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Dilmun: Quest for Paradise

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

S. N. Kramer
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Extract

The land known by the name of Dilmun (or Telmun) in the cuneiform documents has been identified by most scholars with the island of Bahrein in the Persian T Gulf (note 1), and for the past nine years a large and competent Danish expedition has been excavating on the island in the hope of uncovering there the origin of the Sumerians and their civilization (note 2). Several scholars have located Dilmun in Iran, south of Elam, and have taken it to be a land bordering on the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, whose hinterland included the province of Persis (note 3). This was the localization of Dilmun which seemed most likely to me when preparing the article 'Dilmun and the Land of the Living' some two decades ago (note 4). In recent years, however, new inscriptional material has become available which indicates that whatever its western boundary, Dilmun extended much farther to the east and included much, if not all, of that part of Iran, Pakistan, and India on which flourished the Indus or Harappan civilization (note 5). The following pages will sketch the pertinent cuneiform evidence for this identification of Dilmun in the chronological order in which it came to my attention over the years.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 37 , Issue 146 , June 1963 , pp. 111 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1963

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References

(1) For detailed references cf. BASOR (Bulletin of American School for Oriental Research), No. 96 (1944), 18, note 4 and JAOS (Journal of American Oriental Society), 74 (1954), 6, note 5.

(2) Cf. the preliminary reports in Kuml (1954–1962) and Scientific American, vol. 203 (1960), 62-71.

(3) For references cf. BASOR, 96 (1944), 18, note 3.

(4) BASOR, 96 (1944), 18-28.

(5) Whatever the name of the ‘Indus Civilization’ land, there is no doubt that it was known to the Mesopotamian scribes, since the fact that a number of Indus seals inscribed with the Indus pictographic characters have actually been excavated in Sumer— and undoubtedly many more still await the excavating spade—proves conclusively that there was considerable trade between the two lands. In fact there is good reason to assume that Indus traders were settled more or less permanently in several of the Sumerian cities, cf. e.g. V. G. Childe, New Light on the Ancient Near East (1953), 69-171. For a detailed bibliography on the Indus Civilization cf. now Sir Mortimer Wheeler, Early India and Pakistan (1959), 184-185, 189, and add Raikes and Dyson, ‘The Prehistoric Climate of Baluchistan and the Indus Valley’ (American Anthropologist, 63 (1961), S. R. Rao, ‘New Light on the Indus Valley Civilization’, Illustrated London News (25 February and 11 March, 1961); G. F. Dales, ‘Harappan Outposts on the Makran Coast’, ANTIQUITY, XXXVI (1962), 86-92; B. B. Lal, ‘A New Indus Valley Provincial Capital Discovered: Excavations at Kalibangan in Northern Rajasthan’, Illustrated London News (24 March, 1962). The present writer, with the aid of a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, spent some two months in India and Pakistan (December, 1960, and January, 1961) where he studied the Indus artifacts located in the museums at Karachi, Lahore, and New Delhi; discussed the various aspects of the Indus Civilization with the archaeologists of Pakistan and India; and visited Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, Kot Diji, Amri (where J. M. Casal was excavating at the time), Rupar (accompanied by its excavator R. Shamra), and Lothal (where the ‘dockyard’ excavation was still going on).

(6) For the translated text and detailed references cf. ANET (Ancient Near Eastern Texts, James Pritchard, editor, 1955), 47-50, and Gilgameš et sa Légende (Cahiers du Groupe François-Thureau-Dangin 1, 1960), 63-66.

(7) On further study of the text I realized that both these assumptions were untenable (see Journal of Cuneiform Studies, 1 (1947), 35, note 214 for the argument), and the ‘quest for Paradise’ was therefore sparked by an erroneous textual interpretation.

(8) For the translated text and bibliographical references, cf. ANET, 42-44.

(9) For the translated text and bibliographical references, cf. ANET, 37-41.

(10) For a detailed list of the texts in which Dilmun is mentioned, cf. Burrows, Orientalia, 30, 3 ff ; Weidner, AfO (Archiv für Orient forschung), XV (1945-51), 169-170; Cornwall, BASOR, 103 (1946), 3 ff, and Journal of Cuneiform Studies, vi (1952), 137 ff; Oppenheim, JAOS, 74 (1954), 6 ff.

