Dilmun: Quest for Paradise

The land known by the name of Dilmun (or Telmun) in the cuneiform documents has been identified by most scholars with the island of Bahrein in the Persian T Gulf (note 1), and for the past nine years a large and competent Danish expedition has been excavating on the island in the hope of uncovering there the origin of the Sumerians and their civilization (note 2). Several scholars have located Dilmun in Iran, south of Elam, and have taken it to be a land bordering on the eastern shore of the Persian Gulf, whose hinterland included the province of Persis (note 3). This was the localization of Dilmun which seemed most likely to me when preparing the article 'Dilmun and the Land of the Living' some two decades ago (note 4). In recent years, however, new inscriptional material has become available which indicates that whatever its western boundary, Dilmun extended much farther to the east and included much, if not all, of that part of Iran, Pakistan, and India on which flourished the Indus or Harappan civilization (note 5). The following pages will sketch the pertinent cuneiform evidence for this identification of Dilmun in the chronological order in which it came to my attention over the years.