Island
Insula Thilos
Bahrain
Listen to the story
Behind Insula Thilos lies a name far older than Rome: the Greek Tylos, derived from the Akkadian Tilmun, the Dilmun of Mesopotamian trade texts. The island is Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf. In the third and early second millennium BC, Dilmun was a hub of Gulf trade. The link to Bahrain goes back to the notes of Androsthenes of Thasos, an admiral of Alexander the Great. In the second century, texts from Palmyra call the island Thiloua, a province of the kingdom of Characene. A namesake on the Phoenician coast even led scholars to wonder whether the Phoenicians had come from the Gulf.