The Persian Gulf

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The Bronze Age Gulf

1:50It's been called the first commercial superhighway, the body of water that connected the great cities of Bronze Age Mesopotamia, Ur, Uruk and later Babylon, with faraway cultures in Oman, Arabia and the Indus River Valley some 4,000 years ago, trading goods like textiles, ceramics, carnelian, and of course copper, the metal which was so vital for the Mesopotamian cities making bronze.

Names for the Gulf

2:21Here in the west, many know it as the Persian Gulf. In Arabia, it's known as the Arabian Gulf, and back in Babylonian times, they called it the Lower Sea. Whatever you call it, 4,000 years ago, just as it remains today, this Gulf was a vital waterway, another key area of the world that allowed for extensive sea trade and far-reaching connections, another fascinating area of Bronze Age archaeology.

Trade in the Bronze Age

2:51Dotted along the Gulf were thriving ports and settlements, safe havens for boats laden with goods that could be destined either for Mesopotamia, for elsewhere along the Gulf, or even for lands beyond the Strait of Hormuz. There was even one port city so striking and so prominent that it became a place of wonder to many Mesopotamians, the city of Dilmun, located on modern-day Bahrain Island. In this episode, we are going to explore the amazing archaeology that continues to emerge at sites all across the Gulf,

3:25giving us a clearer idea of just how instrumental this highway was for trade and connections some 4,000 years ago.

Welcome to the Ancients

3:35Welcome to the Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the Bronze Age Gulf. Our guests today are Dr. Stefan Lawson, Senior Curator at Al Ain Museum in Abu Dhabi and a leading expert of Bronze Age Dillman, and Dr. Lloyd Weeks, Professor of Archaeology at the University of New England.

4:03Lloyd, Stefan, it is such a pleasure to have you both on the podcast today. Thanks for having us. Yeah, it's an honor to be here. And, I mean, Lloyd, you're in Australia. Stefan, you're in Abu Dhabi, if I'm correct as well, Stefan? Yes, Abu Dhabi. And I'm here in London, so we've got three time zones doing this interview across. It's great. I don't think we've ever been this ambitious on the Ancients before.

The Bronze Age Maritime Route

4:25But we're talking about the Gulf back in the Bronze Age, thousands of years ago. But even back then, this was a really busy maritime route full of these thriving cities, these populations dotted all along this coastline. Yes, I think you'd have to say that was the case, Tristan. There are peaks and troughs, of course, in our evidence and what we know about the scale of trade at this time. But absolutely, it was a period where things were really happening during the Bronze Age. Yeah, people have actually been calling it the first commercial superhighway.

4:56Really? Wow. So, Stefan, did this allow the great cities of Mesopotamia, the likes of Babylon, Oruk, and so on, to trade with other big civilizations beyond the end of the Gulf? It made the exchange of really large quantities of materials and goods possible with ship faring, where the other kinds of trade that had happened over land didn't allow these volumes to be exchanged.

Extent of Trade

5:23And Lloyd, how far did it allow these Bronze Age powers of Mesopotamia and so on to trade? I mean, how extensive did these trade routes become? I think if we start in Mesopotamia, we can see trade routes extending down through the Gulf, past Bahrain and southeastern Arabia, all the way over to South Asia, to modern-day India and Pakistan. The Indus Valley civilization certainly would have been reached through the Gulf. But the Gulf would also have allowed southern Mesopotamia to reach, perhaps more easily, communities in southeastern Iran as well. And Lloyd, we've said the Bronze Age and, as Stefan mentioned, this time of this earliest trade superhighway.

6:00No such thing as a silly question, though. When exactly are we talking about with the Bronze Age in this area of the world? If we're thinking about the Bronze Age in its broadest sense, then we're beginning probably in the middle of the 4th millennium BC, maybe 3500 BC. And we're going down for a little over 2,000 years to the end of the 2nd millennium BC, somewhere around about 13 or 1200 BC.

Source Material

6:23And Stefan, what types of source material do we have surviving to learn about trade, to learn about the people who lived along the Gulf that far back in time? Well, we have archaeology and we have ancient texts. And this area and this region is special because we have some of the oldest records written by man from the cities of Babylonia, the southern part of modern Iraq. And that opens a whole new window into these exchanges, which we don't have in many other regions of the world.

