Introduction
An ethnologist with a taste for adventure, Thor Heyerdahl has spent more than 30 years proving, or attempting to prove, that ancient peoples could have sailed from one distant area to another in rafts and reed boats. After one voyage, he suggested that the Polynesians originally lived in South America and emigrated to Polynesia by raft. On two other voyages he showed that ancient Egyptians might have sailed to the Caribbean on reed ships - and thus influenced the pre-Columbian cultures of Central America and Mexico. His findings were published in Kon Tiki and The Ra expeditions.
In 1976 Heyerdahl and a crew of 10 men set out to test other hypotheses. One was that Sumer, in today's Iraq, where man first consolidated the elements of civilization, was settled by a seafaring people who sailed large reedboats up the Arabian Gulf from legendary Dilmun: Bahrain and, possibly, the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia. Another was that the reedboats were sufficiently seaworthy to carry these early Sumerians even farther the other way: south to Oman, across the Gulf of Oman to today's Pakistan, or even southwest to today's Somalia or Ethiopia.
Heyerdahl, of course, was already knowledgeable on the subject of reed boats, having built two of papyrus reeds and sailed one of them to the Caribbean (See Aramco World January-February 1972). But as true papyrus does not grow in the southern Mesopotamian reed marshes, the first test of his theories - before he even built the boat - was to find a fresh-water reed in Mesopotamia that would endure the salty ravages of the Arabian and Oman Gulfs.
He knew that Mesoptamia's huge marshes - home of the Marsh Arabs (See Aramco World, November-December, 1966) - provided a reed called burdi, a form of papyrus; the Marsh Arabs used burdi to build their unusual boats and houses. But as far as Heyerdahl could determine, burdi absorbed water quickly and thus would be useless at sea where a vessel could not be pulled ashore and dried, as a river boat could.
Still, ancient illustrations and translations of cuneiform tablets suggested that the Sumerians had first come to Mesopotamia in reed boats, so Heyerdahl began to investigate and eventually found an answer. According to several boatmen - and one very old man, found deep in the 6,000 -square-mile marsh - burdi does absorb water quickly, but, if cut in August and dried for several weeks in the sun, will stay buoyant for nine months or more.
Other Marsh Arabs offered invaluable advice on construction and on the question of whether to coat the boat with asphalt. This kind of reed boat, they said, is never coated with asphalt in the marshes.
To Heyerdahl this was a surprise. Eike many others he believed that the Ark - a boat referred to in the Koran, the Bible and also in Sumerian legend - was waterproofed with asphalt. Besides, other Marsh Arabs had said asphalt coating was vital. But he learned that the older Marsh Arabs were right; a test of asphalted reeds failed completely.
In the mean time he had decided that they would use burdi and that their boatyard would be located on a "narrow point of green land" where the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers meet to form the Shatt al-'Arab, the site, some think, of the Garden of Eden, and the estuary over which fighting erupted between Iran and Iraq in September.
Because they had accepted the Marsh Arabs' advice on cutting the reeds in August, cons truction of Tigris did not begin un til September. Nevertheless the boat - built by the same Lake Titicaca Indians who had built Ra II - was completed by November 3 and, on November 11, launched.
Almost at once, Heyerdahl and his international crew – one Russian, two Americans, one Italian, one German, one Mexican, one Japanese, two Scandinavians and one Iraqi - discovered a problem that no Sumerian ever had: pollution. They also discovered that they were famous. On the banks of the Shatt al-Arab, on bridges and in the harbor at Basra and the oil port of Abadan, great crowds of spectators cheered them on. Finally, however, they reached and entered the Gulf where, some scholars had said, reed boats could not go, and where, they quickly found, tanker traffic and oil platforms posed hazards that would have staggered the Sumerians.
