A'ali

You see them from the road before you reach the village: low rounded hills, spaced with a kind of regularity that the flat Bahraini landscape doesn’t produce naturally, running in groups and clusters across the plain. I’d been told they were burial mounds but the word hadn’t prepared me for the scale. There are around eighty thousand of them on the island — the largest concentration of Bronze Age burial mounds anywhere in the world — and many of them are here, in and around A’ali, integrated into the village landscape so completely that houses have been built between them, roads curve around them, and children apparently use the larger ones as informal hills for play.

I walked among the mounds in the late afternoon, when the low light made the rounded shapes cast long shadows and the whole landscape took on a quality somewhere between ancient and dreamlike. Some of the mounds are several meters high — the larger ones, called royal mounds, were reserved for the Dilmun elite and their scale reflects that status. Others are barely knee-high, the smaller tumuli of ordinary people who lived and died on this island four thousand years ago and were buried with a pot, some jewelry, a few provisions for the next world. The Dilmun believed in an afterlife, apparently, with considerable conviction.

The village of A’ali itself is known for something else entirely: pottery. It has been the island’s pottery center for centuries, possibly millennia — some archaeologists suggest a continuity of ceramic production stretching back to the Dilmun period itself. The workshops around the main street produce traditional pieces that you’ll see elsewhere on the island: the jars for water storage, the incense burners, the particular Bahraini teapot form with its elongated spout. Several workshops are open to visitors and I watched a man throw a jar on a wheel with a speed and assurance that made it look effortless, which I knew from trying it once, briefly, was a serious misrepresentation.

The two activities — the ancient dead and the living craft — exist in the same village in a way that seems to generate no particular tension. The mounds are simply there. The potters are simply here. At the edge of the excavated section, where a few burial chambers have been left open under metal protective canopies, you can look down into the stone-lined interiors. They are small and dark and very old and they smell of earth that has been sealed for four thousand years. A skeleton was found in one of them. The pot placed beside it is in a museum in Manama. The grave is empty now, but the cavity remains.

What stays with me is the ordinariness of it. In most places, archaeological sites of this significance are fenced off and administered and signposted to within an inch of their meaning. Here, a man was parking his car between two burial mounds, getting out with his shopping, going inside. The mounds didn’t care. They’ve been through worse than a Tuesday afternoon in a Bahraini suburb.

When to go: October through March. Visit in the late afternoon for the best light on the mounds — the low sun brings out the roundedness of the shapes and the shadows help you read the topography. The pottery workshops tend to be most active in the mornings and are often closed Friday afternoons.