Dilmun, the Lost Bronze Age Civilisation in the Gulf

Ancient history, Archaeology, Geography, Regional History
Modern Bahrain (image: worldatlas.com)

The culmination of archaeological excavations on the island state of Bahrain during the 20th century (see endnote) saw the emergence of a fully-formed Bronze Age city that had been buried for 4,000 years. The Saar settlement, as it is known, was found to comprise two sections, a residential zone and some distance away a “honeycomb” cemetery. Archaeologists working at the site described Saar as having all the elements of a modern city including houses, restaurants, commercial outlets and a place of worship [Sylvia Smith, ‘Bahrain digs unveil one of oldest civilisations’, BBC News, 20-May-2013, www.bbc.com].

Excavated sites on Bahrain (image: archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/)

The great Qal’at tell: Saar is the not the only Bahraini site to yield evidence of ancient civilisation. Located at the northern point of the island is Qal’atal-Bahrain (Fort of Bahrain), a vast tell (artificial mound) 18-hectare in size, which when excavated revealed three early Dilmun cities (dating to 2,800BC) and one later Greek city (200BC), all built on top of one another!(ᗩ) Like Saar, Qal’atal-Bahrain had multiple human uses, public, residential, religious as well as military, and was in all likelihood the capital of the ancient Dilmun state. There are also approximately 170,000 burial mounds, in Bahrain occupying some 5% of the of the island (Smith)()…including the royal tombs at A’ali which are 15 metres in height.

The Fort , Qal’at al-Bahrain (source: UNESCO World Heritage Centre)

The archaeological finds pieced together testify to the existence of an ancient civilisation known as Dilmun (also rendered as Telmun), which means in the Akkadian language “the place where the sun rises”. The Dilmun region in antiquity—populated by an East Semitic people—stretched over an area comprising Bahrain, the islands of Failaka (today part of Kuwait) and Tarout (now part of Saudi Arabia) and a coastal strip on the East Arabian mainland.

Mesopotamia, the Gulf, Dilmun (image: peterborougharchaeology.org/)

Dilmun as entrepôt for north and south: Dilmuth is mentioned in Near Eastern historical sources, in Sumerian economic texts of the Fourth Millennium BC, written on cuneiform clay tablets, which identify Dilmun as a regional commercial centre [‘Dilmun’, Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com]. Seen from the early Mesopotamian civilisations’ perspective, the key strategic location of Dilmun was central to trade. Sumer (and Babylon) wanted the luxury commodities produced by the Indus Valley civilisations (Meluha) – spices, precious stones, ivory, etc. But to facilitate trade with the Indian merchants and secure these highly desirable goods, the Sumerians sought to avoid the overland route which took them through a habitually hostile Persia…the sea route via the Gulf and Dilmun allowed Sumer to bypass Persian territory altogether [‘The Sumerian Connection’, (Jon Mandaville), Saudi Aramco World, (1980), www.archives.aramco.org]. By this circumstance Dilmun was able to establish itself as the hub for trade between Mesopotamia and South Asia. Dilmun merchants at one point maintained a monopoly over the supply of copper, a precious commodity produced in the mines of Oman (then called Magan), also much in demand in the cities of Mesopotamia as a metal of improved durability for weapons, utensils and tools(ᑕ). Dilmun also had commercial ties with other cities in the Near East, with Elam in Iran/Iraq, Alba in Syria and Haitian in Turkey (Smith).

“Boats from the land of Dilmun carried the wood”, inscription on a relief of Ur-Nanshe (c.2550–2500 BC)

By some time around 2,050 BC an independent kingdom of Dilmun was at the apex of its powers. Control over the Persian/Arabian Gulf trading routes had made Dilmun a very prosperous state. Agriculture played its part in Dilmun’s commercial ascent as well. The countryside was fertile land both for the farming of livestock and the growing of diverse crops due to the presence of artesian springs.

Early Dilmun burial mounds (photo: Danish Gulf Expedition/Moesgaard Museum)

Decline of Dilmun: From the mid-Second Millennium Dilmun started to enter a decline. Beginning before 1,500 BC the kingdom(ᗪ) is conquered by the first of a series of dominant regional powers – the Sealand Dynasty, followed by the Middle Assyrian Empire, the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the Kessite Dynasty (Neo-Babylonian Empire). Dilmun was further weakened after 1,000 BC by the flourishing of piracy in the Gulf. By 800 BC it is no longer a trading power, having entered a Hellenistic period, it becomes Tylos. By the time of the fall of Babylon, 539 BC, the Dilmun civilisation had been abandoned.

