Sheikh Esau has here a tiny mosque, just an open loggia, where he goes every morning in summer-time to pray and take his coffee. Beneath it he has a bath of fresh but not over-clean water, where he and his family bathe. Often during the summer heats he spends the whole day here, or else he goes to his glorious garden about a mile distant, near the coast, where acacias, hibiscus, and almonds fight with one another for the mastery, and form a delicious tangle.
Another mile on, closer to the sea, is the fine ruined fortress of the Portuguese, Gibliah, as the natives call it now, just as they do one of the fortresses at Maskat. It covers nearly two acres of ground, and is built out of the remains of the old Persian town, for many Kufic inscriptions are let into the wall, and the deep well in the centre is lined with them. It is a regular bastioned fortification of the sixteenth century, with moat, embrasures in the parapets, and casemented embrasures in the re-entering angles of the bastions, and is one of the finest specimens of Portuguese architecture in the Gulf, an evidence of the importance which they attached to this island.
Amongst the rubbish in the fort we picked up numerous fragments of fine Nankin and Celadon china, attesting to the ubiquity and commerce of the former owners, and attesting, also, to the luxury of the men who ruled here—a luxury as fatal almost as the Flanders wars to the well-being of the Portuguese in the East.
Our road led us on through miles of palm-groves, watered by their little artificial conduits, and producing the staple food of the island. Seid bin Omar talked to us much about the date. 'Mohammed said,' he began, 'honour the date-tree, for she is your mother,' a true enough maxim in parched Arabia, where nothing else will grow. When ripe the dates are put into a round tank, called the madibash, where they are exposed to the sun and air, and throw off excessive juice which collects below; after three days of this treatment they are removed and packed for exportation in baskets of palm leaves. The Bahreini, for their own consumption, love to add sesame seeds to their dates, or ginger powder and walnuts pressed with them into jars. These are called sirah, and are originally prepared by being dried in the sun and protected at night, then diluted date-juice is poured over them. The fruit which does not reach maturity is called salang, and is given as food to cattle, boiled with ground date-stones and fish bones. This makes an excellent sort of cake for milch cows; this, and the green dates also, are given to the donkeys, and to this food the Bahreini attribute their great superiority. The very poor also make an exceedingly unpalatable dish out of green dates mixed with fish for their own table, or, I should say, floor.
Nature here is not strong enough for the fructification of the palm, so at given seasons the pollen is removed by cutting off the male spathes; these they dry for twenty hours, and then they take the flower twigs and deposit one or two in each bunch of the female blossom. Just as we were there they were very busy with the spathes, and in Thursday's Market huge baskets of the male spathes were exposed for sale. The palm-groves are surrounded by dykes to keep the water in.
The date-tree is everything to a Bahreini. He beats the green spadix with wooden implements to make fibre for his ropes; in the dry state he uses it as fuel; he makes his mats, the only known form of carpet and bedding here, out of it; his baskets are made of the leaves. From the fresh spathe, by distillation, a certain stuff called tara water is obtained, of strong but agreeable smell, which is much used for the making of sherbet. Much legendary lore is connected with the date. The small round hole at the back is said to have been made by Mohammed's teeth, when one day he foolishly tried to bite one; and in some places the expression 'at the same time a date and a duty,' is explained by the fact that in Ramazan the day's fast is usually broken by first eating a date.
Amongst all these date-groves are the curious Arab wells, with sloping runs, and worked by donkeys. The tall poles, to which the skins are attached, are date-tree trunks. Down goes the skin bucket as the donkey comes up a steep slope in the ground, and then, as he goes down, up it comes again full of water, to be guided into the channel, which fertilises the trees, by a slave, who supports himself going up, and adds his weight to that of the descending donkey, by putting his arm through a large wooden ring hung at the donkey's shoulder. Day after day in our camp we heard the weird creaking from these wells, very early in the morning and in the evening when the sun had gone down, and we felt as we heard it what an infinite blessing is a well of water in a thirsty land.
Leaving the palm-groves and the Portuguese fortress behind us, we re-entered the desert to the south-west; and, just beyond the village of Ali, we came upon that which is the great curiosity of Bahrein, to investigate which was our real object in visiting the island: for there begins that vast sea of sepulchral mounds, the great necropolis of an unknown race which extends far and wide across the plain. The village of Ali forms as it were the culminating point; it lies just on the borders of the date-groves, and there the mounds reach an elevation of over forty feet, but as they extend further southward they diminish in size, until miles away, in the direction of Rufa'a, we found mounds elevated only a few feet above the level of the desert, and some mere circular heaps of stones. There are many thousands of these tumuli extending over an area of desert for many miles. There are isolated groups of mounds in other parts of the islands, and a few solitary ones are to be found on the adjacent islets, on Moharek, Arad, and Sitrah.
Complete uncertainty existed as to the origin of these mounds, and the people who constructed them, but, from classical references and the result of our own work, there can now be no doubt that they are of Phœnician origin. Herodotus[3] gives us as a tradition current in his time that the forefathers of the Phœnician race came from these parts. The Phœnicians themselves believed in it: 'It is their own account of themselves,' says Herodotus; and Strabo[4] brings further testimony to bear on the subject, stating that two of the islands now called Bahrein were called Tyros and Arados. Pliny follows in Strabo's steps, but calls the island Tylos instead of Tyros, which may be only an error in spelling, or may be owing to the universal confusion of r with l.
Ptolemy in his map places Gerrha, the mart of ancient Indian trade and the starting-point for caravans on the great road across Arabia, on the coast just opposite the islands, near where the town of El Katif now is, and accepts Strabo's and Pliny's names for the Bahrein Islands, calling them Tharros, Tylos or Tyros, and Arados. The fact is that all our information on the islands prior to the Portuguese occupation comes from the Periplus of Nearchus. Eratosthenes, a naval officer of Alexander's, states that the Gulf was 10,000 stadia long from Cape Armozum, i.e. Hormuz, to Teredon (Koweit), and the mouth of the Euphrates. Androsthenes of Thasos, who was of the company of Nearchus, made an independent geographical survey of the Gulf on the Arabian side, and his statements are, that on an island called Ikaros, now Peludji, just off Koweit, he saw a temple of Apollo. Southwards, at a distance of 2,400 stadia, or 43 nautical leagues, he came on Gerrha, and, close to it, the islands of Tyros and Arados, 'which have temples like those of the Phœnicians,' who were (the inhabitants told him) colonists from these parts. From Nearchus, too, we learn that the Phœnicians had a town called Sidon or Sidodona in the Gulf, which he visited, and on an island called Tyrine was shown the tomb of Erythras, which he describes as 'an elevated hillock covered with palms,' just like our mounds, and Erythras was the king who gave his name to the Gulf. Justin accepts the migration of the Phœnicians from the Persian Gulf as certain; and M. Renan says, 'The primitive abode of the Phœnicians must be placed on the Lower Euphrates, in the centre of the great commercial and maritime establishments of the Persian Gulf.'[5] As for the temples, there are no traces of them left, and this is also the case in Syrian Phœnicia; doubtless they were all built of wood, which will account for their disappearance.
