Most of these finds differed from those of nearby Mesopotamia. Nothing linked them to mainland Kuwait, which was extremely poor in archaeological remains. But an impressive number of the Failaka remains belonged to a lost civilization that flourished on the island of Bahrain about four thousand years ago. There seemed to have been an intimate seaway contact between these two prehistoric island cultures 250 miles apart:.
Bibby had been field director of a Danish archaeological expedition to Bahrain. They brought to hght hitherto unknown harbor-cities and temples that rivaled those of Egypt and Sumer in antiquity. Their excavations had convinced Bibby and most other scientists that Bahrain, and not Failaka, had been the DUmun of Sumerian records. But Bibby had begun to speculate as to whether Dihnun cotJd not have been an extensive maritime empire that embraced the whole island area from Bahrain to Failaka.
The most remarkable piece which the Danes dug up on Failaka was a round stamp seal that could only have come from the distant Indus Valley.^ It was til in and flat, with a high boss, and bore on its face an inscription in the still imdeciphered Indus Valley script Whoever brought it to this island had been in touch with people of the great civilization that flourished on the banks of the Indus River and along the coasts of present Pakistan and adjacent India in Simierian times. As suddenly as it had appeared in full bloom with the magnificent cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa about 2500 B.C., just as suddenly and inexphcably had this mighty civilization bordering on the Indian Ocean disappeared completely about 1500 B.C.
Although Alexander the Great had built his ships in the Indus Valley, he came too late to have brought the inscribed Indus seal to Failaka. The Indus script, like the entire cities of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, was completely biuied and forgotten at the time of Alexander and only rediscovered by the archaeologist's shovel a few decades ago. Thus in the period between 2500 and 1500 B.C., Failaka Island had contact not only vidth Bahrain but with a civilized nation outside the gulf area. People able to read and write in their own characters had plowed these waters long before literacy spread from the Middle East to Greece and the rest of Europe.
gS The Tigris Expedition
Imran Abdo, the Antiquity Superintendent. I got no farther. What I had come for was no longer on the island. Abdo brought his keys and opened glass doors and cases.
Sure enough, here were those precious stamp seals with Su-merian and Babylonian mythical scenes incised upon them, used for sealing the cargo of merchant sailors frequenting Failaka in epochs lost from written history. Among them I caught sight of a motif more precious to me than that of any legendary encounter between Sumerian demigods and kings. A shipl A sickle-shaped ship with mast and with crosswise hatching along its curved body to illustrate rope lashings of a reed boat just hke ours.
Enthralled, I stood scrutinizing the prehistoric seal in my hand. Abdo, a blue-eyed Palestinian with thirty years of local research behind him, looked at me in surprise. Did I not realize that Failaka had been a very early shipping center? There was proof of very early contact not only with nearby Mesopotamia, Bahrain and the distant Indus Valley, but also with ancient Egypt.
He dug out of his archaeological treasure chest a chunk of stone. Just an ordinary piece of rock, but clearly the fragment of something that had been worked, for one side was brightly polished.
"Egyptian granite," Abdo said triimiphantly. "An American expedition from Johns Hopkins University dug it up on Failaka five years ago."
We admired the piece together as an art object more precious than gold. Gold could have come to Failaka from anywhere. This particular kind of granite only from the remote Nile Valley. The Greeks did not quarry stones in Egypt to bring to Failaka.
I had hardly finished gazing at the lump of Egyptian granite when Mr. Abdo began unwrapping fragments of worked alabaster. "Look," he said. "Cream-colored alabaster. As in Egypt. Not white as in Anatolia."
Next he opened with great caution a httle box with a thumb-sized sculpture of a beetle. A scarab I An unmistakable Egyptian scarab. The strange symbols incised on it were of local character, but whoever had carved it had somehow been under Egyptian influence.
A tall, shm jar of Egyptian style had also been excavated on Failaka. It bore a shght resemblance to those containing the Dead Sea scrolls, but was of a type not known in Mesopotamia.