Saar site

Dilmun in the Sumerian creation myth: In Mesopotamian mythology Dilmun held special significance to Sumerians, referred to regularly in texts as a paradisal place to the south…a pure, virginal and pristine land which the (Sumerian) god Enki provides with abundant fresh water, a place where its inhabitants are no longer plagued by the ravages of disease and old age [‘Paradise Found? The Archaeology of Bahrain’ www.peterborougharchaeology.org]. The heavenly characterisation of Dilmun has led some scholars to hypothesise that arguably it may be the location of the Biblical Garden of Eden(ᗴ).

Endnote: The key pioneering work on the location and unearthing of Dilmun civilisation was undertaken by archaeologists Geoffrey Bibby and Prof Peter Glob in the 1950s. Bibby and Glob led a Danish expedition which was the first to excavate the ruins of the ancient civilisation at the Qal’at and Saar sites and date it to the early Dilmun era.

Dilmun excavations (photo: cphpost.dk)

(ᗩ) there is also a Portuguese fort at the Qal’at site built during their occupancy of Bahrain in the 16-17th centuries

() prompting one academic to conjecture that perhaps as many as 20,000 people lived in Dilmun at the ancient civilisation’s peak [C.E. Larson, Life and Land Use on the Bahrain Islands (1983)]

(ᑕ) Dilmun itself exported dates and pearls, the latter especially prized for their quality, thought to be the result of the mixing of salt-water and submarine spring-waters (www.ngwa.org)

(ᗪ) Virtually nothing is known of the Dilmun dynasties or rulers other than the names of some of the kings, garnered from discovered cuneiform inscriptions (eg, Yagli-El, Ilī-ippašra)

() also echoed in the great epic poem of the late Second Millennium, the Gilgamesh Epic

Odysseus Beyond Antiquity: Myth, Hero and Anti-Hero, a Literary Archetype for Contemporary Story-Telling

Cinema, Creative Writing, Geography, Literary & Linguistics, Performing arts

For scholar and layperson alike, the dawn of story-telling in the West if not the earliest literary text, coincides with Homer and his two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. Dating very roughly from somewhere around 700 BCE, Homer (traditionally thought to be a blind Ionian poet – see PostScript) composed his two (very) long poems in hexameter form to be read aloud at festivals and such public events. The Homeric epics were spread throughout the Greek world and beyond by professional reciters of poetry called rhapsodes (sort of travelling bards) [Beaty Rubens & Oliver Taplin, An Odyssey Round Odysseus: The Man and His Story Traced Through Time and Place, (1989)]. 

Epic of Gilgamesh

Homer’s works are generally considered the foundation point of what is commonly referred to as the Western canon, though the Iliad and the Odyssey are predated by other foundation texts emanating from the earlier Sumerian civilisation, particularly the Epic of Gilgamesh (ca 2,100 BCE), comprising poems and tales, the first known work of fiction [‘What is the oldest known piece of literature?’, (Evan Andrews), History, 22-Aug-2018,  www.history.com]. 

Cattle of the Sun

The second of the epic poems, the Odyssey, deals with the perilous and action-packed 10-year journey of its eponymous hero Odysseus back to his home in Ithaca after the Trojan War (the Iliad). In 2018 a poll by the BBC of over 100 international authors, academics, journalists and critics chose the Odyssey as the most influential work in Western literature. Some of the reasons given for making the Odyssey primus inter pares in such a vast array of august literary texts include: it is “one of the great foundation myths of Western culture…asking what it means to be a hero”; it is “properly epic”; it has “great female characters”; it “forces us to question the assumptions we might have about quests, war, and what it means to return home” (repatriation); it endorses a “streak of individualism”, etc [Homer’s Odyssey is Officially the World’s Most Influential Story’, (Tasso Kokkinidis), Greece. Greek Reporter,(2018), www.greece.greekreporter.com.

That the Odyssey has been massively influential in the arts ever since it first emerged in the rocky hillsides of Ionian Greece is indisputable. Other ancient Greek playwrights and poets who followed Homer, like Sophocles, produced their own versions of the iconic tale (and their own take on the elusive character of Odysseus). It has been suggested that the character of Jesus in the Gospel of Markspan class=”s2″ style=”font-size: 19.73px”> draws from Odysseus and his adventures, eg, the “feeding of the 500”, Jesus was a carpenter like Odysseus, who was the builder of the “Wooden Horse” [‘The Odyssey : An Overview, No Sweat Shakespeare,  www.nosweatshakespeare.com].