But natural hazards were present too - as the Tigris crew soon learned. With only one sail and some oars, steering Tigris without a steady north wind, and tacking, became so difficult that they nearly went aground and, unwillingly, had to accept a tow from a Russian freighter called Slavsk
When, as they sailed south, they realized they had sailed too far west and were heading for the island of Failaka off Kuwait. At first this appealed to Heyerdahl because some scholars thought that Failaka, rather than Bahrain or the Saudi Arabian coast, was the site of Dilmun. And in any case excavations by Geoffrey Bibby, the archeologist who pinpointed Bahrain as the site of Dilmun, suggest that Dilmun at least had trade links with Failakaas well as with the Indus Valley in today's Pakistan and lndia. But as Tigris could not be easily steered, Heyerdahl and his crew saw that they were about to be wrecked on Failaka's rocky shore and, again fortuitously, had to accept a tow from Slavsk to Bahrain, where Bibby was waiting to review his evidence of the Sumerian presence in Dilmun.
Chapter 5 : On to Dilmun
The sea was moderately rough as the same Sumerian sun rose above the former Sumerian waters... With mixed feelings I awoke and gazed through the open doorway at the flowing disc that slowly rose with majestic dignity from its bath in the sea. Beautiful. Magnificent. Clean, virgin light was being lit for a new day... I felt as if the sun had lit another hope in my somber spirit. After all, we were safe and free, free to start all over again with a ship that was still in good shape...
The purpose of our reed-ship experiment this time was not merely to float and drift, but to navigate. Therefore the beginning of the voyage had been a glamorous failure which we could only laugh at as we gathered at the breakfast table... "Are you sure the ancient people could have done better than us?" HP [a crew member] queried. "Maybe they just hung on wherever they were until the wind blew more in their direction."
"After all, we too could at least pick our course to span half the horizon," Asbjorn added. We all agreed that we could steer successfully 90 degrees to either side of a following wind.
Suddenly we observed that the violent hugging and lugging came at much shorter intervals. Water cascaded in front of the bow. We were going faster. We hurried up to the cabin roof and waved desperately for Slavsk to slow down... [but] before I could make up my mind whether to cut ourselves free... the tow-line broke in a last violent jerk [and we] found a huge hole torn in our bow...
This was a frightening discovery... [and though] we... faced no immediate catastrophe... we had to find a way of filling the hole before it grew too big. The reeds around it would now loosen one by one and gradually cause the whole bundle-boat to fall apart. Slavsk [meanwhile] came back in a great circle and Captain Igor appeared with a megaphone... He had contacted his shipping company in Odessa and they had approved his actions. He had even sent a message to the Ministry of the Merchant Marine in Moscow, and Minister Gujenko had personally authorized Slavsk to tow the reed-boat Tigris "to an area of safety' "There is no such area short of Bahrain" assured Captain Igor. And his men began to throw us a new tow-line from their tall ship...
We on Tigris [meanwhile] were all curious to see our position in relation to Failaka and Bahrain, and Norman rolled out a very illustrative map sent us by the National Geographic Society. It was a sort of historical map... with archeological annotations such as Abraham's route from Ur and other pertinent data... Norman put his finger at our approximate position. He then read aloud the text that happened to be printed beside his finger: "Earliest Sumerian records refer to shipwrights and seafaring people. Some of man's earliest ventures on the sea occurred in the Persian Gulf." This fired the curiosity of everyone. What were these records about? Had I read them? Certainly not all. But probably all that dealt with seafaring, provided that they had been translated from cuneiform script into European languages...
I crawled into the cabin and came back with a bag full of pocket notebooks replete with scribblings from my own researches. Notes from museum exhibits and store rooms and quotations from scientific books and learned journals, like those I had studied in the Baghdad Museum Library. I opened them one by one...
There was a quotation from an essay entitled "The Seafaring Merchants of Ur"... by a noted authority on Sumerian culture, A.L. Oppenheim. He was of the opinion that the most interesting information contained in some of the inscribed tablets from Ur "has to do with the role of the town of Ur as the 'port of entry' for copper into Mesopotamia at the time of the Dynasty of Larsa. The copper was imported by boat from Telmun [i.e. Dilmun], today the island of Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf."...
