My favourite place in Bahrain is Qal’at al-Bahrain or Bahrain Fort. It is Bahrain’s most important archaeological site and one of the most valuable historic sites in the whole Gulf region, which is why it has been accorded World Heritage Site status by Unesco.
My favourite place in Bahrain is Qal’at al-Bahrain or Bahrain Fort. It is Bahrain’s most important archaeological site and one of the most valuable historic sites in the whole Gulf region, which is why it has been accorded World Heritage Site status by Unesco.
Like many ancient sites, it comprises the ruins of ancient cities and fortifications that are built on top of one another.
The ruins date from the Early, Middle and Late Dilmun Periods (2250 to 250 BCE), the Tylos Period (0 to 1000 CE) to the Islamic Period (from 1250 CE). Qal’at al-Bahrain has been beautifully excavated and developed so that it is easy to access and enjoyable to visit.
There are also excellent portable audio guides available in Arabic and English that provide expert commentary at 23 locations.
Recently, outdoor signs with background sound effects (fierce battles, human buzz, souq bargaining) have been added to the Lower Courtyard and there are also some modern three-dimensional artworks in two of the bastions.
The main fort, with its huge towers, wide moat, expansive courtyards, madbasas (rooms with corrugated floors where dates were trampled to produce date treacle), pillared rooms and horse and camel stables, was built by the Portuguese as recently as 1561 on top of earlier ruins.
The archaeologist’s dilemma is:
how do we excavate the older ruins without destroying the younger ones? One answer is to excavate very selectively so that you penetrate downwards without creating too much disturbance on the surface.
Another solution that has been adopted in Bahrain is to deliberately leave some sites unexcavated until new non-invasive technologies are available in the future that allow the details of buried sites to be revealed without damaging shallower sites. But the beauty of Qal’at al-Bahrain is that they have the best of both worlds.
Many of the older towns are outside the walls and moat of the most recent fort and can be excavated independently. You can therefore look down from the Portuguese Fort onto the excavated ruins of a previously bustling medieval town that is over 2, 000 years older!
Whenever I visit an archaeological site I try to ignore its present dormant state and imagine what it was like when it was bustling with the sights, sounds, smells and thrill of human and animal life – traders bargaining in the souq, old men drinking coffee, children playing games in the sand, women pounding dates in the madbasas, or soldiers cleaning their cannons prior to a battle.
Flags would be flapping overhead, commanders yelling out orders and horses neighing in the stables. I am not suggesting that life in and around the fort was peaceful and idyllic.
It was a military installation and bloody battles took place there using lethal cannons, trebuchets and crude clay hand grenades. But the ruins still evoke a sense of timeless wonder.
*Professor Mike Bruton is the Director of the Bahrain Science Centre. He was previously founder of the Department of Ichthyology and Fisheries Science at Rhodes University and Director of the then JLB Smith Institute of Ichthyology in Grahamstown.
