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This article outlines some general aspects of the Magan and Dilmun trade and goes on to examine the Umm an‐Nar pottery discovered in the tombs of the Early Dilmun burial mounds of Bahrain. These ceramics are of particular interest because they indirectly testify to Dilmun’s contact with Magan in the late third millennium. In this article, thirty vessels of seven morphological types are singled out. By comparison with the material published from the Oman peninsula the Bahrain collection is tentatively dated to c.2250–2000 BC. The location of the Umm an‐Nar pottery within the distribution of burial mounds reveals that its import was strongly associated with the scattered mounds of Early Type. It is demonstrated that the frequency of Umm an‐Nar pottery declined just as the ten compact cemeteries emerged c.2050 BC. The observed patterns are seen as a response to the decline of Magan and the rise of Dilmun.

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This paper deals with the social organisation of early Dilmun in Bahrain based on evidence from the burial mound record. Complete aerial photography survey and mapping have documented the extensive mound fields of Bahrain in their entirety and revealed a new and rare type of burial mound encircled by an outer ring wall. From the spatial distribution and appearance of these ‘ring mounds’ it is argued that they cover the time span 2200–1750 BC. It is further argued that the ring mounds reflect the entombment of a prominent segment of early Dilmun society and thus testify to the presence of a social elite as early as the late third millennium BC. The paper offers evidence supporting the view that fundamental changes in the size of the ring wall and the encircled mound occurred over time, culminating in the colossal ‘royal’ mounds near Aali village. The increase in size of the special mounds and the exclusive appearance of the type in the Aali cemetery after the emergence of ten concentrated cemeteries around 2050 BC are correlated with the already available evidence of increasing social complexity in Dilmun. Three clusters of ring mounds in Aali are argued to reflect the appearance of one or more ruling lineages that were ultimately to found the colony on Failaka, Kuwait, and rule not only Bahrain but also the adjacent coast of Saudi Arabia.

This paper provides a comprehensive examination of the seals of the so‐called ‘Gulf Type’, which date to the end of the third millennium BC. It is argued that the Gulf Type seals are of key importance to our understanding of the origin of sealing and other administrative technologies within an emerging Early Dilmun ‘state’. Based on principal component analysis it is demonstrated that the shape of Gulf Type seals with inscriptions in Indus characters is distinct from seals without inscriptions. It is further argued that Gulf Type seals found in the Indus Valley, Iran, Mesopotamia/Bahrain and Bahrain can be connected with relatively discrete morphological groups apparently corresponding to different areas of production. The Indus inscriptions on the seals are investigated with particular emphasis on the abnormal occurrence of prefixed ‘twins’ signs in the western inscriptions. The hypothesis that a language different from that of the Harappans was used on these seals is reconfirmed on the basis of a newly found seal with a particular instructive pseudo‐inscription. The paper concludes that breakaway Harappans operating in the western orbit invented the Gulf Type seals but that the type from around 2050 BC became practically synonymous with the merchant communities in Dilmun.