THE MOUNDS OF ALI
And now behold us excavators on the way to the scene of our labours. Six
camels conveyed our tents, a seventh carried goat-skins full of water.
Four asses groaned under our personal effects; hens for consumption rode
in a sort of lobster-pot by the side of clattering pickaxes and chairs;
six policemen, or _peons_, were in our train, each on a donkey. One
carried a paraffin lamp, another a basket of eggs on the palm of his
hand, and as there were no reins and no stirrups, the wonder is that
these articles ever survived. As for ourselves, we, like everybody else,
rode sideways, holding on like grim death before and behind, especially
when the frisky Bahrein donkeys galloped at steeplechase pace across the
desert.
For some distance around Manamah all is arid desert, on which grow a few
scrubby plants, which women cut for fodder with sickle-like saws, and
carry home in large bundles on their backs. Sheikh Esau's summer palace
is in the centre of this desert--a fortress hardly distinguishable from
the sand around, and consisting, like Eastern structures of this nature,
of nothing but one room over the gateway for his majesty, and a vast
courtyard 200 feet long, where his attendants erect their bamboo huts and
tents. Around the whole runs a wall with bastions at each corner, very
formidable to look upon. Passing this, the palm-groves, which are
exceedingly fine, are soon reached, and offer delicious shade from the
burning sun. Here amongst the trees were women working in picturesque
attire, red petticoats, orange-coloured drawers down to their heels, and
a dark blue covering over all this, which would suddenly be pulled over
the face at our approach, if they had not on their masks, or _buttras_,
which admit of a good stare.
The _buttra_ is a kind of mask, more resembling a bridle than anything
else. In shape it is like two diamond-frames made of gold and coloured
braids, fastened together by two of their lower edges. This middle strip
comes down the nose and covers the mouth, and the sides come between the
ears and eyes. It affords very little concealment, but is very becoming
to most of its wearers, particularly if they happen to be negresses. On
their heads would be baskets with dates or citrons, and now and again a
particularly modest one would dart behind a palm-tree until that
dangerous animal man had gone by.
About half way to the scene of our labours we halted by the ruins of the
old Arab town, Beled-al-Kadim.
This ancient capital, dating from a period prior to the Portuguese
occupation, still presents some interesting ruins. The old mosque
(Madresseh-i-abu-Zeidan), with its two slender and elegant minarets, so
different from the horrible Wahabi constructions of to-day, forms a
conspicuous landmark for ships approaching the low-lying coasts of these
islands. Around the body of the mosque runs a fine inscription in Kufic
letters, and from the fact that the name of Ali is joined with that of
the Prophet in the profession of faith, we may argue that this mosque was
built during some Persian occupation, and was a Shiite mosque. The
architecture, too, is distinctly Persian, recalling to us in its details
the ruins of Rhey (the Rhages of Tobit) and of Sultanieh, which we saw in
the north of Persia, and has nothing Arabian about it.
Ruins of houses and buildings surround this mosque, and here in the open
space in the centre of the palm-groves the Bahreini assemble every
Thursday for a market; in fact the place is generally known now as
Suk-el-Khamis, or Thursday's Market.
On our journey out not a soul was near, but on our return we had an
opportunity of attending one of these gatherings.
Sheikh Esau has here a tiny mosque, just an open _loggia_, where he goes
every morning in summer-time to pray and take his coffee. Beneath it he
has a bath of fresh but not over-clean water, where he and his family
bathe. Often during the summer heats he spends the whole day here, or
else he goes to his glorious garden about a mile distant, near the coast,
where acacias, hibiscus, and almonds fight with one another for the
mastery, and form a delicious tangle.
Another mile on, closer to the sea, is the fine ruined fortress of the
Portuguese, Gibliah, as the natives call it now, just as they do one of
the fortresses at Maskat. It covers nearly two acres of ground, and is
built out of the remains of the old Persian town, for many Kufic
inscriptions are let into the wall, and the deep well in the centre is
lined with them. It is a regular bastioned fortification of the sixteenth
century, with moat, embrasures in the parapets, and casemented embrasures
in the re-entering angles of the bastions, and is one of the finest
specimens of Portuguese architecture in the Gulf, an evidence of the
importance which they attached to this island.
