A´Ali West Burial Mounds Field
- Category
- Archeology & Heritage
- Area
- A´ALI
A´ali West is one of the components of the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Dilmun Burial Mounds”. It is located in Buri village, but its official UNESCO appellation “A’ali West” is justified by the fact that this burial mound field and the A´ali East Burial Mound Field once formed a single physical entity partially split by a large wadi and nowadays divided by the Shaikh Khalifa Bin Salman Highway. Together, they number 5,392 burial mounds.
The A´ali West cemetery comprises 723 burial mounds. It is one of the last examples to present the distribution of mounds on a mound cemetery´s edge. This makes A´ali West quite outstanding, since most of the other burial mound fields are reduced to their core zones. Compared to other Late Type cemeteries, the mounds appear less dense. This derives from the ancient Dilmunites' preference for building larger mounds at the edges of a cemetery. The sizes of the Late Type burials are above average and, related to their importance, the mounds have been constructed farther away from each other.
The A´ali West Burial Mound Field contains six special type burial mounds with outer ring walls, considered as a indication of chieftain burials. Some of these are still visible today. They are therefore the last examples of their kind, as most of the mounds with an outer ring wall fell victim to urban development.
A cluster of larger hillocks can be found at the south-western corner of the A´ali West Burial Mound Field; the shape and dimensions differ from the neighbouring Dilmun burial mounds. It can therefore be assumed that it hosts Tylos burials. It was common in Tylos times to extend the already existing Dilmun cemeteries as well as to re-use larger Dilmun graves.