Although all this was important evidence of long-range navigation, I had to return to the seals again. By the time we had gone through the whole collection Abdo and I had picked out a total of five Failaka seals that clearly depicted ships. All were sickle-shaped reed ships with masts. One had a figure seated astern, hoisting or holding the halyard to a big, matted sail. His rope ran through the mast top. Another showed two figures standing, one on either side of the mast, each grasping the lower edge of a reefed sail above their heads. AH five ships were engraved on stamp seals from about
2500 B.C.
The Tigris crew hstened to my story from the Kuwait Museum as we ourselves raced toward Failaka on a reed ship. The night was black. Fhckering lamphght fell on attentive faces as we clung to a table that would have plunged overboard with aU of us if not lashed to the deck bundles. Each of us had his own lifehne tied to mast legs or stays, so as not to disappear in the night waves if an imex-pected breaker should timible in from the portside.
"Gherman," I shouted across the table to the one who understood Enghsh least. "Do you understand what I saw on those Failaka seals?"
"Ships."
"But ships in every detail hke those you and I saw incised on the canyon walls of Upper Egypt. Similar enough to match like fingerprints."
I continued my story. I had told Abdo that we were ourselves building such a reed ship in Iraq to test it in the gulf. He was not surprised. He rephed that small boats of this prehistoric type had been used by Failaka fishermen until our own days. The last of them had just been abandoned. He had secured it for the museum. It was the same type as the reed boats still used in Iraq a few years ago, but built from bundles of palm-leaf stems, because there were no reeds on Failaka Island.
"What about your fingerprints?" Asbjorn's smiling face appeared beside us on the doorsill of the forward cabin. I was slowly getting to my point.
The boats on the Failaka seals did not merely end in high points fore and aft, hke our ship, or hke those on ancient designs of reed ships from the Mediterranean islands. On either side of the pointed bow was a long curved horn. I knew this peculiarity from reed-ship designs in Egypt and Mesopotamia. On the best repre-
sentations they were really shown as animal horns. But on simplified designs the top of the bow just ended in three tips. I had already found this curious detail common to ships shown in numerous Egyptian petroglyphs and on Mesopotamian seals. This symbol even antedated the invention of man's first known script. The triple point on an upcurved bow was the symbol for the word "ship" in the earhest Sumerian hieroglyphs, which scientists had found to be the same as the earhest Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for "marine." Moreover, the Sumerian word for a ship's "bow" was the same as their word for "horn."
I began to see a meaning in all this when Mr. Abdo showed me the same "horns" on the Failaka seals and added that it had been a local custom to place the head of a gazelle in the bow of a ship, either a real gazelle's head or a carved one. And here we came to the fingerprint. Three of the five Failaka seals had the sickle-shaped ship depicted in a most pecuhar manner. The deep curve of the deck was incised to coincide with the dorsal outhne of a saddle-backed gazelle in such a way that ship and animal became an inseparable unit. The raised neck with the head and horns of the gazelle coincided with the high bow of the ship, while the curved-up rump and tail became the stern. The mast rose from the sagging back of the animal, and the ship's crew was thus at the same time both sailing and riding. In one case two persons flanked the mast while tending a reefed sail hoisted above their heads.
