Qala'at Al-Bahrain

This is the second volume in The Carlsberg Foundation’s Gulf Project about the Danish archaeological investigations in Bahrain from 1953-1978. The excavations focused on the area around the city wall and on the centre of the settlement. The oldest building remains can be dated to the late-third millennium BC, and around 2000 BC monumental architecture developed. Large-scale storage structures built of limestone ashlars form part of a palace complex. These have no exact parallels or prototypes in Bahrain or elsewhere. In this book, finds from the excavation are described in detail, with particular emphasis on the palace. Constructed in the early-Dilmun era (c2000 BC), re-occupied in the middle-Dilmun era (c1500 BC) and integrated into a late-Dilmun palace (c600 BC), this structure survived for well over 1000 years. The madbasa, a building for extracting date juice, is the oldest found anywhere in the Middle East. Pot shards, human skeletons and animal bones, evidence of metal working, inscriptions and other remains are detailed. The next volume discusses the remaining excavations along the western and southern city wall.