The Bahrain water table
=======================

The Bahrain water table is, in John Kiriakou's description, what set Bahrain apart from the other Gulf Cooperation Council states: alone among them, it was an oasis.

He describes an enormous prehistoric water table that begins at the Atlantic Ocean, runs beneath the whole of Africa and comes to the surface in Bahrain. As recently as the 1970s, water would gush out of the ground in natural springs, "like oil, just gush out of the ground", which is why the island is green, with flowers everywhere and palm trees.

By the time of his posting in 1994 the country had overdeveloped, the table was down about thirty-five feet and the water had turned brackish, though he still found it wonderful.

The Tree of Life

The aquifer's most famous product is the Tree of Life, which Kiriakou describes as the oldest tree in the Middle East at some three thousand years old, and which he lists among the very short catalogue of things to do in the country, along with a world-class history museum and a Quran museum, "a lot of fun to go to once, or maybe twice if you have visitors." After that, he says, you have pretty much done everything.

His measure of the country's scale is Pittsburgh: in 1996, he says, Bahrain was the same size and had the same population as the city, so weekends often meant driving the causeway to Saudi Arabia for a meal and a shopping centre and driving home again.

Older still

The island's antiquity shows up in his account of the villages too. In his own village were 2,000-year-old grave mounds of the Dilmun civilisation, ten or twenty feet high, with royal mounds of fifty feet where kings and queens were buried, in the Shia village of Saar, one of several places he took visiting friends and family to see things of historical importance.

See also

- Bahrain Posting (1994,1996)
- Bahrain Intifada (1994)
- The Gulf Daily News