Common to these three seals was the idea of the men on deck navigating and yet at the same time riding a bounci
ng gazelle. This was perhaps a vivid symbohsm of wave motion. But the combination of a sailing vessel's hull with the body of a beast of the field was as special and unlikely to be repeated as was a fingerprint. Repeated yes, but not without some communication between the boat designers. The design had impressed me and puzzled me when I first came across it, in a special pubhcation on Egyptian petroglyphs. Ships were reported to be among the most common motifs incised in predynastic time on the naked desert rocks between the Nile and the Red Sea. This had made me invite Gherman to join me in these dried-out canyons, looking for further information on prehistoric navigation. Where deep sand and fallen rocks stopped further progress by jeep, Gherman and I had continued on foot in the direction of the Red Sea. It would seem absiu-d to look for anything to do with boats in such surroundings: sand dunes, not a drop of water,
Trapped Between the Reefs and Pirates loi
not a green leaf. Not a place for living creatures other than vultures, flies and desert snakes. Through the barren Red Sea plateau desert wadis ran like empty tributaries into the Nile Valley. Their steep canyon walls and the water-worn boulders at their feet bore evidence that the wadis had been deep rivers in early prehistoric time. The barren plateau around them down to the Red Sea had formerly been amply watered by rain and covered by grass and forests. The change had taken place some five or ten thousand years ago, before the days of the pharaohs.f
It was well known that the desolate desert wadis we entered were filled with ancient petroglyphs illustrating forest animals and ships. And we foimd them everywhere. Many had never been reported before, but all repeated the same restricted repertoire: antelopes, waterbuck and other long-homed species, giraffes, Hons, crocodiles, ostriches and, in addition to these animal pictures, hunters with dogs, and a great number of ships. Boats and ships of all sizes. Some were propelled by rows of oars, others by mast and sail. As could be expected from predynastic art, all represented strongly sickle-shaped reed boats. The size of some must have been quite formidable, since anything from twenty to forty oars were common, and a few were shown with a crew of fifty or more on deck. Many had two cabins, one on either side of the mast. A few carried homed cattle or other large animals on board, which were dwarfed in proportion to the big vessel transporting them.
As Gherman and I came out of Wadi Abu Subeira, the wide desert canyon between Aswan and the Red Sea, it was clearer to me than ever that water transport on a large scale had been of paramount importance in the Red Sea area long before man domesticated the horse and invented the wheel. Had the full story which this prehistoric desert art could tell us been properly appreciated? The fact that the Egyptian petroglyphs were surviving examples of the unsophisticated local art in prepharaonic time seemed to have overshadowed their deeper imphcations. To me their real value had ceased to be a matter of artistic quahty, becoming instead the sim-
t Whether the climate had changed because the forest disappeared or the forest disappeared because the climate had changed is still a matter of dispute among botanists and chmatologists. It is a documented fact that Mesopotamia, too, had been wooded in early Sumerian times. The Sumerians describe their own hills as wooded.^ The pharaohs do not. But archaeology shows that there were people in Egypt long before the pharaohs, and their petroglyphs have something to say as well.
pie fact that they reflected what the artists had seen in a period leading up to known civiUzation. Forest animals and watercraft. Besides the beasts around them the artists had cut into the solid rock their testimony of man's earliest achievements in architecture: huge watercraft for transport and security. Ships were built and depicted long before carts, forts and temples. On his huge raft-ships man was mobile and safe from wild beasts and enemies in days when the land was covered by dangerous forests without roads or walled cities. Beasts and big ships were all the artists thought of in the millennia preceding pharaonic time.
The dried-out wadis lead to the Nile. But the distance from the ship designs to the Red Sea is negligible today and was possibly shorter earUer. The wadis might even have been rivers running from the forests to the Red Sea; land hfting, hnked with the Rift Valley movements, is fuUy possible here. The seagoing curves of these predynastic boats were indisputable. With bow and stem elegantly swung high, as on our Tigris and often much more so, they bore clear evidence of a maritime background. While they may very well have been used on an inland waterway like the Nile as well, they were not primarily designed or developed as barges or rafts for floating cargo, beasts or people on a smooth river. They were designed for bouncing over ocean waves in gazelle fashion, as we ourselves were doing on Tigris, while skidding and jumping across the frothing wave crests. The most artistic composition I had seen from the hands of these early artists had been the combination of sailing ship and gazelle, giving motion to the vessel by letting it bounce hke a homed beast over the ocean waves.
Someone knowing this ingenious composition had bounced from the Red Sea area to Failaka before us. The three seals incised with the Egyptian petroglyph motif of a saihng gazelle were indeed fingerprints left on that island. We would soon be there ourselves.
I had been steering most of the afternoon and proposed that we all leave the table to get some early sleep. We were heading for troubled water and could expect a lively night. Asbjom was now in good shape and he and HP took turns in climbing to the mast top to watch for hghts. The chart showed a tall hghthouse built to guide ships to Kuwait aroimd the southwestern end of Failaka and its shallows. The hghthouse was marked as seventy-five feet high and
visible at sixteen miles. A good mile to the north of it a dangerous reef was marked, with a pile of rocks which, according to the chart, had a hght, but according to the pilot book had none.
