Word: dilmun
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...name the first civilized people, they usually pick the Sumerians, who built imposing cities, including Abraham's Ur of the Chaldees, in southern Mesopotamia about 3000 B.C. But the Sumerians did not think of themselves as native Mesopotamians: according to their legends, they came from a place called Dilmun, where lived Ziusudra, the sole survivor of the Flood. Last week Danish archaeologists were digging into the ruins of a city on oil-rich Bahrein Island in the Persian Gulf. They think it is Dilmun, the mysterious "home city of the Land of Sumer...
Disk-Shaped Seals. After figuring in early legends, Dilmun takes slightly more tangible form in Sumerian writings as a city on an island three days' sail down the Persian Gulf. Merchants from Ur traded there, and clay-written records tell that they brought woolen goods, returning with cargoes of copper, ivory and gold. This suggests that Dilmun acted as middleman between Mesopotamia and the civilization of the Indus Valley in Pakistan. In both places have been found a few peculiar, disk-shaped stone seals. Since most Mesopotamian seals are cylindrical and Indus seals are square, archaeologists have long speculated...
Except for such dim traces, Dilmun vanished centuries ago. But just after World War II, a scholarly young Englishman, Geoffrey Bibby, visited Bahrein on oil business, and was fascinated by 100,000 burial mounds on the island's north end. Under them were T-shaped stone chambers with the remains of a single person in each. Before he could investigate further, Bibby left Bahrein. Later he married a Danish girl, settled in Denmark, and worked his way up to the post of director of oriental antiquities in Aarhus University's prehistoric museum...
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