Bahrain today begins three-day celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Dilmun civilisation.
The celebrations will be launched by His Majesty King Hamad Bin Eisa Al Khalifa with a national festival at the world-famous Bahrain Fort at the northern tip of the island.
The event will be attended by the more than 100 international archaeologists and excavation experts, the ministry of information announced.
The festivities include an exhibition of documents and pictures of the Dilmun period from the archives of the Moesguard Museum in Denmark.
The documents were collected by the Danish expedition in 1953 and 1954. A music concert and a conference on the discoveries are also scheduled.
"The discovery of the Dilmun civilisation was significant locally as well as internationally," said a ministry statement.
The earliest recorded reference to Bahrain dates back to the third millennium BC, when it was known as Dilmun. The era has also been chronicled in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who called Dilmun the land of immortality when he visited it in his quest for eternal life.
Before 1954 the Dilmun civilisation was unknown, according to prominent historian Shaikha Mai Al Khalifa.
In a recent interview with Gulf News, she said Dilmun was an influential civilisation that flourished in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Arabian Gulf.
It was a major commercial centre on a trade route that stretched into Mesopotamia.
The first time Dilmun was mentioned before its discovery was in 1953 when Geoffrey Bibby visited Bahrain as an employee of an oil company.
As he walked around Bahrain, he encountered a strange site that contained large numbers of mounds of equal size spread across a very large area.
Bibby returned to his colleagues in Aarhus, Denmark, where they began to study the site.
To them, Bahrain was no more than a large burial site for the dead brought from neighbouring areas in prehistoric and subsequent times, she said.
The turning point occurred when a leading archaeologist, B.F. Globe, came to the conclusion that Bahrain was the centre of a civilisation much different from others in the region.
He claimed that the burial grounds were used to bury only the dead of that civilisation.
He argued that the traces of the Dilmun capital, as well as villages and temples, must be located close to these burial grounds.
Globe and Bibby formed the first Danish archaeological expedition, the first to explore the area in search of Dilmun.
The expedition took considerable time to complete excavations in Bahrain and neighbouring countries to uncover the 5,000-year-old civilisation.
The most important sites discovered so far are the Bahrain Fort.
The golden jubilee aims to boost archaeological awareness among the island's residents and encourage research on the topic.
It also aims to have the sites registered as Unesco Heritage Sites.
Gulf News
