Partners to power route punch in D ilmun trade-off
Dr Trudy Kawami, presented a lecture on the topic, ‘New Light on the Merchants and Rulers of Dilmun’ at the Yarmouk Cultural Centre. The event was held as part of the weekly lecture series in
the Dar al Athar al Islamiyyah’s 25th cultural season.
Dr Trudy Kawami presented a lecture on the topic, ‘New Light on the Merchants and Rulers of Dilmun’ at the Yarmouk Cultural Centre on Monday evening. The event was held as part of the weekly lecture series in the Dar Al Athar Al Islamiyyah’s 25th cultural season.
Dr Trudy Kawami is a noted scholar of ancient Near Eastern and Central Asian art. She retired as the director of research at the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation in 2015 and is currently working with the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah on a book on Elamite objects in the collection. She was also the curator of the Bronze Age section of the Splendors of the Ancient East: Antiquities from The Al-Sabah Collection exhibition and three related exhibitions of objects in the Arthur M. Sackler collection.
In her lecture, Kawami noted that while it is suspected that the far-sailing merchants of Dilmun were a diverse group with contacts from the Indus to Mesopotamia, recent finds in the elite Bronze Age tombs at A’ali, Bahrain show that the rulers of this mercantile coast were also well-traveled. Inscribed stone vessels have provided researchers with some royal names which are not Sumerian, though Sumerian gods were worshiped there. The names are Amorite, a distinctive West Semitic linguistic group whose speakers rose to prominence as rulers of Syrian city-states like Ebla and Mari, as well as important Mesopotamian regions. Today the best — known Amorite ruler is Hammurabi of Babylon. She shared that it is now clear that Amorite rulers reigned in the Gulf as well and the connections of the Dilmun merchants reached farther than once thought.
Kawami began her lecture by stating the talk would explore the new intimation on the Dilmun merchants and the rulers involved in this trade. “We are all familiar with the very early traders of Dilmun and how they developed trade from the Indus farther east and up into Mesopotamia. We now know a lot about the beginning of this trade.”
Kawami stated that good documentation of this from the 3rd millennium BC is found in the records and the archives of the third dynasty of Ur, founded by Ur-Nammu that indicate that they were involved in the official trade. The records, written from Ur’s point of view, reveal trade to be controlled by Ur and while that has been the prevailing assumption, researchers are now realising that there is another level under that — an unofficial trade connection that is going on as well.
Kawami showed the audience two documents from the best known rulers and dynasties that indictate mercantile oriented rulers who were assumed to have controlled the trade. She reiterated that new findings show that trade existed much earlier. “Over a hundred years before Ur-Nammu and his dynasty, we know that the queen of lagash sent gifts to the queen of Dilmun. Already we have the rulers giving each other presents. In a list, also from Lagash, of temple gifts to the god, one of the objects was a copper model of a Dilmun boat. So we have very early evidence of trade going on with people in Southern Mesopotamia viewing Dilmun as a fabulous place with luxury goods are moving back and forth through there.”
By the end of the 20th century BC, the third dynasty of Ur collapses while it was assumed that the trade fell apart, it didn;t. “What we now know from new excavations is that the whole network which would we would think of was running from Lagash, Ur and Failaka, goes all the way down to Bahrain where the rulers who ran the other end of the trade were developing a very large and complex culture.”
She shared that we now know this because of the archaeological work of the last four-five years, through which a lot of material has been published. “The Danish archaeologists working with the Bahraini archaeologists that have done so much work in this. We know by 2000 BC if not slightly earlier, they had started to have evidence of a very large and complicated culture. We see evidence of city walls built, the stone foundations of large public buildings, a large complicated temple.”
Kawami noted that it was most interesting it to see Failaka as the pivot point. She drew the audience’s attention to the merchants and sailors who did all of the work and the seals they used. Kawami showed several images of a varied group of seals from Failaka that included a Cylinder seal from Al Khidr, a stamp seal, one bearing the inscription — ‘Ab-Gina, sailor from a big ship, the son of Ur-abba’, among other heterogeneous seals.
About 2000 BC there developed huge and extensive burial mounds that became more complex with the passage of time. The best known of these is from the A’ali village in Bahrain which has 11,100 mounds. In all of Bahrain there are 75,000 of these mounds.
She noted that in Failaka, there are no mounds or burial sites because it was a trading depot and not where they lived long-term. The heart of the ruling population was in the heart of Bahrain where they start building a few mounds which become increasingly bigger and complex. Kawami showed the audience images of the Dilmun-era burial mound fields, which have been added to the World Heritage List by UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee this year.
“While some mounds are pretty uniform in some areas, in other areas where the land rises up and the view is good, the mounds are of a different type, they are big and as wide as ninety meters, they have walls around the outside of the mound and it is very clear that these clusters are the ruling families and we start seeing in Bahrain the development of a complex culture with bigger mounds, medium sized ones and a whole lot of ordinary ones.” Kawami stated that it was probably the wealth from the international trade that allows this huge spread of very ostentatious funeral practices and revealed that in some places, the grouping of the mounds of a big, medium and smaller ones implies a hierarchy and a complex society.
“There are three different places where these complicated mounds are constructed so they have posited that they have three lineages who operate the southern end of the Dilmun trade and these people have been up until very recently, anonymous because most of these tombs do not remain intact.”