2nd century AD Tunisian mosaic of the Sirens (Book 12)

The Bard’s debt to Homer

It’s widely known that Shakespeare borrowed freely from many sources – plots, devices and imagery from the Bible, Plutarch, Seneca, Chaucer, from Holinshed’s Chronicles, from Boccaccio’s Decameron, etc. [‘Shakespeare’s Source Material’, (J.M. Pressley), Shakespeare’s Resource Center, www.bardnet.net/]. Like any educated Tudor man of the day Shakespeare voraciously absorbed the classics and Homeric influences are discernible in his plays – Odyssean themes like the phenomena of homecoming (Shakespeare’s Romances); the recognition theme from Odysseus’ reappearance in disguise in Ithaca (King Lear); the renewal theme (The Winter’s Tale) (No Sweat Shakespeare)⦿.

The Odysseus-Hamlet connexion

The Odyssey’s imprint on Shakespeare is most noticeable in the Bard’s most famous tragedy Hamlet. Several patterns emerge. Both literary opuses share a preoccupation with a troubled father-son relationship (Odysseus/Telemachus, King Hamlet/Prince Hamlet). Moreover, the Odyssey and Hamlet possess striking thematic similarities. Prince Hamlet and King Odysseus both employ deception to their advantage—the former dissembling madness and the latter physical disguises—to exact retribution against those who have wronged them. Both protagonists reveal a fatal flaw (hamartia) in the course of their trials and tribulations [‘Hamlet v. Odyssey’, (William Sheng), 12-Apr-2012,  http://docs.google.com/].

Odyssey-lite Homer (Simpson)

Retelling the Odysseus myth anew

The influence of the Odyssey on various media has been recurring and pervasive, including on novels (Don Quixote: Quixote, like Odysseus, embarks on a ‘epic’ journey and inflates (or distorts) his tales of heroism and survival) or The Penelopiad (Margaret Atwood’s feminist remaking of the myth as told from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus’ long-suffering wife); on television animation (The Simpsons “Tales from the Public Domain” episode – a satirical travesty of the Odyssey, Homer (Simpson) as Odysseus on a decidedly unheroic journey [‘8 Novels Inspired by the Odyssey’, (Jessica Ferri), Early Bird Books,  www.earlybirdbooks.com ; Economou Green, Mary. The Odyssey and Its Odyssey in Contemporary Texts: Re-visions in Star TrekThe Time Traveler’s Wife,and The Penelopiad. Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy. 1.1 (2014). Web.]; in poetry (Tennyson’s Ulysses (the Latinised form of ‘Odysseus’) is a kind of pessimistic postscript to the Odyssey with the aged hero unhappily stuck in his island kingdom lamenting the loss of his life of travel and adventure). 

Odysseus by the River Liffey

Easily the most famous literary reinterpretation of the Odyssey is James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness novel Ulysses, a work which tore up the handbook for writing novels in the modern age. T S Eliot summarised the revolutionary impact of Ulysses’ thus: “(Joyce) has made the novel obsolete by replacing the narrative method with the mythical method” [quoted in ‘James Joyce’s Ulysses: Remixing the Homeric Myth’, (James AW Heffernan), The Great Courses Daily, 02-Apr-2017,www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com].Joyce adapts the framework of Homer’s classic to 1904 Dublin, condensing the original’s 10-year journey into a single day, in which the protagonist, the “mock-heroic” and cod-ordinary Leopold Bloom, wanders around his various haunts in the city. In every chapter of Ulysses Joyce matches or parallels the actions of his characters with that of the Odyssey but presents them as banal and mundane. The scene in Homer where a lovely princess Nausikaa assists the shipwrecked Odysseus on the island of Scheria is reworked by Joyce to show the married cuckold Bloom as voyeur, spying on an attractive girl at Sandymount Strand while relieving his frustrations by masturbating [David Norris & Carl Flint, Joyce For Beginners, (1994)]. 