6:54It also makes us look at the trade in a different light because we can see that the scale and the distances were much greater than what we would have expected from what we can see in archaeology. And just to ask you a bit more on those texts, Stefan, is it fair to say that the Babylonians and the people of these various Mesopotamian cities are quite bureaucratic? They liked recording the trade deals and the objects and the imports and the trading and so on. I mean, Lloyd, you're shaking your head side to side at the same time.

7:24So, I mean, it's just an interesting source of information just how much you have surviving relating to that trade from these texts. Well, I should probably let Stefan answer this because he's written more directly about it. But I would say, I mean, our textual record is incredibly important, but it's also very fragmentary. And I think, to be honest, this is coming out very clearly in some of Stefan's work, that the scribes and the institutions they worked for weren't that interested in recording international trade. They had other things that were worried about, the local situation, the movement of goods and materials into and out of their economies.

7:58What we know about international trade is often found out, as it's mentioned, on the sidelines of what's more important to these scribes who are recording this information. Would you agree, Stefan? Yeah, I agree. And I also say, Tristan, you mentioned that they were very bureaucratic, which in a sense is true. But the moment you started having tens of thousands of people living in cities, you really needed a bureaucracy to record how much you had in your storerooms. And a lot of the information we have from ancient texts about long-distance trade are sort of there by accident.

8:35It's because you had huge storerooms for recording how much packing materials you had. And then sometimes people come and check out some packing materials for sealing containers going to the Indus Valley or to Eastern Arabia or to ancient Dilmun. And then we can sort of record these things. Or you have a shipyard that is issuing materials for repairing a ship that's going to the Gulf. So it's more by accident and because of the need for this enormous bureaucracy that we have our information.

9:08So we have to put it together by these indirect references. Does the information then go hand in hand with that other key source that you've mentioned already, which is the archaeology itself, Lloyd, which is going to these sites, for instance, in Arabia or wherever, being out there in the field and getting more of a sense of what the situation was actually like for these communities that lived along the Gulf? Absolutely. It's part of the joy of working in this area at this time period that you get to employ both of these sources of evidence.

9:39And when you're doing that, there's always a tension. Sometimes the sources are in clear alignment. The archaeological evidence kind of maps on to what we might be hearing from the textual sources. Sometimes they're not so much in alignment. We might see a lot of evidence talking to a particular kind of exchange relationship, but that's not really appearing on the ground. And certainly a lot of the materials that are being discussed in texts are what we might call invisibles in the archaeological record. They don't necessarily stick around particularly well in the ground. Things like textiles, which only survive in certain kinds of burial environments.

10:13Although they seem important from the texts, when we work archaeologically, we're largely working in the absence of these sorts of organic remains. Yeah, I can mention here that regarding textiles, we know about a city in southern Babylonia called Guaba, which means the seacoast, which probably was the most important port of trade going into Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age. It consisted of three townships, and American archaeologists have calculated that approximately 10,000 people at one point were employed in the textile industry there.

10:49And when you place a textile industry and you literally bring millions of sheep there every year to create woolen textiles, you only do that because you can export them. But we have never, as archaeologists, found a single Mesopotamian textile fragment from here and all the way to India. Wow, that's amazing. Everyone thinks nowadays about the copper, but there's much more than the copper in the sheet textiles, and that's incredible.

11:20Well, they had to pay for the copper. And one of the things they were sending the other way was textiles, because what you had in these huge agrarian societies on the Babylonian floodplain was a lot of sheep and a lot of grain. So probably they also sent huge fleets of cargo ships with grain to supply the sort of demand for food in the Gulf region. Lloyd, can we get more of a sense of the nature of Bronze Age trade, the nature of Bronze Age shipping at that time?

11:53I mean, naturally, today you've got those great tankers, and they're going day and night, you know, for months on end. But what should we be imagining with the shipping itself, the nature of trading itself back in the Bronze Age? Well, at the moment, some of those ships aren't going, which is part of the story about the Strait of Hormuz at the moment, I guess. But in the Bronze Age, certainly, I mean, we can begin very early, back before the Bronze Age, and start to look at some very fragmentary archaeological evidence, which tells us about the importance and the nature of ships and shipping in the Gulf, even into the Calcolithic and further back into the Neolithic periods.

