Earlier tumuli were usually small with crudely built stone chambers, and the gradual appearance of the more elaborate mounds is considered indicative of a gradual increase in social complexity, including the rise of an elite class. Many of the larger tumuli (called “Royal” mounds in the literature) feature two storied tombs, complete with a small passage or vertical shaft entryway. They date to the Dilmun era of Bahraini history ( public domain ) Terp Laursen, “Early Dilmun and its rulers: New evidence of the burial mounds of the elite and the development of social complexity, c. Chronologically, ring walls initially appear surrounding some Early Type mounds, and appear later among larger Royal mounds, including 18 of the tumuli near the village of Aali, ranging from 20 to 52 meters in diameter with outer rings between 50 and 94 meters. These outer rings are thought to indicate the mounds of particularly high status individuals of one or more ruling lineages. A 1959 aerial survey revealed that 46 out of 75,023 tumuli observed featured the ring walls, and they also appear surrounding some of the Dilmun tumuli on the adjacent Saudi Arabian coast. Some of the tumuli are surrounded by traces of perfectly circular walls of highly stacked, carefully placed limestone blocks, which are typically twice the diameter of the inner mound itself. The majority of the Bahrain tumuli were constructed between 23 BC, and range between 1-3 meters in height and 3-11 meters in diameter, although there are several much larger examples. Map of ancient Dilmun ( Saudi Arabia Tourism Guide ) It may have been just this natural connection to the mythic abyss and the underworld, which resulted in one of the greatest archaeological mysteries in the world-the construction of over 200,000 burial mounds in Bahrain. There are also off shore springs beneath the salt sea where fresh water bubbles up from the massive underground aquifer beneath the Gulf. The island of Bahrain was once littered with natural springs, and many of those not overrun by development are today still surrounded with the ruins of sacred shrines from many eras. Positioned between Mesopotamia, India, and the East African Coast, Bahrain became the host of influential middlemen trafficking copper ore, diordite, gold, tin, ivory, and semi-precious stones into Sumer, Babylon and Assyria until the mid-second millennium B.C., activities attributed to people of the Dilmun Civilization, which occupied both Bahrain and the neighboring Arabian coast. Some archaeologists (including Peter Bruce Cornwall and David Rohl) have identified the mythic Dilmun with the Island of Bahrain, located south of Eridu in the Persian Gulf. What makes the concept of Dilmun so unique among the many mythic locales in ancient literature, is that many researchers consider it to have been an actual place, although there are several candidates for it’s true identity.ĭilmun's God of Water ( Prathap MSK / Flickr ) Various deities were believed to have made Dilmun their home, including Enki himself.Īs the Sumerian Poseidon, Enki was the “lord of the absu (abyss)” in ancient cosmology, and was thought to have sent his sages, the apkallu from out of the watery abyss to partner with the pre-flood kings of Babylonia. These waters transformed a formerly dry land into a literal garden of the gods, where the mother goddess Ninhursag tended sacred plants. The land of Dilmun was filled with divinely ordained and abundant water sources, brought forth from the subterranean realm by Utu/Shamash-the sun god-at the behest of Enki. In Sumerian mythology, the mythical Dilmun was known as the bright and pure land, a paradise where sickness and death did not exist.
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