BahrainThe findings of a Danish dig which began 50 years ago rewrote the history of the Persian Gulf, reports John Armstrong in Manama, Bahrain
A team of Danish archaeologists, some of them very ancient, made a pilgrimage to the small island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf last week.
The occasion was the belated golden jubilee celebrations of a dig at Bahrain Fort, north of the capital Manama, begun in 1954 by the distinguished Danish archaeologist PV Glob. The findings have rewritten the early history of the island and the region.
Glob and the many other Danish archaeologists who worked on the site during the 25 years of excavations uncovered evidence that Bahrain and the east coast of Saudi Arabia are the site of the legendary civilisation of Dilmun, referred to as "paradise" or the Garden of Eden in a Sumerian text of 3,200 BC.
To celebrate the jubilee, a new permanent exhibition of finds from the Bahrain Fort dig, and from subsequent digs at many other sites on the island by Danish, French and British archaeologists, was opened in the presence of the visitors at the National Museum of Bahrain by the minister for education, Dr Majid Al Nuaimi.
PV Glob died in 1985 but one member of his original team, Karen Frifelt, who is now 80, travelled to Bahrain for the event.
Also present were about a dozen other Danish archaeologists who worked in later summer seasons at Bahrain Fort, living for months in palm huts on-site in temperatures sometimes above 50 degrees centigrade.
The Danes were joined in the nostalgic celebrations by some of their former French and British colleagues who subsequently excavated a second millennium BC temple in the northwest of the island, and burial mounds inland dating to 3,800 BC.
Welcoming his European guests to the exhibition, organised in co-operation with the Moesgård Museum in Denmark, Dr Al Nuaimi spoke of the contribution of archaeology in fostering a sense of national identity among Bahrainis and pride in the antiquity of their civilisation.
The millennia of early history which had been progressively revealed since the first dig in 1954 were now part of the school curriculum, he said.
Later the visitors were given a tour of the newly restored Bahrain Fort, formerly a 16th-century Portuguese fortress, which adjoins the dig site, and they were guests of King Hamad Al Khalifa at a dramatic presentation of Bahrain's history by the Gilgamesh Theatre.
The Danish String Orchestra was flown in to give a concert at the museum auditorium and on their final day the archaeologists were brought on a tour of their old dig sites, many now abandoned to the elements.
The director of the Moesgård Museum, Jan Madsen, described the visit as a dream come true: "I remember as a boy reading about the Danish expeditions to Bahrain. To be here now, next to all the items I read about and whose discovery I wished I had been present at, is almost unbelievable." He said he would be discussing proposals for future digs on the island with Bahraini officials, and plans for closer links between his museum and the National Museum in Bahrain.
According to the National Museum director Abdulrahman Musameh, the 19th-century and early-20th-century archaeologists who first investigated the 150,000 burial mounds that are a unique feature of Bahrain, and who used dynamite to open the tombs, concluded that the island was no more than a gigantic burial ground. They saw no signs of human settlement.
But the Danes, working with new maps and elevations prepared by the oil companies then prospecting in Bahrain, discovered a city buried under a gigantic mound beside Bahrain Fort. The mound was so large it had been considered a natural landscape feature.
Six separate periods of habitation were uncovered, including early Islamic and Greek cities, with the earliest layer dating to the middle of the third millennium BC. Later excavations in other locations on the island found other cities and temples, indicating a population large enough to account for the burial mounds.
One of the pieces of evidence which convinced the experts that Bahrain is the site of Dilmun was the discovery at the fort and elsewhere of about 1,000 stamp seals of merchants and government officials of a unique "Dilmun" design. According to Mr Musameh these records, carved on wood, stone and metal, and the circumstances in which they were found, prove the existence on the island of a substantial civilisation, commercially and politically independent, in the second and third millennia BC.
Similar seals found in the ruins of Sumerian cities in present-day Iraq, to the north of the Gulf, and in the Indus Valley in Pakistan, to the south and east, also suggest close trading relations between these first early outposts of human civilisation.
"We have only excavated a small part of the Bahrain Fort site. I am confident future investigations will discover the archives of Dilmun," the director said.
Future investigators would be advised to move quickly. Bahrain is a tiny island with a growing population, now approaching one million. There is huge pressure on land for housing and development. About one quarter of the burial mounds have already been destroyed and many of those that remain are on highly sought-after privately owned land.
"We can't compete with the developers on the increasing price of land, and our case for more funds from the government is weaker when it is put in the balance with the need for new houses and roads. In the past we didn't mind living with our parents and our grandparents but this generation of young people all want their own houses," complained one of the museum curators.
Mr Musameh concedes that the museum doesn't even have the funds or the trained personnel to conserve the sites that have already been excavated, and says they are only beginning the expensive process of presentation, marketing and promotion which can stimulate the development of a profitable cultural tourism sector. The oil is running out in Bahrain and they are diversifying into financial services and tourism.
The hope he and the archaeologists share is that a decision expected this summer from Unesco on a proposal to designate Bahrain Fort as a world heritage site will stimulate national and international interest, and loosen the government's purse strings.
"We need a larger umbrella over us now than just the government," Mr Musameh said.