12:27We find small fragments of bitumen, which show impressions on them, which tell us about the nature of the craft, which were being produced at that time, made of wood and potentially of reeds as well. And we sometimes find models of ancient watercraft in various archaeological contexts in the Gulf and in southern Mesopotamia. So, already this maritime technology that was ratcheted up in the Bronze Age had a very long tradition in this part of the world where local communities, Mesopotamian communities were using transport over water for a variety of purposes to move people and to move goods.

13:01As we move into the Bronze Age, we get the feeling that the size of the vessels, the scale and the nature of the exchange are all increasing quite dramatically. And although our archaeological evidence is still very fragmentary, it's at this kind of juncture where we can bring in evidence from Mesopotamian texts, the ones that Stefan was talking about earlier, which tell us about the scale and nature of the ships, the so-called big ships of Magan, that were sailing up and down the Gulf at this period. But I might throw to Stefan on that, because that's really his area.

13:34Please do. Let's do it. Yeah, it might come as a surprise to many, but we actually know that in the Babylonian province Lagash, this huge state in the late third millennium had a trade ministry, and they commanded a fleet of more than 300 ships. And for instance, 11 of these ships at one point were called Magalgal, and Magalgal means very big ships. And they had a huge capacity, and they were going down the Gulf with cargo to be exchanged for luxury goods from the east, like ivory and carnelian beads, but first and foremost, to feed the demand for copper from the mountains of Oman for these cities and their armies and their production.

14:18Gosh, it's all to do with copper, isn't it? Well, we'll certainly cover that more as our chat goes on. And we're going to kind of explore these various key sites, these peoples who lived along the Gulf, from the northern end of the Gulf all the way towards the Strait of Hormuz, because Stefan, I know you're more of an expert on the northern part in your archaeology, and Lloyd, yourself, on the south. But before we get to that, I must ask, and you did kind of touch on it briefly, the fact that there's evidence of trade, there's evidence of people using this waterway before the Bronze Age.

14:50Lloyd, you mentioned the Chalcolithic and the Neolithic at the end of the Stone Age beforehand. And is it, you raised this in an email before we got on a call, Lloyd, is it also a fact that the Gulf wasn't actually always a Gulf? Yeah, that's right. I guess one of the hardest things we have to do as archaeologists is go to a place and stand there and try and imagine it not looking like it does now. And when we're dealing with sites that are maybe only a few hundred years old, the changes might not be so massive.

15:20But when we're dealing with sites that are thousands of years old, then landscapes and environments can change pretty dramatically over those time periods. And certainly when we look in this part of the world and we go back to a period where we call the last glacial maximum during the end of the Pleistocene period where things were at their coldest and driest about 20,000 years ago, sea levels were maybe 100 or 120 meters lower than they are now globally. What is now the Persian Gulf was not a body of water. It was a river valley and a series of wetlands which extended from what is now southern Iraq right to the Strait of Hormuz.

15:57And this river valley would have probably been quite an important environment and a place where people lived during that period between the last glacial maximum and the Holocene about 12,000 years ago, when the climate improved and ameliorated and populations started taking off with the Neolithic revolution that took place in and around the Fertile Crescent. So from about 15,000 years ago, this river valley started to fill in from the south, from the Strait of Hormuz, moving north through the millennia until it reached its highest state maybe about 6,000 years ago where sea levels were a couple of meters higher than they are now.

16:33But all of that potentially terrific late Pleistocene and very earliest Holocene archaeology is now under the drink, under the water and very inaccessible. Yeah, to think what kind of late Ice Age archaeology there could be under the Gulf, that's a really interesting thing to consider. Stefan, if we briefly touch on the Stone Age, when Lloyd mentioned that the Gulf has risen by some 6,000 years ago, in the Stone Age, should we be imagining farming communities also dotted along, not the great cities of the Bronze Age, but communities dotted along the Gulf and trading or taking advantage of that routeway too?

17:09We can see that all the way back to what we call the Ubaid period in Iraq, people trading a particular kind of pottery and volcanic obsidian glass, they were living along the shores of the Gulf Coast. And so clearly there was contact along the water, like down the line exchange between groups. But before that, in the time where Lloyd refers to the Gulf as a huge fertile river valley, we don't have any physical evidence from this river valley that Lloyd refers to that existed where the Gulf is today.

