A'ali and the Dilmun Burial Mounds

UNESCO-listed ancient cemetery with over 350,000 grave mounds from the Dilmun civilisation

A'ali is a village just north of Riffa that has two claims on a visitor's attention: the ancient burial mounds that surround and penetrate the settlement, and a tradition of pottery-making that has persisted for centuries. The mounds date from approximately 3200 to 330 BC, the period when Bahrain was the heart of the Dilmun civilisation — a trading hub mentioned in Sumerian texts as a kind of paradise island. UNESCO inscribed the mounds in 2019 as a World Heritage Site.

The mounds themselves are low earthen tumuli, most measuring about 15 by 30 feet and standing a few feet high, each concealing a stone burial chamber. You can walk among them in the fields around the village; some have been excavated and left open so you can see the stone construction inside. The village pottery market is a good place to pick up handmade work — potters have been based here for centuries, working in the same reddish clay, and the craft is still practised in small workshops around the village.

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The Dilmun burial mounds contain an estimated 350,000 individual graves — one of the largest ancient cemeteries on earth, created by a population far smaller than the number suggests. Some mounds are ringed by outer walls and stand apart from the rest, indicating that even in the third millennium BC the people of Bahrain had developed a hierarchy of the dead. British archaeologist Ernest Mackay excavated here in the early 20th century, and his finds — including a woman's statuette dated 2000–1500 BC — now sit in the British Museum.

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