The man who put these mounds on the international map was a Dane with a shovel. In 1953 an expedition from Aarhus, led by Peter Glob and the young archaeologist Geoffrey Bibby, came to Bahrain to see whether the island's countless burial mounds hid anything of interest. Bibby later wrote a lively book about the work, Looking for Dilmun, and it is still the best introduction to the place, a story of heat, flies, tea and slowly dawning realisation that this dry island had been the centre of a lost trading civilisation.
Royal Mound 2 sits in the cluster at A'ali, a few kilometres from Madinat Isa. Like its neighbours, it was built from local limestone slabs and rubble, then covered with earth, and its burial chamber was entered from the side by a passage that was sealed after the funeral. By the time the Danish team arrived, almost all of the royal tombs had been looted in antiquity, so the finds were thin: scraps of pottery, fragments of ivory and the odd copper object. What mattered was the pattern. Taken together, the mounds, the walled town at Qal'at al-Bahrain and the temples at Barbar told a story of a major entrepôt linking Mesopotamia with the Indus valley.
The ground you ride over to reach the mound is part of the same story. Bahrain is a low island of pale limestone with a thin cover of sand, and everything is visible: tyre tracks, camel prints, the shadows of old walls. Roads around the mounds are mostly paved with occasional drifts of sand, and the speed limits on the local streets are low and enforced with cameras. Madinat Isa has the services you need, including fuel, food and a quick coffee.
Come in winter if you can, between November and March, when daytime temperatures sit in the low twenties and the desert smells of dust and a faint salt tang from the sea. Be respectful on site; it is a UNESCO World Heritage monument, so keep to the paths and take nothing but photographs.