Thanks to the deciphering of the inscribed tablets, scholars like Oppenheim can give us a good idea of what life had been like in the Gulf ports of Mesopotamia in Sumerian times. Shipbuilding, navigation and maritime commerce were the second largest occupation in ancient Ur, surpassed only by agriculture. Maritime activities were extremely well organized and formed the basis on which Ur founded its economy. From Ur, river boats carried the Gulf trade up the two rivers to other peoples as far north as present - day Turkey, Syria and Lebanon...
I looked for another notebook: one with extracts from the writings of Armas Salonen..., [an] erudite Finnish scholar [who] presents more than 200 pages in a mixture of German, Greek, Hebraic, Latin, Arabic, French,Hinglish, Sumerian, Babylonian and Akkadian languages - amassing all that the learned world has recorded of fragmentary references to ancient Mesopotamian ships and cargo... Most of his sources were precious extracts from cuneiform Sumerian and Akkadian clay tablets.
Salonen stressed that the first ships in the twin river country were reed-ships, and that, with them as models, the earliest wooden ships were built later... First of all he assembles references to the ma-gur, which he refers to as "the sea-going ship,... the ship with high bow and stern." This, he says, was the type depicted in the oldest ideographs for "ship" before the cuneiform script was invented. It is also the traditional vessel incised on the earliest Sumerian cylinder seals...
Salonen... has no comment on the kind of reeds used for the original sea-going ma-gur of Mesopotamia. He translates the Babylonian word for reed-ship, elep urbati, into German as Papyrus-boot, but there is no evidence that true papyrus ever grew in Mesopotamia. For botanical reasons we cannot escape the conclusion that the sea-going Sumerian reed-ships were built from the same burdi as that which dominates the local marshes today. It was now up to us to find out whether burdi cut in August might not float just as well as papyrus.
The national heroes of the Sumerians, the important ancestor-god Enki and his contemporaries, sailed to Ur from distant Dilmun in ma-gurs of reeds. But in subsequent Sumerian times ma-gur also remained the term for the largest of the ships used in the Gulf for merchant adventures, even those that followed the original reed-ships in form although built from split timber. Timber, [indeed,] became, together with copper, one of the principal cargoes...
Salonen shows that the Sumerians had names also for four other types of wooden ships, two for mere river traffic, one for normal sailing both on river and sea, and one a simpler freighter or cargo barge. However, in the functions of the temple priests and other religious performances, it was the "god-ship," the original ma-gur, that was invariably represented...
Our conclusion from Salonen's analysis was that Tigris clearly would have to be classed as a ma-gur, a "god-ship" of early model. This made sense to everybody on board, especially as I had stressed that we were in search of the very beginning, and Sumerian history began with navigating gods, not with merchant seamen. And I was not joking. It was sometimes easy for us to forget that the term "god" had a different meaning for the ancestor-worshippers who had another religion... Like Abraham, the Sumerians traced their list of kings back to the boat-builder who saved mankind from the flood, [and] made a clear distinction between commoners and kings...
The King was venerated as a human god even while still alive, and his rank among the deities was higher the further he was counted back in the royal genealogies... If we dismiss the Sumerian gods as mere mythical creatures, we should have also to dismiss all their royal families from first to last. The real problem is to disentangle the transition between Sumerian history and Sumerian myth...
I had on board also a little book called The Sumerians, written by... Professor C. L. Woolley. In his first chapter... he goes straight to the point: "Sumerian legends which explain the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia seem to imply an influx of people from the sea, which people can scarcely be other than the Sumerians themselves..."
The same scholar ends his book by stating how difficult it is to estimate the debt which the modern world owes to the Sumerians, a branch of mankind so recently rescued from complete oblivion. The Sumerians, he says, merit a very honorable place for their attainment, and a still higher rank for their effect on human history."... We have learnt how that flower of genius drew its sap from Lydians and Hittites, from Phoenicia and Crete, from Babylon and Egypt. But the roots go farther back: behind all these lies Sumer..."
