ART - Bahrain's Mystery ........ Sands Yield Beautiful Riddles
MrMojoMan
Sands Yield Beautiful Riddles
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By Souren Melikian International Herald Tribune
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PARIS - This is history in the process of being written, fresh from archaeological
excavations. Two decades ago, the idea of a show called ''Bahrein: La civilisation
des deux mers'' (''Bahrain: The Civilization of Two Seas'') would have sounded
extravagant - two-thirds of the objects on view at the Institut du Monde Arabe
until Aug. 29 were still buried.
The price to pay is that visitors longing to find out who made some of these
marvelous pots of the second millennium B.C. - or what these stelae reducing the
human figure to pure abstraction meant around the second or third century A.D. -
ask endless questions and get few answers.
No inscription identifying the land has yet been found on the Gulf island known in
Arabic as Bahreyn, ''The Two Seas.'' The first record of its name, which was
Dilmun in Akkadian, the early Semitic language of Babylon, is found in an account
of the Deluge inscribed on a tablet excavated at Uruk, in southern Iraq:
''Ziusudra, the King, having prostrated himself in front of An and Enlil, they
granted him eternal life as to a god. They settled him in a land overseas, in
Dilmun, where the sun rises.''
If little is known about early Dilmun from 2300 B.C. to 1800 B.C., one feature of
its culture is not in doubt. Afterlife was a major preoccupation - the material
yielded by funerary chambers over the last decade is impressive.
The Dilmun dwellers loved beautiful pottery. In the 1996-1997 season, Bahraini
archaeologists recovered from a necropolis at Rifa'a a jar with rounded shoulders
topped by a broad, everted neck, which has exact parallels among Mesopotamian
vessels and must be an import from Ur. Its shape places it among the masterpieces
of early Middle Eastern pottery.
Inspired by the models from Mesopotamia, the Dilmun potters created their own
masterpiece. An ovoid jar in red clay painted with black bands simulating
horizontal grooves, which was recovered in 1994 by Danish archaeologists, has a
lightness and vibrancy that is entirely its own.
The Dilmun artists had a feel for fine material. A tall jar with ribs swirling
around that dates from around 2000 B.C. is made from a warm brownish red clay shot
through with white specks due to shell fragments. It exudes a unique lyricism.
Does the Dilmun dwellers' keen artistic sense account for their many imports of
beautiful objects? From Oman they brought in superb jars with abstract black
patterns painted on a red slip, and, above all, the gray soft stone vessels, as
pure in shape as they are sober in their geometrical patterns of dotted circles.
In their search for beautiful pots, they looked as far afield as the Indus Valley.
Pierre Lombard, the French archaeologist who curated the show and edited the book
that goes with it, notes that a footed cup of gray earthenware can be matched from
the pottery produced at Mehrgarh in Pakistan.
By far the largest number of imports, however, came from the lands across the Gulf
that would become Iran. The Dilmun dwellers naturally imported their beloved stone
vessels. One of these, carved with an architectural pattern of the third
millennium B.C., may have been preserved above ground for centuries - the context
from which it is found is datable to about 2000 B.C. to 1800 B.C.
Can the mystery surrounding the early Dilmun culture ever clear up? It would help
if we could ''read'' the symbols carved on the seals that cover a 400-year period
from around 2050 B.C. Two of these are intriguingly inscribed with signs in the
Indus Valley script, which, alas, remains undeciphered.
What disastrous process affected the land of Dilmun around the early second
millennium B.C. eludes us entirely. Three early sites gradually lost their
importance until they were abandoned for ever.
A fourth site, Qal'at al-Bahreyn, was also abandoned, and reoccupied centuries
later. At that point, a new people dominated the scene. The Kassites who had
invaded Babylon in the 16th century B.C., had gained control of the marshlands and
occupied faraway Dilmun.
Seals and tablets inscribed in Akkadian establish their presence. In 1995, the
French Archaeological Mission headed by Lombard brought to light some 50 tablets
at Qal'at al-Bahreyn, the Kassite power center. One, made for scribes, carries a
bilingual list of words in Sumerian - by then a dead language still used in
liturgy and literature in southen Mesopotamia - and in Akkadian, spoken in Babylon
and used for administrative purposes in Dilmun.
Other tablets deal with economic and legal matters. More may be learned as the
decipherment currently under way is completed.
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PERHAPS a new disaster befell Dilmun - the palatial complex at Qal'at al-Bahreyn
was devastated by fire at the end of the 14th century B.C. - for another long
break follows the Kassite period. The name Dilmun next crops up around 709 B.C. in
Assyrian monumental inscriptions recording the submission of Uperi ''king of
Dilmun who lives like a fish 30 double-hours away, in the middle of the Sea of the
Rising Sun.''
At Qal'at al-Bahreyn, some of the monumental remains uncovered by the French may
well be the palace of that same Uperi. A century later, King Assurbanipal named
Dilmun among the provinces of Assyria and when the Babylonians made a brief
comeback in the mid-sixth century B.C., their last king, Nabonidus, cited Dilmun
as a land administered by one of his governors. After that, the Achaemenid empire
of Iran extended its domination over the entire Semitic Near East, Dilmun
included.
The complex story told by excavated objects is more gripping.
If aesthetics mean anything, they suggest an astonishing cultural continuity. The
old love of Dilmun for beautiful pottery and stone vessels was as vivid as ever,
and the links with Iran, across the Gulf, even stronger - long before the
Achaemenid takeover.
Entire classes of objects - libation vessels with long, projecting spouts, painted
cups from the northern districts of Khorasan, in present-day Uzbekistan - are
considered by archaeologists to be imports from Iran. But now Dilmun also had its
own production of superb stone vessels, some perpetuating second millennium
shapes.
Alexander's conquest of the Achaemenid empire in 332 B.C. apparently left these
links intact. For a while, a syncretic art may have developed. A pair of stunning
gold earrings of the first century B.C. discovered at Shakhura combine two
Iranian-looking reclining does mounted by Hellenistic Eros figures with pendants
in the shape of Greek marble vases.
Around the second to third century A.D., a school of sculpture inspired by
Parthian Mesopotamia was active alongside another tradition from the Arabian
peninsula, that inspired very abstract funerary stelae so geometricized that the
human form is beyond recognition. Beautiful turquoise glazed vases were imported
from Parthian Mesopotamia and superb glass vessels from the Syrian area. The old
artistic sense of Dilmun honed over 2,000 years had lost none of its sharpness.
Oddly, next to nothing survives of the early Islamic period.
An admirable glazed pottery bowl with a lotus chalice in almond green on ocher
ground from the ninth century is probably an Iranian import, and another,
not-so-admirable bowl in the Khorasan style might be too. A 12th-century slab from
the mosque at Suq al Khamis illustrates the existence of a powerful school of
monumental calligraphy in Bahrain with evident links to the southern Iranian
world. Cultural history here remains to be written.
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