Amongst the rubbish in the fort we picked up numerous fragments of fine
Nankin and Celadon china, attesting to the ubiquity and commerce of the
former owners, and attesting, also, to the luxury of the men who ruled
here--a luxury as fatal almost as the Flanders wars to the well-being of
the Portuguese in the East.
Our road led us on through miles of palm-groves, watered by their little
artificial conduits, and producing the staple food of the island. Seid
bin Omar talked to us much about the date. 'Mohammed said,' he began,
'honour the date-tree, for she is your mother,' a true enough maxim in
parched Arabia, where nothing else will grow. When ripe the dates are put
into a round tank, called the _madibash_, where they are exposed to the
sun and air, and throw off excessive juice which collects below; after
three days of this treatment they are removed and packed for exportation
in baskets of palm leaves. The Bahreini, for their own consumption, love
to add sesame seeds to their dates, or ginger powder and walnuts pressed
with them into jars. These are called _sirah_, and are originally
prepared by being dried in the sun and protected at night, then diluted
date-juice is poured over them. The fruit which does not reach maturity
is called _salang_, and is given as food to cattle, boiled with ground
date-stones and fish bones. This makes an excellent sort of cake for
milch cows; this, and the green dates also, are given to the donkeys, and
to this food the Bahreini attribute their great superiority. The very
poor also make an exceedingly unpalatable dish out of green dates mixed
with fish for their own table, or, I should say, floor.
Nature here is not strong enough for the fructification of the palm, so
at given seasons the pollen is removed by cutting off the male spathes;
these they dry for twenty hours, and then they take the flower twigs and
deposit one or two in each bunch of the female blossom. Just as we were
there they were very busy with the spathes, and in Thursday's Market huge
baskets of the male spathes were exposed for sale. The palm-groves are
surrounded by dykes to keep the water in.
The date-tree is everything to a Bahreini. He beats the green spadix
with wooden implements to make fibre for his ropes; in the dry state he
uses it as fuel; he makes his mats, the only known form of carpet and
bedding here, out of it; his baskets are made of the leaves. From the
fresh spathe, by distillation, a certain stuff called _tara_ water is
obtained, of strong but agreeable smell, which is much used for the
making of sherbet. Much legendary lore is connected with the date. The
small round hole at the back is said to have been made by Mohammed's
teeth, when one day he foolishly tried to bite one; and in some places
the expression 'at the same time a date and a duty,' is explained by the
fact that in Ramazan the day's fast is usually broken by first eating a
date.
Amongst all these date-groves are the curious Arab wells, with sloping
runs, and worked by donkeys. The tall poles, to which the skins are
attached, are date-tree trunks. Down goes the skin bucket as the donkey
comes up a steep slope in the ground, and then, as he goes down, up it
comes again full of water, to be guided into the channel, which
fertilises the trees, by a slave, who supports himself going up, and adds
his weight to that of the descending donkey, by putting his arm through a
large wooden ring hung at the donkey's shoulder. Day after day in our
camp we heard the weird creaking from these wells, very early in the
morning and in the evening when the sun had gone down, and we felt as we
heard it what an infinite blessing is a well of water in a thirsty land.
Leaving the palm-groves and the Portuguese fortress behind us, we
re-entered the desert to the south-west; and, just beyond the village of
Ali, we came upon that which is the great curiosity of Bahrein, to
investigate which was our real object in visiting the island: for there
begins that vast sea of sepulchral mounds, the great necropolis of an
unknown race which extends far and wide across the plain. The village of
Ali forms as it were the culminating point; it lies just on the borders
of the date-groves, and there the mounds reach an elevation of over forty
feet, but as they extend further southward they diminish in size, until
miles away, in the direction of Rufa'a, we found mounds elevated only a
few feet above the level of the desert, and some mere circular heaps of
stones. There are many thousands of these tumuli extending over an area
of desert for many miles. There are isolated groups of mounds in other
parts of the islands, and a few solitary ones are to be found on the
adjacent islets, on Moharek, Arad, and Sitrah.
Complete uncertainty existed as to the origin of these mounds, and the
people who constructed them, but, from classical references and the
result of our own work, there can now be no doubt that they are of
Phoenician origin. Herodotus[3] gives us as a tradition current in his
time that the forefathers of the Phoenician race came from these parts.