One point that should not be passed over lightly is what the same scholar emphasized: the wealth of Lower Mesopotamia is purely agricultural: "there is no metal here and no stone, and not the least interesting point about the treasures recovered from the site of Ur is that the raw material of nearly all of them is imported from abroad. "[But] how can the first civilization known to us, antedating the first known dynasties in both Sumer and Egypt, be based entirely on imported materials? Extensive unrecorded travels must somehow have antedated the known beginnings.
Unless we recognize that the god-men described and depicted on the earliest Sumerian tablets and seals were people like those buried in the earliest royal tombs of Ur, we shall never have an explanation of the riches in those tombs. Enki, the "god" who came from Dilmun and found Ur still washed by water and shaded by hashur-forest, reflects the memory of one of these mighty kings whose fleet of ma-gurs must already have carried capable craftsmen and merchants to many distant lands.
How else could they have been acquainted with the great variety of precious metals and stones they needed to create the royal treasures? Nowhere in the vicinity of their own kingdom would they find gold, silver, electrum, copper, lapis lazuli, carnelian, alabaster, diorite, soapstone, or flint. Before coming to Ur experienced members of the king's party must already have thoroughly explored many distant lands to acquire an expert knowledge of all those foreign materials, where to locate them and how to work them. The shipwrights and seamen of the earliest god-kings buried at Ur must therefore have been of the same high standard as the goldsmiths and the jewelers. No wonder that people of today who have heard of spacecraft but never of ma-gur could be fooled into believing that these god-men of sudden appearance had come to Mesopotamia from outer space...
In the early afternoon of the fourth day we reached Bahrain... [where, later] we were towed past anchored tankers and between concrete breakwaters to an enormous mole not yet officially opened. Popularly known as ASRY, the Arab Shipbuilding and Repair Yard, it was the largest drydock in the world, just ready to accommodate supertankers of up to 450,000 tons. It so happened that tiny Tigris, with its topmast hardly visible above the lowest platform of the mole, was the first ship to enter and dock, two days before the official opening...
[Later still, among the crowd that awaited us, we] found Geoffrey Bibby... [the British-] born scientist who had shaken former beliefs about the beginning of civilization when [he] dug up temples and tombs buried in the sand of this island, testifying to merchant activity and maritime trade with remote countries more than 5,000 years ago. Bibby had flown down from Denmark when he learnt that we were heading for Bahrain. He wanted to get a personal impression of a ship built after the earliest type known in the Gulf area... And during the next couple of weeks he took us to the sites of his main excavations [where we] plunged with space-craft velocity back through 5,000 years of human history...
"This is Dilmun," said Bibby, and pointed with his pipe toward a landscape of giant pimples which stretched like a choppy sea of fossil wave-tops to the horizon and beyond. "You can see why Peter Glob and I were tempted to come here and start digging."
Prehistoric tombs. Burial mounds. According to the estimates there were supposed to be about 100,000 such man-made mounds on Bahrain. This was the largest prehistoric cemetery in the world... I had seen groups of burial mounds and prehistoric cemeteries in many parts of the world, but nothing like this. There was just nothing like it. And from now on Bibby did not have to argue to convince me that Bahrain was Dilmun...
But Bibby still had his trump cards... He drove us from the cemetery to a buried city... [where we] stopped at a huge and solid city wall with a gate directly facing the sea. Here we found ourselves surrounded by tall stone walls, in an open square where a main avenue flanked by stone buildings led to this big gate and the sea. From the open plaza inside the city wall other streets took off at right angles. Bibby pointed through the lofty gate. Huge sand dunes had blown up in front to bar the view, but when the wall was built this gate had led directly to the water, which was still right down below.
"Here ships docked four to five thousand years ago, in the Dilmun period, to load or unload their cargo," said Bibby He turned from the gate and pointed to the ground in the open square we stood on: "And here we found the evidence of overseas trade. Here the cargo was unloaded. It was here and in the streets of the town that we found numerous scraps of unworked copper. Also copper fishhooks, bits of ivory, steatite seals and a carnelian bead. All represented materials foreign to Bahrain."...
