped in piles. A whole mountain had been removed by prehistoric miners who had turned it into a valley covered by multicolored slag to look like a giant painter's palette. Here prehistoric copper miners had been crushing the slag from their many small furnaces.

  Bumping through trackless canyons and dried-up riverbeds we reached what Costa considered the most impressive site in Oman, and we were astounded by the immensity of the prehistoric activities whidi had transformed the whole landscape into a sort of giant arena or painted outdoor theater. Of the former mountain nothing was left by the copper miners but a monumental metaUic outcrop, formed like a triumphal arch on the low hill at the side of a battlefield filled with multicolored debris. Perhaps this majestic gateway was left there on purpose to commemorate the original opening through which the miners had first worked their way into the copper mountain that they had gradually caused to disappear.

  I could no longer keep my deductions to myself. "Makan," I exclaimed as Costa led us into the great gateway and turned to show us the spectacular sight. "Yes," he confirmed, "this may well be Makan, the legendary Copper Mountain of the old Sumerians. There is no copper nearer to Mesopotamia."

  I recalled how Geoffrey Bibby had taken us down between the walls of the prehistoric port city he had excavated on the island of Bahrain, to show us where he had found aU the scraps of imworked copper in the open square just behind the gate in the sea wall. He had emphasized that this was evidence to prove that local merchants had sailed to ports outside the gulf in Sumerian times to fetch this important metal, so dearly required by all Bronze Age cultures. The import of copper had been of paramoimt importance to the foimders of Mesopotamian civilizations, as copper was not locally available in the twin-river country or elsewhere in the gulf.

  Perhaps more than anyone else, Bibby had speculated on the origins and transport routes of the Mesopotamian copper trade, and showed how texts on the ancient tablets recorded that the imports had come by sea from a land known to the ancient Sumerian scribes as Makan or Magan. Two tablets sHghtly over four thousand years old, found at Ur, represent receipts left by a Sumerian merchant for goods received by him from the main temple. One hsted sixty talents of wool, seventy garments, one hundred and eighty sldns, and

  six kur (five hundred gallons) of good sesame oil, as "merchandise for buying copper." The second tablet is more specific: garments and wool were received as "merchandise for buying copper from Makan."

  Bibby had foimd references to Makan in Mesopotamian inscriptions dating from the days of Sargon of Akkad, about 2300 B.C., when he boasted of ships from Makan tying up alongside his quay together with ships from Dilmun and Meluhha. King Sargon's grandson claimed that he "marched against the country of Makan and personally took captive Mannu-dannu, King of Makan." And Gudea, a governor of Lagash aroimd 2130 B.C., imported diorite from the mountains of Makan to fashion numerous stone statues, and some of these still exist with incised inscriptions recording the fact. But references to "copper from Makan" or to merchandise "for the purchase of copper, loaded on a ship for Makan" petered out about 1800 B.C., according to Bibby. From then on, he found, there seemed to be no more direct sailings to Makan; now all the copper trade went through the markets of Dilmun. But Makan was still known as the primary producer. There were still hsted references to "diorite: produce of Makan," and "copper: produce of Makan," as distinct from "palm trees: produce of Dilmun, produce of Makan, produce of Meluhha."^ Whereas the Mesopotamian supreme gods, and Ziusudra, the survivor from the Flood, were intimately linked with the trading post of Dilmun, there are no mythological texts referring to Makan. The gods of the Sumerians never went there. All references to Makan were commercial and matter-of-fact.*

  • In the days when Bibby's excavations on Bahrain began to give strong support to the theory that this island was Dilmun, many scholars had already started to postulate dieories as to the whereabouts of Makan too. One school of thought would place Makan in Africa; thus the noted authority Kramer believed that Makan was probably Egypt, and others had suggested Sudan or perhaps Ethiopia. The reason for these assumptions was a hint in late Assyrian texts. When Assyrian kings around the years 700-650 b.c. waged wars against Egypt, they left inscriptions placing both Makan and Meluhha somewhere to the south of that country, after having reached Lower Egypt overland from the Mediterranean side. But the Assyrians were presumably ignorant of how far to the south of Egypt these two legendary countries lay, for direct trade between Mesopotamia and Makan had ceased over a thousand years earlier.

  The second school of thought placed Makan closer to the Sumerian ports. WooUey, for instance, said that "diorite was brought by sea from Magan, some point on the Persian Gulf." As to copper he was more specific: "copper came from Oman, as is shown by analysis of the ores. . . ."^ Bibby,^ too, supported this latter view, partly because he felt that Makan had to be within fairly easy

  Not until after our return from the Tigris expedition did I get further news about the temple-mound, when I had a surprise visit from Paolo Costa and his wife Germana to my home in Italy. They had then started to excavate the big mound at Tawi Arja. The centuries of exposiure that had eroded the structure itself had not managed to accumulate humus strata on the hard-packed sinf ace of the wind-swept and occasionally flood-washed plains on which it stood, and neither potsherds nor other datable remains older than the Moslem period had been found. But imder the dirt on top of the pyramid Costa had found the badly eroded remains of a foundation wall of adobe: a small edifice or erection of some sort had stood on the summit platform, built from big square, sun-dried bricks of the type used in ancient Mesopotamia.