The Phoenicians themselves believed in it: 'It is their own account of
themselves,' says Herodotus; and Strabo[4] brings further testimony to
bear on the subject, stating that two of the islands now called Bahrein
were called Tyros and Arados. Pliny follows in Strabo's steps, but calls
the island Tylos instead of Tyros, which may be only an error in
spelling, or may be owing to the universal confusion of _r_ with _l_.
Ptolemy in his map places Gerrha, the mart of ancient Indian trade and
the starting-point for caravans on the great road across Arabia, on the
coast just opposite the islands, near where the town of El Katif now is,
and accepts Strabo's and Pliny's names for the Bahrein Islands, calling
them Tharros, Tylos or Tyros, and Arados. The fact is that all our
information on the islands prior to the Portuguese occupation comes from
the Periplus of Nearchus. Eratosthenes, a naval officer of Alexander's,
states that the Gulf was 10,000 stadia long from Cape Armozum, _i.e._
Hormuz, to Teredon (Koweit), and the mouth of the Euphrates. Androsthenes
of Thasos, who was of the company of Nearchus, made an independent
geographical survey of the Gulf on the Arabian side, and his statements
are, that on an island called Ikaros, now Peludji, just off Koweit, he
saw a temple of Apollo. Southwards, at a distance of 2,400 stadia, or 43
nautical leagues, he came on Gerrha, and, close to it, the islands of
Tyros and Arados, 'which have temples like those of the Phoenicians,'
who were (the inhabitants told him) colonists from these parts. From
Nearchus, too, we learn that the Phoenicians had a town called Sidon or
Sidodona in the Gulf, which he visited, and on an island called Tyrine
was shown the tomb of Erythras, which he describes as 'an elevated
hillock covered with palms,' just like our mounds, and Erythras was the
king who gave his name to the Gulf. Justin accepts the migration of the
Phoenicians from the Persian Gulf as certain; and M. Renan says, 'The
primitive abode of the Phoenicians must be placed on the Lower
Euphrates, in the centre of the great commercial and maritime
establishments of the Persian Gulf.'[5] As for the temples, there are no
traces of them left, and this is also the case in Syrian Phoenicia;
doubtless they were all built of wood, which will account for their
disappearance.
As we ourselves, during the course of our excavations, brought to light
objects of distinctly Phoenician origin, there would appear to be no
longer any room for doubt that the mounds which lay before us were a vast
necropolis of this mercantile race. If so, one of two suppositions must
be correct, either firstly, that the Phoenicians originally lived here
before they migrated to the Mediterranean, and that this was the land of
Punt from which the Puni got their name, a land of palms like the Syrian
coast from which the race got their distorted Greek appellation of
Phoenicians; or secondly, that these islands were looked upon by them
as a sacred spot for the burial of their dead, as the Hindoo looks upon
the Ganges, and the Persian regards the shrines of Kerbela and Meshed. I
am much more inclined to the former supposition, judging from the
mercantile importance of the Bahrein Islands and the excellent school
they must have been for a race which was to penetrate to all the then
known corners of the globe--to brave the dangers of the open Atlantic,
and to reach the shores of Britain in their trading ventures; and if
nomenclature goes for anything, the name of Tyros and the still-existing
name of Arad ought to confirm us in our belief and make certainty more
certain.
Our camp was pitched on this desert among the tumuli. The ground was hard
and rough, covered with very sharp stones; though dry, it sounded hollow,
and it seemed as though there were water under it.
Our own tent occupied a conspicuous and central place; our servants' tent
was hard by, liable to be blown down by heavy gusts of wind, which event
happened the first night after our arrival, to the infinite discomfiture
of the bazaar-master, who, by the way, had left his grand clothes at
home, and appeared in the desert clad in a loose coffee-coloured
dressing-gown, with a red band round his waist. Around the tents swarmed
turbaned diggers, who looked as if they had come out in their
night-gowns, dressing-gowns, and bath-sheets. These lodged at night in
the bamboo village of Ali hard by, a place for which we developed the
profoundest contempt, for the women thereof refused to pollute themselves
by washing the clothes of infidels, and our garments had to be sent all
the way to Manamah to be cleansed. A bamboo structure formed a shelter
for the kitchen, around which, on the sand, lay curious coffee-pots,
bowls, and cooking utensils, which would have been eagerly sought after
for museums in Europe. The camel, which fetched the daily supply of water
from afar, grazed around on the coarse desert herbage; the large white
donkey which went into the town for marketing by day, and entangled
himself in the tent ropes by night, was also left to wander at his own
sweet will. This desert camp was evidently considered a very peculiar
sight indeed, and no wonder that for the first week of our residence
there, we were visited by all the inhabitants of Bahrein who could find
time to come so far.