The scraps of unworked copper had their own story to tell and filled a gap in a jigsaw puzzle. Copper was perhaps the most important of all raw materials imported to Mesopotamia in Dilmun times. As Bibby had pointed out,... writing was an extremely important art in ancient Sumer, and the clay tablets found in private houses and shops range from school exercise books to the account books of the moneylenders. There was also the regular business correspondence of a copper broker living in Ur. He was referred to as a Dilmun trader and yet it appears from one of the written tablets found in his house that Dilmun was not the place where the copper ore was quarried. Dilmun was only a trading center where copper was bought and sold. The weight of some of the shiploads of copper moving in the Gulf in Sumerian times was by no means inconsiderable, to quote Bibby's expression. He figured out that in one case the shipment acquired in Dilmun was no less than 18.5 metric tons, "which at present prices would fetch something like twenty thousand dollars..."
Dilmun was indeed a reality to our spiritual forebears. And Sumerian merchant vessels must certainly have been among those docking in front of the gate of the now-buried harbor city of Bahrain, because it had the peak of its activity in Sumerian times.
With the Sumerian deluge story in mind, Bibby found it highly significant that they had discovered a temple on Bahrain with Sumerian affinities. Nowhere in the Gulf area outside Mesopotamia had structures resembling a stepped ziggurat ever been found [before]. And the excavations of the temple uncovered quantities of potsherds, lapis lazuli beads, alabaster vases, copper bands and sheet copper, a copper figure of a bird, a cast bull's head with... inlaid eyes (See Aramco World, March-April 1980), and - the final proof of Sumerian contact - a little copper statuette of a naked man with large round eyes and shaven head. He stood in the special attitude of supplication typical of Mesopotamia between 2500 and 1800 B.C. One of the alabaster vases was of a shape used in Mesopotamia in the final centuries of the third millennium B.C. It was fascinating to visit this temple-mound with Bibby and hear how he linked it to long-range Sumerian sailing and Dilmun trade. This had indeed not been an isolated island civilization...
In the meantime there were more urgent problems to solve. We had come to Bahrain with a huge hole in our bow. Little was visible above the waterline, but Gherman [one of the crew] came up horrified from a dive and told us there was room for himself inside the cavity...
We carried a modest quantity of spare reeds with us for minor repairs, and we could also use some of the burdi fenders to fill the hole. But it would still not be enough. What could we use?...
I had an idea and started skimming through a copy of Bibby's book, which was part of the Tigris library. In it he had a line drawing of a bundle-boat with sail and double rudder-oars astern, resembling those of Failaka. It was the caption I was looking for: "These boats, about 15 feet long and made of bundles of reeds, are used by fishermen of Bahrain. They are buoyant but not, of course, watertight (and are therefore technically rafts). Similar boats of papyrus reeds were in use in Egypt over 4,000 years ago."
I ran to Bibby [and]... together we drove across the island... to a long and beautiful sandy beach... Drawn up on the white sand lay a small raft-boat of the type I knew so well... The material was not reed, but the slender mid-stem of date-palm leaves, just as on Failaka, where reeds were equally lacking, at least today. Apart from the usual lashing, each stalk had been sewn neatly to its neighbor...
Apparently canes and palm-stalks were too hard, not spongy enough, to be lashed together with outside loops only. Nor would they probably maintain their buoyancy as long as reeds. I asked [an] old man... He doubted they would float more than a week. Probably the palm stems would not evea survive more than a week in sea water...
This, perhaps, was Enki's "dock-yard house of the land" referred to in the Dilmun poem, unless another port of the same magnitude lies buried elsewhere on Bahrain. That seemed unlikely. This was a major trading port for such a small island. Ma-gurs from Ur must have been among those that came here to barter copper for Mesopotamian wool and garments, as the records and accounts on the tablets show. It required a considerable trade to keep prosperous such an island city as this...