the 1967 film version of ‘Ulysses

Sci-Fi Odysseus: Trekking with Homer

Science-Fiction depictions on the screen, big and small, have mined an abundant seam of inspiration from the Odyssey. Kubrick’s and Arthur C Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey repositions the story in the Solar System with a supercomputer named HAL-9000 filling the role of the Cyclops imperilling the life of Odysseus/Dave Bowman. Another cult classic that owes inestimably to Homer’s Odyssey is the long-running Star Trek TV series. The Odyssey parallels are more than translucent  Star Trek is replete with alien locations and weird and unworldly characters. Captain Kirk is “an intelligent, strong and charismatic leader, struggling to keep his crew together as they sail through the depths of space” [‘Greek Myth and Science Fiction’,  www.greekmythandscifi.wordpress.com]. Kirk & Co leave the known world (Earth) to journey into the unknown (the Galaxy), they “go beyond”, they problem-solve, they vanish aliens and monsters and “re-emerge into the world victorious in quest purpose and with knowledge to better the plight of humankind” (Economou Green).

Odysseus as anti-hero precursor?

Odysseus exhibits qualities that make him seem to our eyes very modern (or even post-modern). He heroically and valiantly combats the monstrous creatures which block his path, but there is another, deeply problematic side to his personality. Odysseus, the personification of guile and cunning (polumetis in the Greek), routinely acts in both the Iliad and the Odyssey without honour or noble intention – a trickster, a dissembler and “con man”, a cheat, a liar, Among his many misdeeds, he sleeps with Circe; he murders innocent maids; he displays arrogance such as in his encounter with Polyphemus (the Cyclops); he misappropriates the armour of the dead Achilles (causing Ajax to take his own life); he fails to protect his crew on the voyage home resulting in them all perishing. You can discern in the ‘complicated’ and ‘ambiguous’ character of Odysseus a model for the ascendency of the anti-hero in modern cinema since the 1960s (Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, etc) [Cook, E. (1999). “Active” and “Passive” Heroics in the “Odyssey”.  The Classical World, 93(2), 149-167. doi: 10.2307/4352390].

Footnote: Odyssey, the prototype road movie

Homer’s classic is of course one of if not the principal fount of all subsequent travel/road stories in Western culture. This has proved nowhere more fecund than in modern cinema in films such as Easy Rider, Mad Max and countless others. Other road movies have been even more overt in referencing their debt to Odyssey and Homer – Paris, Texas, where the Odyssean protagonist charts a hazardous course which takes him from ruin and desperation to redemption [‘Wander Forever Between The Wind: A Tribute To PARIS, TEXAS’, (Priscilla Page), Birth, Movies, Death, 23-Sep-2017, www.birthmoviesdeath.com]. The Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou is unequivocally transparent in its pilferings from the Odyssey…the movie is variously peopled by a “Ulysses/Everett”, a “Penny”, a figurative “Cyclops”, “Lotus Eaters”, “Trojans/Ku Klux Klan”, a “Cattle of the Sun God”, “Sirens/laundry ladies”, a “Poseidon/county sheriff” and assorted other Homeric entities – all transposed to a 1930s Great Depression, Deep South setting.

PostScript: Authorship issue

Some scholars over the years have sought to debunk the custom of attributing the Iliad and the Odyssey to someone called ‘Homer’, about who there is virtually zero factual information, no biography to recount. Rather than a knowable or identifiable author this view attributes authorship to the whole Hellenic culture, tracing its genesis in fragments created before the supposed dates that ‘Homer’ flourished [‘Author Says a Whole Culture—Not a Single ‘Homer’—Wrote ‘Iliad,’ ‘Odyssey’’, (Simon Worrall), National Geographic, 03-Jan-2015,  www.nationalgeographic.com].

the books, films, etc referred to above are only a selection of the total works—literary, the arts, music, cinema—informed and influenced by the Odyssey

𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪

‘classic’ works of literature, philosophy, music and art elevated into a band of select ‘membership’ in the firmament of high culture

 the claim of ‘official’ recognition should be tempered by the fact that if a different set of experts were asked, they might not necessarily agree with the choice

 in Hamlet it is prevarication and indecision, failing to act when he should, in Odysseus it is hubris, by which Odysseus offends Poseidon with “god-like” arrogance  

⦿ Shakespeare’s borrowings from the Iliad are more overt in Troilus and Cressida, he is indebted to Homer’s tale of Troy for the storyline and the entire Dramatis personae

 a method of narration in a literary work that describes happenings in the flow of thoughts in the minds of the characters [www.literarydevices.net/]

 cf. Odysseus – the Underworld

 Emily Wilson/Erwin Cook