It was very weird to sit in our tent door the first evening and look at
the great mound we were going to dig into next morning, and think how
long it had stood there in the peace its builders hoped for it. There
seemed to be quite a mournful feeling about disturbing it; but
archæologists are a ruthless body, and this was to be the last night it
would ever stand in its perfect shape. After all, we were full of hope of
finding out the mystery of its origin.
The first attack next morning was most amusing to behold. My husband
headed the party, looking very tall and slim, with his legs outlined
against the sky, as he, with all the rest, in single file and in
fluttering array, wound first round the mound to look for a good place to
ascend, and then went straight up.
They were all amazed when I appeared and gave orders to the division
under my command.
They looked very questioningly indeed, but, as the Persians had learnt to
respect me, the Bahreini became quite amenable.
[Illustration: THEODORE BENT RECEIVING VISITORS AT THE MOUNDS, BAHREIN]
The dimensions of the mound on which we began our labours were as
follows: 35 feet in height, 76 feet in diameter, and 152 paces in
circumference. We chose this in preference to the higher mounds, the
tops of which were flattened somewhat and suggested the idea that they
had fallen in. Ours, on the contrary, was quite rounded on the summit,
and gave every hope that in digging through it we should find whatever
was inside in _statu quo_. At a distance of several feet from most of the
mounds are traces of an outer encircling wall or bank of earth, similar
to walls found around certain tombs in Lydia, as also round a tumulus at
Tara in Ireland, and this encircling wall was more marked around some of
the smaller and presumably more recent tombs at the outer edge of the
necropolis; in some cases several mounds would appear to have been
clustered together, and to have had an encircling wall common to them
all.
We dug from the top of our mound for 15 feet, with great difficulty,
through a sort of conglomerate earth, nearly as hard as cement, before we
reached anything definite. Then suddenly this close earth stopped, and we
came across a layer of large loose stones, entirely free from soil, which
layer covered the immediate top of the tombs for two feet. Beneath these
stones, and immediately on the flat slabs forming the roof of the tomb,
had been placed palm branches, which in the lapse of ages had become
white and crumbly, and had assumed the flaky appearance of asbestos. This
proved that the palm flourished on Bahrein at the date of these tombs,
and that the inhabitants were accustomed to make use of it for
constructive purposes.
Six very large slabs of rough unhewn limestone, which had obviously come
from Jebel Dukhan, lay on the top of the tomb, forming a roof. One of
these was 6 feet in length, and 2 feet 2 inches in depth.
The tomb itself was composed of two chambers, one immediately over the
other, and approached by a long passage, like the dromos of rock-cut
Greek tombs, which was full of earth and small stones. The entrance, as
was that of all the tombs, was towards the sunset. This passage was 53
feet in length, extending from the outer rim of the circle to the mouth
of the tomb. Around the outer circle of the mound itself ran a wall of
huge stones, evidently to support the weight of earth necessary to
conceal the tomb, and large unhewn stones closed the entrance to the two
chambers of the tomb at the head of the passage.
We first entered the upper chamber, the floor of which was covered with
gritty earth. It was 30 feet long, and at the four corners were recesses
2 feet 10 inches in depth, and the uniform height of this chamber was 4
feet 6 inches. The whole surface of the interior to the depth of two or
three inches above the other _débris_ was covered with yellow earth
composed of the tiny bones of the jerboa, that rat-like animal which is
found in abundance on the shores of the Persian Gulf. There was no sign
of any recent ones and only a few fragments of skulls to show what this
yellow earth had been. We then proceeded to remove the rubbish and sift
it for what we could find.
