Royal Mounds of A'ali in Bahrain

The Emergence of Kingship in Early Dilmun

Steffen Terp Laursen

• Publisher: Aarhus University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9788793423190
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

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 In this study, vast quantities of hitherto unpublished data from excavations in the burial mounds of Bahrain is integrated to allow a more informed and diachronic picture of the evolution in tomb architecture,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.

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title page
• Colophon
• Content
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The early explorers and exploration history of A’ali
• 3. Gazetteer of elite burial mounds previously investigated in A’ali
• 4. Recent investigations
• 5. Carbon sampling and radiocarbon-dating
• 6. Burial and death rituals
• 7. The origins and evolution of the burial mounds
• 8. Social status typology and relative chronology
• 9. Radiocarbon chronology based on Bayesian modelling (By Steffen Terp Laursen and Jesper Olsen)
• 10. Conclusion and discussion
• Appendix 1. A’ali pottery in Mumbai (By Steffen Terp Laursen)
• Appendix 2. Analysis of bitumen from the Royal Mounds (By Thomas Van de Velde)
• Appendix 3. The stone building materials (By Steffen Terp Laursen)
• Appendix 4. Ceremonial platform Mound OA 256 (By Steffen Terp Laursen)
• Appendix 5. Inscriptions from the Royal Mounds of A’ali (Bahrain) and related texts (By Gianni Marchesi)
• Acknowledgements
• Bibliography