Failaka Island in Kuwait has a history stretching back more than 4,000 years:

• 2700 BCE Failaka may have served as the inspiration for the island of Šiduri in the Epic of Gilgamesh
• 2000 BCE Failaka was settled by traders from Dilmun, centered on modern-day Bahrain
• 250 BCE a temple is constructed on the island during the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire
• 800 CE (approx.) a remote Christian monastery existed in the center of the island
• 1600s CE Failaka potentially served a base for pirates in the Arabian Gulf
• 1800s CE a shrine was built dedicated to Al Khidr
• 1990 CE Iraq invades Kuwait and forcibly depopulates the island

While today the island is (technically) unoccupied, a community of about 2,000 people lived on Failaka up until the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990. Failaka’s archaeological sites are on the tentative list to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Apart from visiting the island itself, the best place to learn about Failaka is at Kuwait’s National Museum. I have also compiled a list of articles and books about Failaka. On this Instagram account, I am posting photographs, videos, and facts about Failaka, as part of a residency with FIKAR.

The old stamps from this website and the postcards are from delcampe and ebay

Here is a video I made, which touches upon the sacred character of Failaka:

Ancient Dilmun Civilization

The ancient Dilmun civilization was primarily based on Bahrain, but also extended to Failaka Island. The Perforated Relief of Sumerian King of Lagash Ur-Nanshe, dating to 2500 BCE, mentions obtaining wood from Dilmun to build a temple. During this period Failaka was called “Agarum,” meaning the land of Inzak (the primary deity for the Dilmun civilization). Agarum is referred to on the Durand Stone from 1378 BCE, which was deciphered by Henry Rawlinson in the 19th century. According to Archaeology Magazine, around 2000 BCE the Dilmunites, “were leaving their homeland to become seagoing merchants and establish a powerful trading network that eventually stretched from India to Syria.” The Dilmun trade network collapsed around 1730 BCE but picked up again several hundred years later. Failaka Island seems to have been a particularly important religious place, given the large quantity of stamp seals that have been uncovered. Several Dilmunite sites have been excavated on Failaka:

The maps above come from Reddit and this post

F6: this site is often referred to as the “palace,” although more recent analysis by scholars characterizes it as a temple, likely dedicated to Inzak, with storage facilities

F3 (Tell Sa’ad): next to Sheikh Ahmad Al Jaber’s summer residence, this site is primarily made up of domestic spaces. There are also the ruins of a temple. The panoramic photo below is from Jehan Rajab’s book Failaka Island, it shows the modern summer residence of Sheikh Ahmad and F3/Tell Sa’ad in the foreground. To the center left is F6. The other two sites, center top and center right, are Hellenistic (more below).

Al-Khidr: likely a Bronze Age Dilmunite fishermen’s settlement, archaeologists have uncovered pottery, stamp seals, metal objects, and more dating from 2000 to 1500 BCE at hills known as KH1, KH2, and KH3, the site is also known for and takes its name from the demolished modern shrine dedicated to the Islamic figure al-Khidr.

Al-Awazim: on the northern coast, Georgian and Kuwaiti teams have discovered fragments of Dilmun as well as later Islamic pottery.

Classical Seleucid Empire

The Hellenistic Period lasted from 323 to 30 BCE. In his lecture series Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age, Jeremy McInerney states that, “the generation after Alexander’s death saw the entire eastern Mediterranean and much of the Near East plunged into a paralyzing difficult round of civil wars. His generals clustered around his dead body in Babylon and carved up his empire like jackals around a carcass. Many of his generals were men of Philip II’s generation, 20 or 30 years older than Alexander. They were uninterested in sharing power with the Persians.” One of new kingdoms was the Seleucid Empire, which lasted from 312 to 63 BCE.

