Science: Home City of Sumer?

When historians look back into time to name the first civilized people, they usually pick the Sumerians, who built imposing cities, including Abraham’s Ur of the Chaldees, in southern Mesopotamia about 3000 B.C. But the Sumerians did not think of themselves as native Mesopotamians: according to their legends, they came from a place called Dilmun, where lived Ziusudra, the sole survivor of the Flood. Last week Danish archaeologists were digging into the ruins of a city on oil-rich Bahrein Island in the Persian Gulf. They think it is Dilmun, the mysterious “home city of the Land of Sumer.”

Disk-Shaped Seals. After figuring in early legends, Dilmun takes slightly more tangible form in Sumerian writings as a city on an island three days’ sail down the Persian Gulf. Merchants from Ur traded there, and clay-written records tell that they brought woolen goods, returning with cargoes of copper, ivory and gold. This suggests that Dilmun acted as middleman between Mesopotamia and the civilization of the Indus Valley in Pakistan. In both places have been found a few peculiar, disk-shaped stone seals. Since most Mesopotamian seals are cylindrical and Indus seals are square, archaeologists have long speculated that the disk-shaped seals were made in Dilmun, the in-between place.

Except for such dim traces, Dilmun vanished centuries ago. But just after World War II, a scholarly young Englishman, Geoffrey Bibby, visited Bahrein on oil business, and was fascinated by 100,000 burial mounds on the island’s north end. Under them were T-shaped stone chambers with the remains of a single person in each. Before he could investigate further, Bibby left Bahrein. Later he married a Danish girl, settled in Denmark, and worked his way up to the post of director of oriental antiquities in Aarhus University’s prehistoric museum.

But Bibby did not forget Bahrein. In 1953 he persuaded his director, Dr. Peter Glob, to lead an expedition there, with himself as second in command. During the first season they attacked the fascinating mounds. The burial chambers had been robbed, but the Danes still found gold and ivory ornaments. Then they turned to searching for the city where the dead in the graves had lived.

On the north end of Bahrein Island is a ruined Portuguese fort and near it a mound 40 ft. high, 2,400 ft. long and 1,200 ft. wide. Dr. Glob (who, says Bibby, has “a fine eye for country”) picked it out, hired native laborers to cut a trench into it. Done properly, this is slow work: for years the archaeologists worked on the mound. Piled in layers were vertical walls and stamped clay floors all mixed with bits of pottery and copper.

Chips from the Chisel. This is the sort of record that archaeologists love. The mound represented what for many centuries was a well-built stone city of about 10,000 inhabitants. The oldest part seems to have flourished before 2500 B.C. It had no city wall, and a layer of ashes shows that its poor defense posture may have enabled an invader to burn it. When the inhabitants built a new city, they encircled it with a substantial wall.

Perhaps the most interesting discovery made by the digging Danes was 225 of the round stone seals associated with the in-between city, Dilmun. Since they may have been imported, the disks did not prove conclusively that Dilmun was on Bahrein Island. But they made the theory look good.

Last year came the conclusive find. Archaeologist Egor Hansen discovered deep in the city’s ruins the unmistakable remains of a stone engraver’s shop, still littered with chips from the chisel. From a heap of stone scrap came a real prize: an unfinished round seal that had broken in the making and been tossed aside. Here was conclusive proof that the round seals originated in Bahrein, and therefore that Dilmun had been on Bahrein.

Whether the inhabitants of Dilmun were really the ancestral Sumerians has still not been positively established. But the Danes are still digging—with high hopes that they will unearth the answers about the oldest civilization.