The chief objects of interest consisted in innumerable fragments of
ivory, fragments of circular boxes, pendants with holes for suspension
(obviously used as ornaments by this primitive race), the torso of a
small statue in ivory, the hoof of a bull fixed on to an ivory pedestal,
evidently belonging to a small statue of a bull, the foot of another
little statue, and various fragments of ivory utensils. Many of these
fragments had patterns inscribed on them--rough patterns of scales,
rosettes, encircling chains, and the two parallel lines common to so many
ivory fragments found at Kameiros, and now in the British Museum. In
fact, the decorations on most of them bear a close and unmistakable
resemblance to ivories found in Phoenician tombs on the shores of the
Mediterranean, and to the ivories in the British Museum from Nimrud in
Assyria, universally accepted as having been executed by Phoenician
artists: those cunning workers in ivory and wood whom Solomon employed in
the building of his temple, and, before the spread of Egyptian and Greek
art, the travelling artists of the world. The ivory fragments we found
were given into the hands of Mr. A. S. Murray, of the British Museum, who
wrote to my husband as follows: 'I have not the least doubt, judging from
the incised patterns, from bull's foot, part of a figure, &c., that the
ivories are of Phoenician workmanship.'
The pottery found in this tomb offered no very distinctive features,
being coarse and unglazed, but the numerous fragments of ostrich
egg-shells, coloured and scratched with rough patterns in bands, also
pointed to a Phoenician origin, or at least to a race of wide
mercantile connection: and in those days the Phoenicians were the only
people likely to combine in their commerce ostrich egg-shells and ivory.
We also found small shapeless pieces of oxidised metal, brass or copper.
There were no human bones in the upper chamber, but those of a large
animal, presumably a horse.
The chamber immediately beneath was much more carefully constructed; it
was exactly the same length, but was higher, being 6 feet 7 inches, and
the passage was wider. It was entirely coated with cement of two
qualities, the upper coat being the finest, in which all round the walls
at intervals of two feet were holes sloping inwards and downward. In
similar holes, in one of the other tombs we opened, we found traces of
wood, showing that poles on which to hang drapery had been inserted. The
ground of this lower chamber was entirely covered with a thin brown earth
of a fibrous nature, in appearance somewhat resembling snuff; it was a
foot in depth, and evidently the remains of the drapery which had been
hung around the walls. Prior to the use of coffins the Phoenicians
draped their dead,[6] and amongst this substance we found traces of human
bones.
Thus we were able to arrive at the system of sepulture employed by this
unknown race. Evidently their custom was to place in the upper chamber
broken utensils and the body of an animal belonging to the deceased, and
to reserve the lower chamber for the corpse enshrouded in drapery. For
the use of this upper chamber our parallels are curiously enough all
Phoenician. Perrot gives us an example of two-storied tombs in the
cemetery of Amrit, in Phoenicia, where also the bodies were embedded in
plaster to prevent decay prior to the introduction of the sarcophagus,
reminding us of the closely cemented lower chambers in our mounds. A
mound containing a tomb with one chamber over the other was in 1888
observed in Sardinia, and is given by Della Marmora as of Phoenician
origin. Here, however, the top of the tomb is conical, not flat, as in
our mounds, which would point to a later development of the double
chamber which eventually blossomed forth into the lofty mausolea of the
later Phoenician epoch, and the grandiose tombs of Hellenic structure.
Also at Carthage, that very same year that we were in Bahrein, _i.e._
1889, excavations brought to light certain tombs of the early
Phoenician settlers which also have the double chamber. In answer to
Perrot's assertion that all early Phoenician tombs were _hypogea_, we
may say that as the Bahrein Islands offered no facility for this method
of sepulture, the closely-covered-in mound would be the most natural
substitute.
Before leaving the tombs we opened a second, and a smaller one of coarser
construction, which confirmed in every way the conclusions we had arrived
at in opening the larger tomb. Near the village of Ali, one of the
largest mounds has been pulled to pieces for the stones. By creeping
into the cavities opened we were able to ascertain that the chambers in
this mound were similar to those in the mound we had opened, only they
were double on both stories, and the upper story was also coated with
cement. Two chambers ran parallel to each other, and were joined at the
two extremities.
Sir M. Durand also opened one of the mounds, but unfortunately the roof
of the tomb had fallen in, which prevented him from obtaining any
satisfactory results; but from the general appearance, it would seem to
have been constructed on exactly the same lines as our larger one. Hence
we had the evidence of four tombs to go upon, and felt that these must be
pretty fair specimens of what the many thousands were which extended
around us.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: II. 89.]
[Footnote 4: XVI. iii. 4.]
[Footnote 5: _Hist. des langues sémitiques_, ii. 183.]
[Footnote 6: Perrot, _History of Art in Phoenicia_.]