I was brought back from Dilmun to Bahrain by the shrill sound of a klaxon from one of the waiting cars on the plains below. Time to return. Scrambling down the steep rubble hill that concealed the fine stone walls, I drank in the view of the exclusive group of majestic man-made hills around me. This island contained the tombs of the Sumerian forebears. In a wider sense, the tombs of our own spiritual forebears. Would this bring us a step closer to our own lost beginnings?...
From the nameless seaport Bibby brought us westward along the coast to a locality known as Barbar. Here his team had made their first major discovery: a temple. And it was a very special temple...
The building had been a compact, solidly filled elevation with right-angled corners, rising in steps above the terrain like a Sumerian temple-pyramid. The facing slabs of each of the superimposed terraces were blocks of fine, close-grained limestone, laid in three courses and carefully cut to fit together without mortar.
The stones on the top platform were different; they were perfectly shaped, like the tapering ice-blocks of an Eskimo igloo, to form a circular enclosure only six feet, approximately, in diameter.
Excavations revealed that 4,000 years ago the original ground surface on which the structure stood must have been eight or 10 feet lower. The central temple must then have been much more imposing, standing on its platform above sheer terrace walls oriented to the movements of the sun. As excavations revealed the staircases and ramps that led up to the summit temple, Bibby realized they had hit upon a religious structure that began to qualify as a ziggurat, the terraced temple mount of Mesopotamia.
We walked along the beach and found two more boats of precisely the same kind pulled up among the palms. One was quite new and a masterpiece of workmanship. These raft-boats obviously had the one advantage that they could come right in across the limestone shallows and be pulled ashore while other boats were anchored far out. [Then] I found a single palm-leaf stem tossed up by the waves on the beach... It looked like a splendid white flower, as the thin end was densely overgrown with a colony of chalk-colored, conical mollusks. I was showing it to Bibby as a curiosity when it dawned upon me that here was silent testimony that these palm stalks did not dissolve quickly in sea water. This one was still as complete and tough as new, and it must have been months in the sea for all these mollusks to have grown to such a great size. We ran after the old fisherman. He promised to bring 200 such palm stems to the ASRY docks next Friday if we sent a car for him...
Friday came, and so did our driver with the big load of palm stems... and we began the repairs. All the Iraqi burdi reeds we could spare were stuffed into the gaping wound. Then the long and tough but slightly pliant palm stalks were stuck down under the loops and sewn on, Dilmun fashion, side by side like a breastplate. To look at, the palm stems were amazingly similar to papyrus reeds. But they were heavier and harder. When the slack spiral loops were so full and tight that nota single further stalk would enter, a criss-cross net of string was tied over for extra security. Then Tigris looked as trim as when we raced towards Failaka.
[Then] we had another problem to solve. Khalifa, the fine young Arab the Minister had chosen to help us on arrival, came back the next morning with a discouraging report... there was not a single soul left on the island today who could sew a sail, [to replace one that was torn as we set out on the Shatt al-Arab], and the last dhow sailors [whom we needed as guides] were so old that they had left the sea to the younger generation. Perhaps we would have better luck if we went to Pakistan...
The moment Khalifa brought his discouraging news... I...counted my dwindling supply of cash. Barely sufficient to risk sending Detlef [a crewman] back to Germany with the dissected sail. The Hamburg sailmaker could put it together again. It was he who had made it. And he could also make us the big dhow sail I had hoped to have made in Iraq...
Waiting for Detlef to come back we remained for more than three weeks on Bahrain... And on the last day before Detlef's return I got great news. [Major Smith,] the commander of the prison colony... [on the island of Jidda] would... fetch me with the police boat on the pier of Budayia village on the northwest coast by sunrise next morning [so that I could inspect the quarries on Jidda to see if they were the source of that special temple at Barbar].
Major Smith [was] a husky police officer and former professional British soldier... [and his] police launch was moored at a little pier... The friendly Englishman apologized that he had to get us up so early, but we had to reach Jidda Island before the tide went out...
