Dilmun

The water comes up out of the ground here, and it comes up sweet. The sea around this island is brackish enough to sting a cut, and yet springs push through the limestone and stand in cold pools that make your teeth ache, and date palms grow where nothing should. A Sumerian poem four thousand years old builds its entire theology on that one piece of geology. Before Enki intervened, it says, Dilmun was a city with no river quay and no furrow. Afterwards, its wells of bitter water became wells of sweet water, and it became an emporium on the quay for the Land.

The place existed. Dilmun was a real kingdom on the eastern edge of Arabia, centred from around 2050 BC on the island now called Bahrain, with a capital and harbour at Qalat al-Bahrain, urban centres at Saar and Diraz, and a temple at Barbar dedicated to Enki himself. Its most visible legacy is a cemetery: something like eighty thousand burial mounds were originally estimated on the island, each one a rectangular stone chamber inside a ring wall, built to hold a single body folded on its side. Four thousand years of erosion and stone-robbing have slumped them into rounded rubble, so that from a distance the northern plain looks pocked rather than built on. About a thousand Dilmun stamp seals have come out of those graves and houses, round steatite discs with a crowded, unreadable iconography that remains the only art the culture left behind.

The myth begins with a run of negatives. In Dilmun the raven was not yet cawing and the partridge was not cackling. The lion did not slay, the wolf was not carrying off lambs, the dog had not been taught to make kids curl up, the pig had not learned that grain was to be eaten. No eye-disease said there, I am the eye disease. No old woman said there, I am an old woman. No singer sang a lament, and no wailing was wailed on the outskirts of the city. It is a list of things not happening. Read closely, the passage is less a description of paradise than of a place where nothing has started yet, a country still holding its breath, and the poem never actually promises anyone eternal life in it.

What it promises is water. Ninsikila, the goddess Enki has settled there, is unimpressed with her gift and says so directly: you have given a city, and what does your giving avail me, a city with no river quay, a city with no fields, glebe or furrow. Enki answers with a timetable. When Utu steps up into heaven, fresh waters will run out of the ground from the mouth of the waters running underground. And they do, at that moment, on that day, under that sun. The basins fill. The city drinks. The salt pools turn sweet, the furrows produce grain, and Dilmun becomes the dockyard of the inhabited world, with ships from Magan bringing copper, from Meluhha carnelian and dark hardwood, from Marhashi precious stones, from Elam choice wool.

Then the poem goes somewhere stranger. Enki fathers a line of goddesses in rapid succession, each pregnancy lasting nine days rather than nine months, and eventually eats eight plants that have grown from his own spilled seed. Ninhursaja curses him and vanishes, the Anuna gods sit down in the dust, and eight of Enki’s organs begin to fail. A fox negotiates a reward from Enlil and talks the mother goddess into coming back. She seats the dying god beside her and works through his body one part at a time. My brother, what part of you hurts you. The top of my head hurts me. She gives birth to Abu out of it, then to Ninsikila out of the locks of his hair, then to Ningiriutud, Ninkasi, Nazi, Azimua, Ninti, and last, out of his sides, Ensag, who is made lord of Dilmun. The poem ends four words later. Praise be to Father Enki.

Dilmun turns up in one other place that matters. The broken Sumerian flood story ends with An and Enlil granting Ziusudra life like a god, and then settling him, because he preserved the animals and the seed of mankind, in an overseas country, in the land Dilmun, where the sun rises. That single line does more for the place than the whole paradise passage. It makes Dilmun an address rather than a metaphor, somewhere east across the water, where the one man who outlived the deluge is presumably still sitting.

What Dilmun grants, then, is exemption. Nothing rots there, nothing hunts, nothing grows old on the page, and the person parked there stops dying. What it cannot do is generate any of that on its own. Its blessedness is entirely borrowed: without Enki’s underground water it is a dry rock with a good harbour and no farmland, and the poem is honest enough to open with the goddess complaining about exactly that. The same dependence shows up in the archaeology. When the Indus cities collapsed and southern Mesopotamia went into decline at the end of the eighteenth century BC, Dilmun’s kingship faded with its trade. It came back as a Kassite colony with a Babylonian governor, went quiet again, and by 709 BC a king called Uperi was sending careful gifts to Sargon II of Assyria, less tribute than diplomacy from a man who could count ships. The last cuneiform mention of Dilmun is not a hymn. It is a legal contract in Akkadian, found in 2016, dated to the eighteenth year of Darius, king of Babylon and all the Lands, around 510 BC.

Samuel Noah Kramer, who did more than anyone to make Dilmun famous in English, argued in 1964 that it was the Indus land itself. That identification has not held, and the poem he was translating quietly refutes it: Meluhha and Magan arrive in Dilmun’s harbour as separate countries carrying separate cargo. The Garden of Eden comparisons that trail after Dilmun in popular writing run into a similar problem. There is no fall in this story, no forbidden fruit and no expulsion. There is a water shortage, a god with poor impulse control around plants, and a fox who knows how to ask for a fee.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Dilmun?

Dilmun is a land in Sumerian myth described as pure, clean and pristine, and also a real Bronze Age kingdom centred on the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. In the poem Enki and Ninhursaja it begins without fresh water and is transformed when the god Enki brings sweet water up from underground. Mesopotamian economic texts treat it as the great trading hub of the Gulf.

Where was Dilmun located?

Dilmun lay on the eastern side of Arabia, with its centre from about 2050 BC on Bahrain island, its capital and harbour at Qalat al-Bahrain, and related sites reaching north to Failaka. Sumerian texts place it overseas, in the direction of the sunrise. Archaeological remains include the Barbar temple, the settlements at Saar and Diraz, and vast fields of burial mounds.

Who lives in Dilmun in Sumerian myth?

The goddess Ninsikila is settled there by Enki at the start of the poem, and at its close the god Ensag, born from Enki’s side during his healing, is named lord of Dilmun. The flood survivor Ziusudra is also placed there by An and Enlil, granted life like a god in return for preserving the seed of mankind.

Is Dilmun the Garden of Eden?

No. The comparison is a modern one, and the Sumerian poem contains no fall, no forbidden fruit and no expulsion from the land. What it describes is a place where sickness, predation and old age have not yet begun, which then receives fresh water and becomes a busy commercial port.

Why was Dilmun important to Mesopotamia?

Dilmun was the transshipment point for the Gulf trade, where copper from Magan and goods from Meluhha, Marhashi and Elam were gathered and sent north to Sumer and Babylonia along with local dates and pearls. Merchants of Dilmun appear repeatedly in Mesopotamian economic records. That commercial role is written into the myth itself, which calls the land an emporium on the quay for the Land.

Related Entries

Enki, Ninhursag, Ninkasi, Enlil, Shamash, Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh, Anunnaki, Apsu, Inanna