Jysk Arkæologisk Selskabs Skrifter – serie

In the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC, the Arabian Gulf was an important waterway linking the large cities and states of Mesopotamia and Iran with Southeast Arabia and the Indus Valley. Trade along the Lower Sea, as the Gulf was named, demanded supporting stations, and civilizations grew and declined with the fortunes of this trade. In the 1950s, Danish investigations along the southern shores of the Gulf discovered remains of two of these ancient civilazations, Dilmun and Makkan (Bibby 1969). Survey and excavation in Kuwait beginning in 1958 revealed that the upper Gulf was an important part of Dilmun in the early 2nd millennium. Both before, during and after the flourishing of the Dilmun civilization the island of Failaka located off the Kuwait mainland formed an important role in several Near Eastern trade networks with Mesopotamia as the dominant partner.

The Early Bronze Age Tombs of Jebel Hafit presents fifty burial mounds excavated by Moesgaard Museum in 1961-1971 in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi in the Arabian Gulf. These excavations were the first archaeological investigations at all in this part of the world, and they throw light on the beginning of the Bronze Age on the Oman Peninsula. The graves represent a fundamental transformation of the relationship between humans and the environment in the region, preceding the emergence of oasis agriculture. The graves contain the first objects of copper in the region and show that the exploitation of copper from the Oman mountains had begun. The tombs of Jebel Hafit are inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage list. The publication is the result of a cooperation between the Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority and Moesgaard Museum.

The Royal Mounds of A'ali in Bahrain has long been shrouded in mystery and suspected to be the final resting place of the Bronze Age kings of Dilmun. Puzzled by their great size explorers and professional archaeologists have for hundreds of years attempted to penetrate their interior and wrestle secrets and treasures from the tombs. This book presents information from the early days of archaeological exploration at A'ali as well as new data from the joint Bahrain - Moesgaard Museum investigations 2010 -2016 directed by the author. The evidence from both old and new field explorations at A'ali are meticulously analyzed. The results are discussed with a strong focus on the royal cemetery as an institution, using a theoretical approach based on the anthropology and ethnography of death rituals. Emphasis is also placed on developing an architectural typology and a radio-carbon based chronology of the royal tombs at A'ali. In this study, vast quantities of hitherto unpublished data from excavations in the burial mounds of Bahrain is integrated to allow a more informed and diachronic picture of the evolution in tomb architecture, death rituals and social organization in the Early Dilmun period, c. 2200-1700 BC. Philological evidence is presented which demonstrates that the entombed kings were of Amorite ancestry. The study reveals that the Amorite Dynasty buried at A'ali emerged with the formation of huge monumental tombs in a royal cemetery proper around 2000-1900 BC and lost its grip on power c. 1700 BC.