Dilmun Burial Mounds

Bahrain's landscape is studded with the dead of a Bronze Age boom: roughly 11,774 burial mounds raised between 2200 and 1750 BCE, when Dilmun's position on Gulf trade routes brought prosperity broad enough that ordinary people, not only elites, received tomb towers. Twenty-one sites preserve the tradition, from vast tumulus fields to seventeen two-storey royal mounds, their chambers fitted with distinctive alcoves. UNESCO inscribed the Dilmun Burial Mounds in 2019.