17:45But there is no doubt that this was one of the most important sort of habitats for early human evolution and early, probably also early evolution of what later became the cities and the Neolithic revolution, all these things. But we simply lack the evidence to say how and why. Stefan, you're currently in Abu Dhabi and I'm doing a bit of research about this some time ago, but I must also ask about this Stone Age pearling industry that might have already been there at the time before the Bronze Age.

18:17And was that quite a big, well, that's probably a difficult question to ask, but there is archaeological evidence for pearling from thousands of years ago in that area. Yes, you find pearls going back to the Neolithic, natural pearls from the different oyster species in the Gulf, and they were clearly selected and they were perforated and worn as jewelry. But from the text, we also know of a thing called fish eyes. And it's never been proven, you know, beyond any doubt, but it's very, very likely that this thing they were trading called fish eyes were, in fact, the oyster pearls.

18:54And they were a coveted sort of trade good and luxury that was coming from the lands of Dillman and Magan, as they called them, in the Gulf. So Lloyd, is it around 5,000 years ago? Is it at the beginning of the Bronze Age? I mean, do you start seeing a bit of a societal shift? Do you start seeing the emergence of larger settlements along the Gulf? I would say that we certainly see changes in settlement and we see settlements growing. But we shouldn't take a model of the growth of cities that we might see in a place like southern Mesopotamia in Babylonia and transplant that to the Gulf.

19:29Because the growth of cities, urbanization, is something that didn't occur in all places of the Gulf during the Bronze Age. Some places, yes, in Dillman, that I'm sure Stefan will be talking about later on. But in areas where I've worked, mostly in southeastern Arabia, the modern-day UAE and sultanate of Oman, settlements become bigger, towns expand, but we don't see cities develop in the way that they do in Mesopotamia. But certainly we're seeing a growth in populations and a growth in interconnectivity over very large distances.

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20:57And do you see a richer concentration of settlements in the northern part of the Gulf, nearer the Mesopotamian cities, or in the south of the Gulf? Or is it pretty much spread evenly across? I would say that there are quite big gaps in our evidence in lots of parts of the coastal Gulf. Even in the northern Gulf, there are pockets of area like Kfalika Island, like Bahrain, and also the coast of Saudi Arabia adjacent to Bahrain, which show evidence for settlement.

21:38And we've got evidence for settlement in southeastern Arabia as well. But there are gaps in between those settlements. There are areas where we know very little, in coastal parts of Saudi Arabia, for example. Then there's the whole northern shore of the Gulf, in modern-day Iran, where settlements of any period are very sparse in the immediately adjacent coastal region. Once you get beyond the mountain chains further inland, we see the development of very complex and large sites and urban formations. But on the coastal fringe itself, settlement's really limited to just a few locations.

22:12Let's now explore evidence in the northern parts of the Gulf. And Stefan, where your work is focused, so you're going to be the lion's focus of this part of the conversation. But of course, Lloyd, if you want to jot in with anything, you are more than welcome to, my friend. Stefan, we've mentioned the word a few times already, so can you please explain it to us? What is and where are we talking with this word, dillman? Dillman is the word the ancient Mesopotamians used to describe some place in the Gulf.

22:46And through our research over the years, it's become clear that this place was several different things. They sometimes refer to a city called Dillman. They sometimes refer to an island called Dillman. And they sometimes refer to a region called Dillman. And all of this was around ancient Bahrain, where we found the city of Dillman, and then the coast from Bahrain all the way up to modern-day Kuwait. That was what they meant by Dillman. Dillman was also a mystical place in their mythology.

23:19So it was a magical place of creation. It was a place where the ancient hero and king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, went to look for eternal life. He found it in the form of a fruit underwater, which was probably a natural pearl. But he lost it to a snake on his way back to Uruk, a bit like mortality was lost in the biblical narrative of original sin later on. And it was the place where the Babylonian Noah was allowed to live with his wife after saving the animals in the ark after the deluvial flood.