(11) The location of Magan and Meluhha is still much debated. Most cuneiformists would probably agree that from about 1500 B.C. on Magan and Meluhha corresponded roughly to ancient Egypt and Ethiopia (for bibliographical references see Weidner, AfO, XVI, 1952, 1 ff). It is for the earlier periods that this identification has been generally thought to be unlikely since it would involve the seemingly incredible assumption that the peoples of those early days had sea-going ships that could reach the coast of Africa. This has led to the hypothesis that over the millennia there was a shift in toponomy, that is, that in the third and early second millennium B.C. the names Magan and Meluhha actually corresponded to Baluchistan and India and only later were transferred to Egypt and Ethiopia (cf. now Leemans, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 21-37). Now methodologically speaking, the verification of an hypothesis involving a name shift in the cuneiform documents for countries so important as Magan and Meluhha should be based on evidence that is reasonably assured and decisive. But as of today this is hardly the case; there is every reason to believe that the Mesopotamian scribes had a clear idea of the locations of the more important countries of the world about them. Thus, for example, in the historiographic document ‘The Curse of Agade’ (Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, 1961, 317 ff) we find the Meluhhaites described as ‘the people of the black land’, a phrase which parallels closely the expression ‘the black Meluhhaites’ (that is, Ethiopians) found in the much later Esarhaddon inscriptions (cf. Weidner, AfO, XVI, 1952, 7-8, sub 12 and 16).

(12) The text was identified and copied by C. J. Gadd and will be published in a forthcoming Ur Excavations volume devoted to Sumerian literary texts under the joint authorship of Mr Gadd and the writer.

(13) Cf. Figulla and Martin, Letters and Documents of the Old Babylonian Period (1953), and Leo Oppenheim’s valuable and illuminating study ‘The Seafaring Merchants of Ur’ in JAOS, 74 (1954), 6-17; in my opinion, however, Oppenheim errs in his localization of Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha.

(14) For the maritime character of the Indus Civilization, cf. especially the articles by Dales and Rao cited in note 5.

(15) Enki is a Sumerian compound meaning ‘Lord of the Earth’. But from early days Enki had another name, Ea, a word whose etymology is quite uncertain; it is not altogether impossible that it belonged to the language spoken by one of the ‘Obaidan’ peoples (see note 17).

(16) Nor is the Dilmun myth the only Sumerian composition which characterizes Dilmun as a land noteworthy for purity and cleanliness. In ‘Enki and the World Order’, a mythological poem of close to 500 lines, published in Wissenshaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich-Schiller-Universitat Jena 9 (1959-60), 221-256, we find Dilmun among the lands whose fate is decreed by Enki as he goes about organizing the earth and its cultural processes. The passage involving Dilmun consists of six lines, but only two of these are fully preserved; interestingly enough, these read:

He (Enki) cleaned and purified Dilmun,

Placed the goddess Ninsikilla in charge of it.

In fact, Ninsikilla, the name of the goddess whom Enki charged with the care of Dilmun, is a Sumerian compound word, meaning ‘the pure queen’, which is probably a further indication of the value put on purity and cleanliness in Dilmun.

(17) If this hypothesis is correct we may have some linguistic data which might prove of no little value for the Indus language and script. For while we still know practically nothing about the grammar and structure of the Ubaidian language we do know a number of Ubaidian words denoting place names and occupations. The names of the two great Mesopotamian rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, or idiglat and buranun as they read in the cuneiform texts, are Ubaidian—not Sumerian—words. So, too, are the names of the most important urban centres of ‘Sumer’: Eridu, Ur, Larsa, Isin, Adab, Kullab, Lagash, Nippur, and Kish. In fact the word Dilmun itself may, like the word buranun for the Euphrates, be Ubaidian. More important still, such culturally significant words as engar (farmer), udul (herdsman), shupeshdak (fisherman), apin (plough), apsin (furrow), nimbar (palm), sulumb (date), tibira (metal worker), simug (smith), nangar (carpenter), addub (basket-maker), ishbar (weaver), ashgab (leather worker), pahar (potter), shidim (mason), and perhaps even damgar (merchant), are probably all Ubaidian rather than Sumerian, as has been usually assumed (cf. Benno Landsberger, ‘Die Sumerer’ in Ankara Universitesi, Dil re Tarih-Cografya Dergisi, 1943-45). And should the inscriptions on the Indus seals contain not only the name of the consignor or consignee of the goods to which their clay impressions were attached, but also his occupation, it is not impossible that one or another of the above-listed words will be found among them.