A'ali

The A'ali burial mounds.

The Dilmun Burial Mounds in 1918.

The burial mounds date to the Dilmun era (3200 BC-330 BC). In February 1889 some of the mounds were investigated by the British explorer J. Theodore Bent and his wife Mabel.[5] The site was then excavated by many foreign archaeological teams throughout the 20th century.[6] An important group of artifacts was excavated by the British archaeologist Ernest Mackay and can now be found in the British Museum, London.[7] It includes an unusual statuette of a nude woman with a curvaceous body dating from between 2000 and 1500 BC.[8] The discovery of a "new and rare type of burial mound encircled by an outer ring wall" has led archaeologists to believe that specific mounds were made for the social elite, indicating that early Dilmun culture had a class system.[9]

According to J. G. Lorimer's 1908 Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, A'ali was a considerable village situated 6 miles southwest of the Manama fort. The town consisted of 200 houses populated by the Baharna, who were primarily pottery-makers and date palm cultivators. There were an estimated 8,250 date palms in the village and livestock included 35 donkeys & 10 cattle. Lorimer also mentions that the village was the site of the largest tumuli on the island[10]