Background
Thomas Geoffrey Bibby was born on October 14, 1917, in Heversham, Westmorland, England. He was the second of four sons.
East Rd, Lancaster LA1 3EF, UK
Thomas attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School.
Trinity St, Cambridge CB2 1TA, UK
Thomas read Classics and oriental studies at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge.
The Old Schools, Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TN, UK
Thomas studied archaeology at Cambridge University prior to World World War II.
(The quest for the real Dilmun, the lost civilisation of A...)
The quest for the real Dilmun, the lost civilisation of Arabia, began when the author Geoffrey Bibby revisited Bahrain in order to explore the thousands of undated burial mounds scattered across the country. A brief season's digging was enough to establish the existence of a major civilisation dating from around 2300 BC. Thus began an undertaking to reveal the extent of Dilmun, a land which stretched beyond the confines of Bahrain, as far north as Kuwait and as far south as Saudi Arabia. In this classic tale of discovery, first published in 1969, renowned scholar Geoffrey Bibby tells his story of archaeological detective work with style and humour. Looking for Dilmun is re-issued here for a fresh generation of readers, and introduced by Dr Harriet Crawford, one of the leading archaeologists of the region.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BTDTR3I/?tag=2022091-20
2012
Thomas Geoffrey Bibby was born on October 14, 1917, in Heversham, Westmorland, England. He was the second of four sons.
Thomas attended Lancaster Royal Grammar School, and then read Classics and oriental studies at Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge. He studied archaeology at Cambridge University prior to World World War II, but because Thomas could find no work in that profession after the war, he lived in Bahrain and worked for the Iraq Petroleum Company from 1947 to 1950.
Practical experience in archaeology on Hadrian’s Wall was curtailed by the war. So Thomas Bibby served with the Royal Artillery, and when MI6 discovered that his language abilities included a little Swedish, he found himself for two years on the Faeroe Isles, questioning Norwegian fishermen about German movements in the North Sea. Becoming competent in Danish too, Bibby was transferred to Special Operations Executive, and helped to plan the bombing of Gestapo headquarters in Aarhus where, ironically, he was to spend most of his life.
In Denmark with the Army after the liberation, Bibby met the resistance fighter and archaeologist P. V. Glob at a dinner party. From their subsequent partnership, the archaeology of Arabia was born.
In 1947 there were, as now, few paid opportunities for archaeologists, and Bibby spent three years working for the Iraq Petroleum Company, based in Bahrain. In 1949 he married Vibeke Tscherning, au pair to the vicar of Warton, in Lancashire. Visiting her parents in Aarhus, he again encountered Glob, who was by then Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology and Director of the Prehistoric Museum in Moesgaard. Together they planned an expedition to Bahrain to hunt for the mysterious land of Dilmun.
Mentioned in the world’s earliest writings, Dilmun was a trading entrepot supplying ancient Mesopotamia and featured in the epic of Gilgamesh as the land given to Ziusudra (the Babylonian “Noah”) after the Flood. Its location was a major scholarly controversy, and there were clues that pointed to Bahrain.
In the mythology of Sumeria, Dilmun was a secret island where the epic hero Gilgamesh went in search of eternal life. It was portrayed as a place without death or sickness and with an abundance of sweet waters. Using the text of the legend, written in verse on clay tablets, Mr. Bibby and his colleagues established a connection between Dilmun, presumed to be a mythical paradise, and Bahrain, the very real island off the coast of Saudi Arabia.
In 1953, Mr. Bibby and Prof. Peter Vilhelm Glob, a colleague at Aarhus University in Denmark, set off with a team to search for the mysterious realm. After several years of expeditions, Mr. Bibby and his colleagues verified the existence of Dilmun, a "considerable city," under the capital of Bahrain, Manama.
Mr. Bibby concentrated on one site under and around the ramparts of a 16th-century Portuguese fort and on another to the west at Barbar, the site of a temple built in the third millennium B.C.
He discovered enough artifacts to show that Dilmun was the rich capital of an independent kingdom and the center of trade between Sumeria, a region of Mesopotamia that is now Iraq, and a civilization in the Indus River Valley, now Pakistan and western India.
Mr. Bibby also found clues about the early civilization in ancient burial mounds, numbering in the thousands, that he called "the biggest known prehistoric cemetery." He visited them for the 35th and final time in 1997.
Many mounds had been plundered in the distant past. But they yielded further evidence of Dilmun's importance as a commercial hub, a status that, incidentally, Bahrain has been reclaiming now that its oil reserves are waning.
Mr. Bibby told of his digs in "Looking for Dilmun," a highly praised book that remains in print. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times wrote, "It's enough to turn us all into archaeologists."
But Mr. Bibby did not confine himself to Arabia. His "Four Thousand Years Ago," a panorama of life in much of the inhabited world from 2000 to 1000 B.C., is also in print.
Closer to home, he wrote "The Testimony of the Spade," a survey of European prehistory of the Stone and Bronze Ages, north of the Alps, from 15,000 B.C. to the Vikings. Its sweep reached from Russia to Ireland, from the cave dwellers of France and the Norse sagas to the "barbarian" tribes described by Caesar and Tacitus.
He also wrote about the "bog people" of northern Europe, particularly Grauballe Man, the well-preserved body of a hanged man circa 190 B.C. and excavated in Denmark in 1950.
Trained as a classical archaeologist and versed in Assyrian scripts, Mr. Bibby was a curator at the Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus and an archaeological field director at Aarhus University. He officially retired in 1987 but maintained an active interest in the museum and in 1993 he was invited, with Vibeke, back to Bahrain, by the London-Bahrain Archaeological Expedition, a new British initiative which gave fundraising and public relations a high profile, and with which he seemed to find an instant rapport. There he gave lectures, signed books, socialised tirelessly, and obliged the media, his customary good grace quite undiminished.
(The quest for the real Dilmun, the lost civilisation of A...)
2012Quotations: "Every archaeologist knows in his heart why he digs. He digs, in pity and humility, that the dead may live again, that what is past may not be forever lost, that something may be salvaged from the wreck of ages."
Geoffrey Bibby could make himself at home in a desert camp, in a ruler’s palace or at a European dinner table, and was respected in England, his native country, in Denmark, the country he adopted, and in the Gulf, especially Bahrain, where he made his greatest contribution to archaeology.
On a home visit, Bibby met Vibeke Tscherning, a Danish au pair at a vicarage in Britain, and married her in 1949. Visiting her parents, Thomas met Mr. Glob, who by then was a professor of prehistoric archaeology and director of the prehistoric collection of the Moesgaard Museum, at a dinner. They linked up to solve the controversy over the whereabouts of Dilmun, the paradise visited by Gilgamesh, a land given to Ziusudra, the Babylonian Noah, after the flood. In addition to his wife, who often accompanied him on expeditions, Thomas is survived by a daughter and two sons, all of Denmark.