The Dilmun burial mounds
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The Dilmun burial mounds are the ancient grave mounds of Bahrain, and in John Kiriakou's account of his 1994,96 posting they illustrate a political point as much as an archaeological one: nearly everything of historical importance on the island stood in a Shia village.

In his own village were mounds he describes as two thousand years old, from the Dilmun civilisation going back to 500 BC, standing ten or twenty feet high, and beyond them royal mounds of about fifty feet where kings and queens were buried. That was also a Shia village, Saar.

The same pattern held for the living culture. When colleagues from surrounding countries, or his father, his brother or his college friends visited, Kiriakou would take them into the villages to meet the last native weaver in the country, sitting at his loom, or the master potters who made their pots from the mud of the village. All of it, he notes, in Shia villages.

That is what makes the geography political in his telling. The uprising might be taking place at the Ministry of Labour or the Ministry of the Interior, "but the villages are exploded", and at night the government sent in first the police, who found themselves outgunned, and then the military with armoured personnel carriers and in some cases tanks, to start grabbing people.

See also

- Bahrain Intifada (1994)
- Bahrain Posting (1994,1996)
- The Bahrain water table
- Abdul Amir al-Jamri