  As a cautious scholar he refrained from any hasty deductions for lack of conclusive evidence. There was neither carbon nor written tablets to help date the strange structure. It remained unique in the Arabian peninsula, alone as a huge non-Moslem edifice in an area with forty-six old, abandoned copper mines, the only copper within reasonable reach of merchant mariners from Ur in Mesopotamia and their trading partners on the gulf island of Bahrain.

  But even if no Sumerian vase is ever found in the barren landscape of the wadi and the surrounding mines, geography and geology combine to argue with rather conclusive strength that northern Oman was the copper country of Makan to the old Sumerians. There is no competitor for that honor in the gulf area. It is anyone's right to speculate as to the identity of the seemingly misplaced mini-ziggurat at Tawi Arja. An enormous amount of labor had been put into its construction. It was not a fort and not an Arab mosque,

  sailing distance from Dilmun. But also because a large number of copper objects from Mesopotamia
of the period 3000-2000 B.C. had been analyzed and found to contain a slight trace of nickel. Now nickel is fairly rare as an impurity in copper, but a similar slight intermixture had been ascertained in a single specimen of copper ore coming from the territory of the sultan of Muscat and Oman, which was stiU closed in the rigid days of Qaboos' father. The sample was reported to be from "ancient workings*' and found in the valley nm-ning inland from the port of Sohar.

  I was later to leam, through a letter from Mr. G. J. JefiFs of Prospection Limited in Canada, tiiat it had been the brief reference to this one copper sample from Oman in Bibby's book Looking for DUmun that had prompted their company to smrvey the forgotten mines of north Oman with the consent of Sultan Qaboos, a recent survey that led to Mr. Jeffs' discovery of the sites Paolo Costa was now able to show us.

  but it had all the aspects of a ceremonial structure and one known in the Old World only in Mesopotamia, with a single exception in the recently excavated Dilmun mini-ziggurat on Bahrain. We ourselves had sailed a Sumerian ship from Bahrain to the ocean coast of Oman. In Sumerian terms, we had sailed a ma-gur from Dilmun to Makan. It would seem hard to find a theory more plausible than to suspect that the unidentified structiure discovered by the mining prospectors at Tawi Ar|a had been built by, or for the service of, the sun-worshiping merchant mariners from the great civilizations in the twin-river country, who had come here in large numbers because it was the nearest site for mining and smelting copper.

  None of the vestiges of prehistoric ingenuity we saw in Oman impressed us more than the subterranean falaj. In an area where a plain of sand and gravel stretched as far as the eye could see we were taken to the edge of an open hole in the ground, which made us recoil because it seemed quite bottomless. A stone-lined shaft descended for at least thirty vertical feet until lost in pitch darkness. The ground around the opening was shghtly raised like a small crater with dirt and gravel brought up from below. When we looked over the desert we could see similar craters at intervals in a straight line toward both horizons. We learned that deep down in the groimd these shafts were interconnected by a subterranean aqueduct dug for miles upon miles with such precision that the water flowed in an even descent irrespective of hills or other irregularities on the smf ace terrain.

  Near the source a falaj had to run at surface level, or it might even be elevated, to gain the required dechnation, and we were speechless when we saw an open aqueduct coming down the hillside above a river, then passing under the river and up on the other side! At the crossing point the water tumbled into the top of a chimneylike stone tower, then passed beneath the riverbed to come up again through the top of a slightly lower tower on the other side. From then on it flowed elevated again along another hillside in the direction of the sun-scorched plains, where it was to begin its long and cool journey deep underground. We were told that some of the falaj ran for many miles at an incredible depth below deserts and canyons. Some were maintained by the present Arabs and a few were perhaps even built by them, but the origins of this incredible display of engineering skill and mass labor was lost in antiquity. Whoever had first built them, the falaj of prehistoric Oman gave to

  me a logical explanation to a puzzle connected with the prehistoric water conductors discovered by Bibby and his collaborators on Bahrain. These Dihnun aqueducts, too, were found deep below the sand, with the same pecuhar stone-lined "chimneys" rising at intervals to the surface. In all likelihood, hke those of Makan, those of Dihnun had been built intentionally imderground and had not been covered afterward by wind-blown sand drifts.

