The Barbar temple

Why this is extraordinary

South of the village of Barbar, on the north coast of Bahrain, a mound dug in 1954–1962 held three temples, each built on and around the one before, in the centuries around 2000 BC, when the island was Dilmun. The excavators set Temple I at about 2100–2050 BC, Temple II at about 2050–1900, and Temple III at about 1900–1800. Radiocarbon has since pushed those centuries several decades earlier. A tentative World Heritage text also says the temples were built in the third and second millennia BC, a looser start. The file on the photograph says about 3000 to 2000 BC. Three clocks are in print. They are not the same width.

Temple I stood on a rectangular platform about 25 metres by 16 to 18, preserved to about 2 metres, on clean sand over blue clay. In the foundation were groups of seven clay beakers, broken and buried, and small heaps of copper. A stair in the southwest corner went down to a square well. Temple II enlarged the oval court in limestone brought by boat from Jidda island, cut and dressed. The photograph is that kind of block, platforms and fitted stone, with the modern town beyond. A double circular altar stood in the shrine. Three cult stones were shaped like ship anchors, the middle one with an animal head. From the central terrace a covered stair went down to a chamber on the spring.

The famous object was under the floor. About 50 centimetres below the central platform of Temple II, with rectangular copper plates set with nails, was a bull’s head of copper, moulded in one piece, about 18 centimetres high and 15 across the horns. It has been read as a Sumerian prototype of the Early Dynastic, as a cousin of a gold and silver bull from Altyn Depe in Turkmenistan, as two local heads in one wide network rather than a direct copy, and as the sound-box fitting of a lyre like the ones from Ur. The heads share a flat muzzle and eyes set to the front. The horns, the ears, and the way they join the skull do not match. A foundation deposit, a god’s emblem, and a piece of an instrument are three uses for one sculpture. The plates and the nails were with it. They look like fittings. They do not say of what.

The spring is the other reading. A chamber on fresh water, reached by a stair, is compared with the apsu, the underground freshwater ocean of Enki in Mesopotamian temples, a feature the texts describe and the digs in Mesopotamia rarely catch. The comparison is offered with a “perhaps.” On this island the god named in a royal tomb is Inzak, which the burial mounds already carry. A spring under a temple can be Enki’s ocean, Inzak’s shrine, or the water the building needed. No solstice of the oval, and no azimuth of the stair, is published in the sources used here. The groups of seven beakers are an offering count. They are not, in these reports, a week of the moon. The cult the excavators describe is water, under the floor, not a sunrise.