Sumerian toponym, the pure land of Enki and Ninhursag where sickness and death are unknown, and a real trading polity named in economic texts as a source of copper and a transshipment point for the Gulf trade.
The identification
Dilmun has been identified since the nineteenth century with Bahrain and the adjoining coast of eastern Arabia, on the strength of Assyrian royal inscriptions, the Gulf trade records and the excavations at Qal’at al-Bahrain and on Failaka. It is an ordinary, well-evidenced piece of ancient geography.
Why the node is here
Because Zecharia Sitchin relocates it. Reading TIL.MUN as Land of the Missiles, he places it in the Sinai peninsula, and everything downstream in The Wars of Gods and Men depends on that move: the post-Flood spaceport, the landing corridor from Ararat through Baalbek to the thirtieth parallel, and the nuclear strike of 2024 BCE that destroys the spaceport along with the cities of the plain. The etymology carries no lexical support and the geography contradicts it, which makes this the single load-bearing member of that book’s argument.
Connections
Zecharia Sitchin · The Wars of Gods and Men · Baalbek · Enki · Anunnaki · Michael S. Heiser · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · The Anunnaki Chronicles