23:55So in that sense, it was an unreal mythical place. But from the textual records on trade, we can see that it was also a word and a name used for a city and a place where the Babylonians exchanged luxury goods and copper from further east. But Bahrain Island itself doesn't have any resources to trade with, with the exception of pearls and dates. So everything that came into this market came from outside.

24:27So they were a middle market. Right. So are the people of Dillman, are they very much kind of, are they renowned, aside from this kind of mythical link as well, are they renowned by the people of Babylon, Mesopotamia, as, as you say, the middlemen, as, as the seafarers, as the traders, as the people who are owning the boats and are bringing all of these items to and from, you know, you know, those ports nearer the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, for instance. Yes. In some of their narratives about Dillman, it's called the storeroom at the end of the quay.

24:59So that was, you know, where you could go and get all this luxury goods that the cities were craving. You could get canelian, you could get ivory, you could get hardwood, you could get copper, you could get silver and gold. So it was, it was literally, you know, they literally used the metaphor, the storeroom. You mentioned that this main city is in Bahrain, but the Dillman, dare we say culture? How does the name Dillman therefore also get aligned with other key trading centers further north in the Gulf?

25:34For instance, you mentioned Kuwait earlier. Around the turn between the third and the second millennium, this Dillman culture changes and Dillman society from a more tribally organized society into a, like a city state and a kingdom. And the kings of Dillman take control of a small Kuwaiti island called Filaka and they establish a colony, they establish some temples and an industrial facility and a settlement. And they use this colony as a bridgehead for the trade further north to the cities of Babylonia.

26:10And how important a settlement, a trading post, does a place like Filaka Island become as the Bronze Age progresses? It becomes very important because we have to remember that there were no places where you could go to shore and repair your ships or stock water. So there was a, there was a huge need for way stations, places where you could repair your boats, where you could restock supplies, but also where you could do middle trade.

26:40So that some people did not have a fleet of long distance ships, so they could only go so far. They would bring their goods a bit of the way and then someone else would pick it up and go further. And Filaka was a key point in that transaction. Forgive me for my terrible knowledge of the Gulf's layouts, but is it almost the use of river craft to get down the Euphrates or the Tigris towards the Persian Gulf and then going to somewhere like Filaka Island, where those goods could then be transferred onto a more sea durable vessel, something like that?

27:13You probably already had to change from river craft to sheave worthy vessels when you reached the mouth of the Gulf because the long barges that you typically used on the Tigris and Euphrates would have been completely unsuitable for the waves of the Gulf. In a city, like I mentioned earlier, Guaba, the port town at the seacoast, that was probably where canals would lead barges with goods for repacking and then, you know, going on seaworthy vessels, and then they would head to the Gulf.

27:47We actually have an idea that there was a great development in the seagoing vessels over time. So around the 21st century, Babylonia was controlled by what we call the Third Dynasty of Ur. And that was a huge territorial state with an enormously well-organized infrastructure. And they had these large ships, the Magalgal, and they could go probably as far as Gujarat in India.

28:18But around 2004 BC, the city of Ur is sacked by an attacking army from Susiana in western Iran. And this empire or this territorial state collapses. And with it, this trade fleet disappears. And from that time, we don't hear of ships going that far again. So probably the ships that were built after that point were smaller and had a shorter range.

28:48So they could only reach as far as Bahrain. And that's actually when we can see at the same moment that Dilmun, you know, really starts to prosper. And this Dilmun kingdom suddenly emerges. So they were able to control the trade suddenly and become the central middleman. But before that, people were sailing all the way.

29:11So it's taking control of the trade themselves, which allows them to rise from being one city in Bahrain to controlling more. It almost feels like the Phoenicians, I guess, or something like that, you know, kind of creating outposts elsewhere, trade entrepots, you know, that allow them, dare I say, too many modern terms, I know, like a monopoly, but a prime position on the trade routes, you know, of this Bronze Age superhighway at the time. Yeah, you can say it sort of emerged as a kind of Singapore of the Bronze Age at some point there.