F5 (Tell Sa’id): this site was built during the time of the Seleucid Empire. During Alexander’s lifetime, he dispatched several expeditions to explore the Gulf. It is said that they named the island “Ikaros” since it bore a resemblance to one named as such in the Aegean. F5 bears the ruins of a fortress dating back to about 300 BCE and two temples. The better known, temple A, is a syncretic blend of Greek and Achaemenid architecture. In Mathilde Gelin’s work New French-Kuwaiti Research in the Hellenistic Fortress, she writes that, “the foundation of the fortress, around 300 BC, is attributed to Antiochos the First. He is said to have been sent by his father Seleucos to establish a control point of the trading maritime routes in the Gulf. It seems that the Greeks and the ’local’ people encountered difficulties which led to the fortress being taken over by the local inhabitants, for a period estimated by the excavators to have lasted about forty years. Antiochos the Third is known to have restored Seleucid order in the empire, reinvesting in the fortress and awarding it the status of colony. After the abandonment of this area, limited occupation occurred in the fortress until the 1st century AD.”

F4 (Al Khan/Dar Al Deyafa): UNESCO writes that it is, “a twelve room structure constructed with mudbrick that was used as a workshop for molding Terracotta statutes as well as a house of relaxation for ship captains and sailors.” There is also B6 (Hellenistic Sanctuary), “a two rooms building with a yard where signs of ritualistic activities could be detected. This building in particular did not last in standing condition as it was drifted by sea high waves.” You can read more about Hellenistic Failaka here. Below are images from an old documentary that show Hellenistic statues that have been unearthed at Failaka.

The Middle Ages

Medieval Christian Community: In the 8th/9th centuries of the common era, a small Christian community lived in the center of the island. In 2016, the work Al-Qusur, A Christian Monastery on Failaka Island was published detailing this archaeological site. Julie Bonnéric writes that, “the history of Christianity in the Gulf is still largely unknown since both archaeological and written sources are sparse. A church was excavated at al-Qusur (Failaka Island, Kuwait) by the French Mission to Kuwait in 1988–1989. Since 2011, a new French–Kuwaiti Archaeological Mission in Failaka has aimed to better understand the site. The discovery of a large refectory and a small tripartite building that is most probably a monk’s cell, as well as the reinterpretation of a church-like building as a structure perhaps dedicated to the spiritual education of monks has demonstrated that at least the central part was a monastery, making it the second Christian settlement in the Gulf to be proven to be a monastery.” The images below come from Archaeology Magazine, the museum on site of the ancient archaeological sites, and IASA.

Early and Late Modern Periods

Early Modern Ruins: in the north of the island, at Al-Quraniya, there is evidence of a village dating back to the 1600s. In 2018, a work was published detailing the Kuwaiti-Italian excavations from 2010 – 2015. Archaeology Magazine writes that, “just to the southeast of the village is a small square rock fort dating to about the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Some researchers believe that this structure was constructed by Portuguese soldier-merchants who did frequent business in the region. Others suspect that Arab pirates built the base to attack the lucrative shipping lanes that led to wealthy Iraqi cities such as Basra or to ports along the Iranian coast to the east. In this era, European, Iranian, and Chinese elites had a growing appetite for the Gulf pearls that dominated the region’s economy. Pirates were a constant threat until the nineteenth century; British guns and diplomacy put an end to their raids.” In this 2008 article, Peter Barta writes that, “the fort… was built from searock on square-like layout with round protruding corner towers. Both the village and the fort were first mentioned by Danish traveller Carsten Niebuhr who spoke about a ‘Portuguese castle’ near Grain. The first systematic survey of the site was carried out by the Italian mission in 1976.”

Late Modern Ruins: in her article Unearthing the Past in Kuwait, Mary Ann Tetreault writes that, “the village of Az Zawr, situated on the northwest side of Failaka, was the longest continuously inhabited location in what is now Kuwait. Based on currently available evidence, the mainland location of Kuwait City was settled in the early eighteenth century, some say by migrants from Failaka. Stories depicting early Kuwait note its lack of fresh water while, until about a hundred years ago, Failaka had ample fresh water to support its agriculture. The water now is severely depleted thanks to the demands of the modern city across the bay that shares Failaka’s water table”