  But an even more apparent and mobile link between Dihnun and Makan became clear as we drove in Costa's Land Cruiser down the broad and flat wadi that led from the temple site and the sur-roimding mines to the open beach at Sohar. This old town and former capital lay where a broad river must once have had its outlet in the sea, in the remote millennia before the copper miners had put an end to the inland forests. The enormous smelting activities testified to by the remains of prehistoric slag shows that here, as in so many other parts of the Middle East and elsewhere, man has misused his environment by turning woodlands into deserts and rivers into wadis. The smelting had required enormous quantities of wood that once had been available locally. The bottom of the wadi was smooth, water-worn river pebbles. The forest and river were gone. There was no other reason for placing the onetime capital of Oman here but the outlet of a broad watercourse from a once most important mining area.

  The wide sandy beach stretched for over a hundred miles along the local coast, open toward the ocean. We reached the white sand in front of some modest huts of mud and reed mats at the outskirts of Sohar. Friendly Arab fishermen were sitting in the sun mending nets. Old women and young girls in colorful gowns, but with black masks on their faces, stood calmly in front of their mat walls instead of running into hiding as in the inland villages. Out at sea was a man in a small vessel struggling with long oars to come back to shore. Soon he entered the moderate surf and came riding straight up on the sand. He pulled his boat ashore, fuU of ghttering fish. His boat was a reed boat, or more correctly, a boat of slender pahn stems precisely of the type we had seen on Bahrain. There were three more of the same kind pulled ashore where the fisherman came in. The name for this land of boat was shasha. They were now gradually disappearing. We were told that they were used for landing cargo from the dhows, which had to anchor outside.

  I inspected the shasha with keen attention. They were built just Hke the farteh of Bahrain, so similar in all details that we found no difPerence at aU but the name. Two Arab nations on opposite sides of the Hormuz Strait had inherited the same type of wa-tercraft, but in times so ancient that they smrvived with different names.

  If modem regulations had not forced us all the way down to Muscat, we would have anchored at a convenient depth off this beach, just as the present dhows and the former ma-gurs from Ur and Dilmun, aU of which were too big to come right in to the sand. We could just visuahze Tigris at anchor in the clean blue water outside this beach, with the local shasha coming out to give us shore-to-ship service in the same way they had served merchant mariners who came to load tons of copper in Sumerian times. Tigris had been idle in the polluted water of Port Qaboos for a full week now. The reed ship, which according to current assumptions would waterlog too fast to leave a river, already had seaweed growing on its bottom as long as Neptune's beard, and crabs and sea hares were breeding among the bundles. We were in no hurry. We were all fascinated by the rare opportimity of visiting Makan.

  It was not imtil my retmn to Europe that I reread the ancient Naturalis Historia^ written exactly nineteen centuries earlier by Phny the Elder, to see if the Romans in their days had any information about Oman or its people. I was not a httle surprised when I found Pliny referring to an Arabian people called the Macas (gentem Arabiae Macas), and that their territory was found by crossing a strait merely five miles wide separating them from the eastern boundaries of the land ruled by the Persian kings, an area where copper was mined. The narrow strait was quite clearly the one known to us as the Hormuz Strait, and the Macas were thus the people of northern Oman. That the Macas hved in a land known to themselves and to the Sumerians of antiquity as Makan would make perfect sense indeed.

  Chapter 8

  TIGRIS AND THE

  SUPERSHIPS:

  THE VOYAGE

  TO PAKISTAN

  "P

  RTSIDE row, starboard rest! . . . Both sides rowl . . . Ready . . . rooowl . . . Ready . . . rooowl . . /'

  I felt like a galley slavedriver as I stood high and dry in the stem, steering while my friends toiled rhythmically, their sweat pouring and their long oars sweeping in unison like the legs of a centipede.

  It was an exciting test, and one I had been looking forward to but never yet attempted. We wanted to row oiu: reed ship out of port, and, with Tom and Carlo in our mbber dinghy to film and photograph, only eight men were left to man the oars: four on either side and myself at a rudder oar. To se
e the men I had to balance high on the bridge railing with a grip on the upper of the two tillers we had fastened to either of the long steering shafts.

  **Ready . . . rooowl . . . Ready . . . rooowl . . .*' The men put the last ounce of their strength into propelling the heavy ship through the water. The wet berdi, nth superstmctures and full load, must now have weighed close on fifty tons, so each man had to shift the weight of a floating elephant. If we were to lose control, the shghtest gust of wind or tidal cxurent in the harbor would force

  us into involuntary grips with hulls, mooring lines and anchor chains of the ships large and small docked or anchored everywhere aroimd us. The eyes of spectators watching us from ships and shore probably gave the straining men an extra lu-ge not to give in.

  We had been up before sunrise to try to carry out this maneuver and fight oiu: way out of the big Qaboos harbor before the wind rose and people got out of bed. But somehow the news of our departure had spread faster than we were able to take farewell of all oiu local friends, and people who could not get in through the police gates had lined up on the main city road along the bay. The crews of all the ships in the harbor were also standing as silent spectators when at last we began to move, pulling our bow away from the pier with the anchor rope and pushing oflF.