29:45And in part, they were, of course, they were clever, but they're, and they were able to exploit a vacuum that emerged after this collapse of the Ur-3 state's trade empire and their trade fleet. Yeah, and we see it as a bit of a collapse in the other places, but it was probably very short-lived. And everybody adjusted to this new situation, and then they, and everybody started prospering for it in their own way. And from the archaeology of the sites, I know you've been working at both of them, Stefan, Feilica Island and at Bahrain,

30:15what should we be imagining with these settlements in their prime? Should we be imagining bustling harbours and then lots of markets straight away? So as soon as you go through the harbour, you enter these commercial areas? Or do we get more of a sense of everyday life, of their religion? Are they giving us more of an insight into the whole culture of Dillman, not just the trading? I think it will be a surprise to many. But if we look at the city of Dillman, the site is today called Kalal al-Bahrain, because the Portuguese, they decided to build a huge fortification right on top of it in the 15th century.

30:49But it would be a surprise to many that this was actually a 25-hectare city with a stone-built city wall with towers going all the way around it. And when you entered the city, you would go through large double-leaf city gates. There would be custom offices where your goods would be weighed and you would be, someone would be levying taxes. And when you entered the heart of the city, you would be in the palatial quarters. And in the palatial quarters, there is a 12-metre-wide boulevard going through the city.

31:25And on both sides of this boulevard, you have huge stone-built monumental storerooms on both sides going down the street. And we should probably imagine, we haven't excavated that much yet of it, but we should probably imagine a palatial institution of the size of what you see in Knossos at Crete. So around 20,000 square meter palatial quarter neighborhood. And the quality of the masonry and everything is completely compatible to what you see in sort of high palatial cultures in the Mediterranean.

32:03That's the Minoan Palace, Knossos, supposedly underneath you have the labyrinth and the Minotaur. But, you know, the excavations there just revealed just how complex that palace was with administrative areas, lots of different rooms, a throne room and so on. So these were kind of the beating hearts of society and administration and bureaucracy and all of that. So something similar, do you think, Stefan? Completely. We don't have the artistic developments with this enormous surplus going into artistry and pottery making that you see in Minoan Crete.

32:36But in many ways, the city is, its architecture and organization is at that level. If we then move to Feilica, you asked about religion and so forth. Because on Feilica Island, we are lucky that in the Brontage colony, we have both a large and a small temple. And then at the settlement, we have a small temple like sanctuary. And we have a pretty good idea that the large temple was dedicated to the god Inzak, who was the tutelary deity of Dilmun.

33:09And that the small temple was dedicated to his wife or consort, Hanipa. Is there kind of a mystery around these particular gods worshipped by the people of Dilmun? It is shrouded in a bit of a mystery. We assume that Inzak was the god of water. And we think his symbol or his sort of avatar was the date palm. But our knowledge is very limited. We know from the kings who were buried at a site called Arli in Bahrain in huge mausoleums.

33:40We know that they used the title Servant of Inzak, of Agarum, or Agarru. So probably the ancient Dilmunites didn't call them their own city Dilmun to begin with. They called it Agarru. Lloyd, you've been listening in very intently at the last part of this chat. And I've got a couple more questions on Dilmun before we go on. But I just also want to throw it over to you as well. I know your work is more on the southern Gulf. But do you have any thoughts about Dilmun at all? I mean... Well, absolutely.

34:11Because what's happening in southeastern Arabia, where I've mostly worked at this time period, is still intimately connected with what's happening in Dilmun. When Dilmun takes over this role as middleman and lead agent of exchange in the Gulf region, it's interacting with southeastern Arabia. And sort of some of those way stations that Stefan mentioned earlier heading north, they have similar counterparts, somewhat smaller maybe, heading south as well, which indicate Dilmun traders heading to southeastern Arabia to maintain this Gulf exchange system

34:41in a changed way from what it was in the third millennium. So southeastern Arabian materials, especially copper, were still moving north through the Gulf at this time. And some of my work has been around exploring the nature of this technology in southeastern Arabia, but also some of the material as it's been exported to sites in Bahrain, and also on Filaka, where I've looked at some of the metal artifacts from the excavations there by Stefan and other Danish teams. And what we can see when we look at that material is that there really is a clear evidence for the use of southeastern Arabian Magan copper

35:16in this period of the early second millennium BC. And that is one thing that aligns perfectly with what we know textually about the continuation and even the expansion of the copper trade at this time. Although in the place that's producing the copper in southeastern Arabia, finding archaeological evidence for this production is quite challenging. So Dilmun is really winning the picture in terms of the textual sources, but also the archaeological evidence for this time period. We've got to talk about copper then, come on. I mean, Stefan, at the height of Dilmun, at the height of the Bronze Age,