Out of the 75,000, she shared that there are 46 ring mounds that are big and have walls around them with the inner, large mound paramount to the circle of smaller mounds around them to state hierarchy in the culture. She highlighted that these 46 ring mounds aren’t just a heap of stones as we see them now but have built chambers inside, and are not sunk into the ground as in the Egyptian funerary style but lay on the top with the mound built over it with stone. Back then, rather than mounds, they looked like short, stout towers, inside they had small structures. “You might think of them as small stone houses above ground which then have this big monumental man put up both of them”, she said.
“What is interesting in the 46 ring mounds, is that 20% of the ceramics were from Babylon. Most of them were large jars, the old fashioned containers that goods were shipped in. So they have not only goods but the pots that carried them as a sign of status. 20% of your ceramics from one region that is quite far away gives a little indication of how this trade is going.”
She discussed other mounds from A’ali, saying, “You see the very largest ones built very nicely of stone and of course the problem with mounds of stone is that if anyone is looking to built a house, why go out and quarry stone again while there is a mound of it nearby? So that it isn’t just time that has deconstructed some of these mounds.”
The bigger tombs are also on slight rises and no two big ring tombs are next to each other, as if keeping their distance, but positioned in a way to sight the elite neighbour from edge of one wadi to the other. “There seems to be a certain balance and equilibrium between these three lineages that they all keep their distance and their hierarchy and they are polite at least in the placement of their tombs which reflects probably some sort of way that the culture itself treated each other.”
She shared that a few years ago, when the Danish and Bahraini archaeologists were excavating a large ring tomb, they came upon some broken stone vessels inside. “A fragment of a lovely black polish stone with a wonderful inscription on it for someone named Yagli-el, servant of the god Enzak of Agarum, which was the title the Dilmun kings used. The name turned out to be extremely interesting because part of it in another one, said that he is Yagli-el the son of Rimum, and that got everybody very excited because Rimum has been known since the mid nineteenth century from a fragmentary stone and its inscription which reads – from the palace of Rimum, servant of Enzac of Agarum.”
Kawami shared that was is most exciting about Yagli-el is that the name has a specific ethnic and linguistic origin – an Amorite. “He has a name that is very popular in Syria, parts of central Mesopotamia and the language family is Northwest Semitic. What this tells us is that the rulers of Dilmun are a very mixed bunch, they worshipped and called themselves the servants of the local god and then their personal names are from the northwest.”
Kawami shared that Amorite rulers were found in Babylon, Southern Syria, Ashour in northern Mesopotamia. “TheAmorites are not necessarily a tribe but people of a certain linguistic preference and they used it in their names. They did very well in the first half of the first millennium BCE. They were ruling elites in various towns and the best known was Hammurabi, who we always think of Babylonian. He was probably the most successful Amorite ruler and we know him from his great law code.”
The rulers of the Dilmun and the princes who were part of the great Dilmun trade were part of this group of linked rulers. Everybody got around. It wasn’t just the Dilmun merchants sailing from the Indus up to Ur. “We think we invented travel but people got around during antiquity as well”, Kawami remarked.
Hammurabi was part of this group, he had an interesting career. One of the people he had some involvement with was Zimri-Lim in Syria at the site of Mari, was a very wealthy little state doing quite well in international trade and international relations. “We know a lot about Mari because when the building of the palace was sacked and collapsed, all their clay records stayed there, some of they were slain in fires, but there were all there to be found years, centuries and millennia later’, she said, while showed the attendees images of the palace reconstruction.
“He sends special oils to the ruler in Dilmun so we know there was direct contact and direct trade from Mari to Bahrain and they sent letters. Things don’t go well, ultimately for Zimri-lim and he runs foul of his earlier patrom Hammurabi who trashes the place and kicks out Zimri-lim. Kawami shared that it is uncertain if he died then or went into exile.
Hammurabi was the first among equals and was the better strategist among the Amorite princes. While there was no Amorite empire, there was very lucrative trade that involved perfumes and perfumed oils going from Mesopotamia, down to Bahrain along with rich textiles. “The big cities of Mesopotamia were producing luxury goods for export. We know what was going the other way was copper, hard stones, plus a lot of other things, even animals.”
“We have a two-way trade and now we can watch it over nearly a thousand years. We now understand it a bit better because we see who is involved, even in Bahrain is the Amorites. There were probably two other families down there. It was only luck that stone artifacts have survived giving us these people’s names and their patronimics. We need to know who the father’s name was so that we could put a generation together.”
Kawami shared that looking back gives a better understanding of the political layer that went over this international trade along with the practical aspect of moving goods from one place to the other without any hassles. That, is where the merchants of Dilmun come in – playing the very significant role of facilitating the exchange.
She informed that the Dilmun merchants considered themselves independent of the hierarchy, the organizing principle among them was a heterarchy, a horizontal network of connections and associations. “They influenced each other not by bashing heads or building bigger tombs but by facilitating trade, a common exemplar of this heterarchial distribution of power.”
The distribution of secondary power, below the rulers, among the Dilmun merchants made the trade happen. “They may not figure in the annals of military figures and royal rulers but they provide the pathway through which those powers were exerted. Once again, not big and splashy but the centre point connecting the rulers, the trade and international connections in the second millennium BCE”, she concluded.