Jidda Island appeared on the horizon. High cliffs. White like Dover, with a single small house visible; the major's. The water was certainly shallow long before we docked at the end of a long, crude stone pier... To the left were nothing but date palms and in front of them a number of huge rocks that seemed to be the remainder of a bluff blasted away by man. I walked over to examine the surfaces of the fractures. This was indeed the work of man. Old. But not old enough to date from Bronze Age quarrying...
There was apparently nothing more of interest among the blasted blocks, but Major Smith said he would show us something else. And he did... the elevated limestone plateau that was by far the largest part of the island, scarcely a mile long and much less in width. And it seemed as if a fair part of it had been taken away by ancient stone workers.
We could hardly believe the evidence we saw of the extent of former quarrying. In a few places were obvious traces of the early Portuguese, or of the Arabs working for them... But these quarries were superimposed upon and surrounded by other quarries that filled almost every part of the island hills and the coastal cliffs. It was difficult to locate an area not cut into terraces, escarpments, niches and steps in times so long ago that all surfaces had so darkened as to be indistinguishable from the natural rock face, and so eroded as to lose the sharpness of all edges and corners...
I was quite familiar with prehistoric quarries... [and] the bone-hard limestone cliffs of Jidda Island had not been worked by amateurs, but by a people belonging to the great old clan of true stone experts. Everywhere were vestiges of an incredibly skilled activity... [and the stone quarried] far surpassed the sum total of quarried blocks in the structures so far excavated on Bahrain. It would therefore be tempting to prophecy that more buildings are yet to be discovered beneath the Dilmun sand. There was another reason for this suspicion: no columns had as yet been discovered in the Dilmun palaces or temples... Lbut] among the niches in the Jidda quarries were... marks of the removal of cylindrical blocks the size a man could barely encircle with his arms. Stones of this shape do not appear in the known buildings on Bahrain. They can hardly have been used for anything but segments for a column...
The southern part of Jidda was so remarkably different from all the rest that I began to wonder whether it was due to the work of ancient man... The whole area surrounded a basin with a large natural well from which ice-cold crystal-clear water welled up from somewhere below the bottom of the sea in such a quantity that we had to jump aside when the proud major somehow forced it into a garden hose. No wonder that the Sumerians who had been to Dilmun thought there were two seas, one of fresh water below the salt one...
[On the return trip I decided that the Dilmun transporters had certainly loaded their tons of burden from Jidda Island onto strong, sturdy and shallow vessels, whether they called them fartch, like the Arabs today, or ma-gur like the Sumerians in the days when the quarries were worked, and [that] the big blocks of stone were surely not unloaded on the nearest part of the Bahrain coast... There was no need to drag them overland to the building sites when the floating vessel with sail or oars and punting poles could bring the tons of cargo straight to that part of the coast where the stone was needed... The vessel came easily in to Jidda Island on the tide and was beached as the water withdrew. Sitting sturdy on the rock bottom the broad reed-ship would be as steady to load as a four-wheeled cart ashore. It would be ready to float seaward with its cargo when the tide next came in, and might even reach Bahrain to come in with the same flow, ready for unloading as soon as the water went away...
[But now it was time to go on.] No sooner were we back from Jidda when Detlef was back from Hamburg, [and]... on the morning of 26 December we reloaded our ship for departure from Dilmun and, we hoped, from the Sumerian gulf, [as soon as we got the new sail on board. Unfortunately,] when the canvas was folded to the wood, it took all 11 of us to lift it off the ground [and] my skepticism grew into clear disapproval I shouted to Norman, "It will break our mast!" Norman wiped his perspiring forehead... [and] admitted that the sail was too heavy. He had told Detlef to order the thickest cotton canvas the Hamburg sailmakers had, but had never realized they had anything this thick... I took a brutal decision on the spur of the moment: "Let this white elephant down. We are going to sail without it. We might get it on board here in port, but how the devil are we going to handle it in a storm at sea? The mast will rip off before we find a place for it on deck. All aboard! We're off!"