I had barely turned in at 8 p.m. when Norman*s head appeared in the cabin door informing me that from the mast they saw the hght. It was where we had expected it. I still had time for a quick nap.
A moment later he was there again, now visibly worried. We were going fast, and we were heading straight for the hghthouse rocks. The helmsmen were unable to press us past the hghthouse on the left side and into the shipping channel for Kuwait. Too much leeway with this wind. There was no choice but to fall oflF from 250° to 290° and steer straight into the Failaka shallows to avoid coUision with the hghthouse island and the rock pile to its starboard side.
The flashes from the hghthouse in the black night were soon visible even from the deck. Three short flashes in groups, followed by long intervals, while all around us the night was as black as a wall of tar. With our kerosene lamps we could see nothing but the yellow reeds and bamboo that surrounded us in a black universe. There was a ghtter of phosphorescent plankton dancing wildly in the wakes of our two rudder oars, nothing else. The lookout chng-ing to the swinging mast top saw no hght but these short blinks that approached us with good speed on the left. We were soon going to clear that hght on the portside, but where was the reef with the rock pile? It was obviously not ht at all. No modem ship would come on this side of the lighthouse anyhow.
Asbjom lay stretched out on the upcurved reed bundles forward, his head out beyond the bow, to scout for rocks without being bhnded by the flickering lamps forward of the sail and the cabins. The flashes from the invisible tower shd by at some distance on our portside. Were we far enough off to clear the unht rocks as weU?
While we all strained our eyes in vain from deck and mast. Carlo came crawling out of the cabin and said he heard surf. We all listened. Sure enough, we all heard surf rumbhng against boulders as a growing rhythmic undertone in a hissing orchestra of seas on all sides. The growing rumble came out of the night somewhere ahead, and to the left, it seemed.
Land. Rocks. On the portside now. Very clearly. Were there more in front? For safety we turned even farther to starboard, steer-
ing 320°, but saw nothing. The rumble of water on rocks slowly drowned again in the normal roar of breaking seas. Shortly afterward even the noise of the sea became noticeably hghter. W
e also stopped rolling. We were in the shelter of something—probably the httle island holding the hghthouse to our windward. This was surely the best place to anchor and wait for a favorable wind. Ahead of us were only the extensive shallows and sharp rocks of Failaka Island. Norman shouted from the mast that he saw several faint hghts from Failaka along the horizon in front.
I ordered the ship turned all about and the sail down. Thus we could throw out the anchor from the bow, where we had tied broad pieces of water-buffalo hide to the bundles to protect the reeds from being cut by the anchor rope. Detlef was in the bow with assistants ready with the anchor. Each man did his job perfectly with halyard, sheets and braces, and the sail was packed up around the yardarm on deck before the Httle anchor was thrown overboard. Perfect teamwork. It was 10:30 p.m.
Moments afterward we heard shouts from the bow that drowned in the noises of the night. Norman on the cabin roof thought he had heard that we had lost the anchor. HP shouted the same words from somewhere up in front. At first I thought it was a bad joke. The reefs were just ahead of us. I refused to believe it until Detlef came fumbhng out of the dark and reported that the anchor rope had snapped.
"Hurryl The other onel"
Fortunately we had a second, smaller anchor; Carlo and Detlef were already busy getting it ready. This time from the stem where it lay. We all checked and double-checked the knots. I repeated again and again: "Make sure nothing fails. This is the last thing we have on board that can grab hold of the bottom 1"
Our second anchor went overboard. We began to get outside the lee of the invisible isle now and with the high bow and stem catching wind we picked up speed. The anchor did not seem to take hold. Someone quietly suggested that perhaps we had lost that one too. Silence. Detlef tried the rope. Began to pull in the slack. An empty end came out of the black water. None of us uttered a word. Detlef remained speechless and motionless. The young German captain, used to weighing tons of anchor chain by pressing a button, just stood there with the short piece of rope dangling from his hand.
The Tigris Expedition Page 13