Dilmun Burial Mounds

Across the north and centre of the main island of Bahrain lie thousands of low, rounded mounds of earth and stone. They are graves of the Dilmun civilisation, built over a few centuries of the early second millennium BCE, when Dilmun was a wealthy trading power that linked Mesopotamia, the Gulf and the Indus valley. Once there were many tens of thousands; today some eleven thousand survive in groups among the towns and fields. In 2019 UNESCO inscribed twenty-one of these sites as the Dilmun Burial Mounds.

Most mounds cover a single stone chamber, built for one person and closed with a capstone, then heaped over with gravel and earth. In the village of A'ali stand the largest, known as the royal mounds: great tombs built as two-storeyed stone towers and covered to form mounds many metres high, believed to belong to the rulers of Dilmun. Among the mounds archaeologists have found pottery, seals, copper weapons and ivory that tell of Dilmun's far-reaching trade.

Danish archaeologists, led by Peter Glob and Geoffrey Bibby, excavated many mounds from the 1950s, helping to identify Bahrain as ancient Dilmun. Bahrain's later history was also bound up with Iran: in the Sasanian period the islands were part of the Persian empire under the name of Mishmahig. In A'ali, potters still work beside the royal mounds, firing their kilns in the shadow of the ancient tombs.