Dr. Steffen Laursen

There would be custom offices where your goods would be weighed and you would be... Someone would be levying taxes.

And when you entered the heart of the city, you would be in the palatial quarters.

And in the palatial quarters, there is a 12-meter-wide boulevard going through the city.

And on both sides of this boulevard, you have huge...

stone-built monumental storerooms on both sides going down the street.

And we should probably imagine, we haven't excavated that much yet of it, but we should probably imagine a palatial institution of the size of what you see in Knossos at Crete.

So around 20,000 square meter palatial quarter neighborhood.

And the quality of the masonry and everything is completely compatible to what you see in sort of high palatial cultures in the Mediterranean.

Completely.

We don't have the artistic developments with this enormous surplus going into artistry and pottery making that you see in Minoan Crete.

But in many ways, the city is its architecture and organization is at that level.

If we then move to Fylika, you asked about religion and so forth.

On Fylika Island, we are lucky that in the Bronze Age colony, we have both a large and a small temple.

And then at the settlement, we have a small temple, like sanctuary.

And we have a pretty good idea that the large temple was dedicated to the god Inzak, who was the tutelary deity of Dilmun, and that the small temple was dedicated to his wife or consort Hanipa.

It is shrouded in a bit of a mystery.

We assume that Inzak was the god of water, and we think his symbol or his sort of avatar was the date palm.

But our knowledge is very limited.

We know from the kings who were buried at a site called Ali in Bahrain in huge mausoleums

We know that they used the title Servant of Inzak, of Agarum, or Agaru.