Dr. Steffen Laursen

But from the text, we also know of a thing called fish eyes.

And it's never been proven, you know, beyond any doubt, but it's very, very likely that this thing they were trading called fish eyes were in fact the oyster pearls.

And they were a coveted sort of trade good and luxury that was coming from the lands of Dilmun and Magan, as they called them, in the Gulf.

Dilmun is the word the ancient Mesopotamians used to describe some place in the Gulf.

And through our research over the years, it's become clear that this place was several different things.

They sometimes refer to a city called Dilmun.

They sometimes refer to an island called Dilmun.

And they sometimes refer to a region called Dilmun.

And all of this was around ancient Bahrain, where we found the city of Dilmun, and then the coast from Bahrain all the way up to modern-day Kuwait.

That was what they meant by Dilmun.

Dilmun was also a mystical place in their mythology.

So it was a magical place of creation.

It was a place where the ancient hero and king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, went to look for eternal life.

He found it in the form of a fruit underwater, which was probably a natural pearl.

But he lost it to a snake on his way back to Uruk, a bit like Gilgamesh.

mortality was lost in the biblical narrative of original sin later on.

And it was the place where the Babylonian Noah was allowed to live with his wife after saving the animals in the ark after the deluvial flood.

So in that sense, it was an unreal mythical place.

But from the textual records on trade, we can see that it was also a word and a name

used for a city and a place where the Babylonians exchanged luxury goods and copper from further east.