Du Pays de Cocagne au pays oublié ? Dilmun / Bahreïn dans les sources cunéiformes
Abstract
As part of the "Bahrain and its neighbors" symposium organized at the Musée du Louvre on November 17, 2022, this paper presented an overview of all the cuneiform documentation mentioning the ancient archipelago of Dilmun/Tilmun or found on the main excavation fields of the island, those from Qal'at al-Bahrain. This documentation spans four millennia, from the late 4th to the 1st millennium BC, and is characterized by a certain imbalance between the periods studied. While recalling the importance of the cuneiform documentation on Dilmun in the 3rd and 2nd millennia and the context in which it was produced, we will focus here on understanding the position occupied by the archipelago in international relations in the 1st millennium BC, when textual mentions became rarer. It is this relative silence in the sources that we propose to analyze, when Dilmun seems to have fallen well behind the position occupied in earlier eras.
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