35:50just how extensive was the copper trade that was going through, you know, the port of Bahrain, the Filaka Island, and so on at that time? I think we have to imagine it being very extensive. We have textual records from Ur mentioning the transshipment of up to 18 tons of copper in just one ship, and that is just a random, the preserved text, so it could have been on an even larger scale. So at this point, I think our best way to evaluate it

36:24is by looking at the explosion of wealth in Bahrain. The fact that this relatively small island, the size of Jersey, could produce a huge city and all these monuments, there is approximately 100,000 burial mounds built in this period on Bahrain Island. That just testifies to something extraordinarily happening. I feel I have to, Stefan. I'm really sorry. I feel I have to bring up his name at this point because he is everybody's favourite copper merchant today because of the memes and everything like that,

36:55and his links to Dilmun. This copper merchant from Ur, Aenazia. As Amanda Padani has said in the past, you know, he's not a king, he's not a noble, he's just a trader, but he's become more important, more famous, more legendary than many kings and leading figures of the Bronze Age in this area of the world. And he was a copper trader. Yes, he was. And we have these different documents from his house. And, you know, what happens is the testimony of a dispute he had with people he was exchanging copper with,

37:27and they are complaining that he has tricked them. And from them, it's, you know, it's very relatable because we can all see that this copper trader, Aenazia, he was a, you know, he was a con man and he made someone, you know, pay good money for bad copper and he wasn't giving in. It's so relatable to us today. And he has a link to Dilmun in particular, so we can imagine this interaction, this work and play, this conning. There is a Dilmun link there because that's where through most of the copper trade came at that time.

37:58Yeah, Aenazia's merchant title was Alik Tilmun, and that literally means he who goes to Dilmun. So that was his game. He was sailing back and forth or sending his people back and forth and running this trade. So definitely the copper he was trading had come to Dilmun from Southeast Arabia and then went to Ur. And my last question on copper at that end of the Gulf, if someone mentions like copper, ingots, Bronze Age,

38:28I might immediately think of the big oxhide ingots that you find from shipwrecks near Cyprus. When we're talking about the copper trade at this time, should we just be thinking of large copper bars or should we be thinking something like these bizarre oxhide ingots or some other kind of object? I would say in this case, no oxhide ingots in the Gulf. We wish that would be very interesting. What we've got more is what we might technically call plano convex ingots, but regular people would call bun-shaped ingots. Maybe about 10 or 15 centimetres in diameter,

39:00flat on the top, curved at the bottom, hence the name bun-shaped. And these seem to be one of the most common forms in which copper was traded during the Bronze Age in the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC. Occasionally we find larger lumps of copper that might have slightly different shapes. There's one from a site called Telebrac from the early 2nd millennium BC that's almost pyramid-shaped. But mostly, we're looking at bun-shaped ingots. Stefan, it sounds really amazing how much archaeology is revealing about this culture so far and the tablets. But I'm presuming there's still so much

39:31more to learn about this culture, these traders and their prominence in the Bronze Age well going forward. Absolutely. I mentioned that we only have a small window into the city of Dillman through the archaeology and perhaps today only as much as 4% of the volume of the city has been excavated. So, there is absolutely a lot more to learn. So, Lloyd, we're now going towards the southern end of the Gulf. And can you give us a picture of what we think

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

40:00at the moment

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

40:00the world of the Gulf looks like once someone would have got past Dillman and is going towards the Strait of Hormuz? Well, what we see as we move into the southern Gulf is a kind of a cultural transition. So, we move from the central Gulf which is fairly culturally homogeneous in terms of its material culture. We might call this Dillman. When we get into the south, we see different kinds of assemblages of material, whether it's ceramics or metal artefacts or soft stone vessels that are distinct from those that we find

40:31in Dillman but that are relatively homogenous within this area of southeastern Arabia, the UAE and Oman. Typically, in the third millennium, we would call this the Umana culture or the Umana period. And as we move into the second millennium, we give it different names, the Wadi Souk period and the Late Bronze Age and we see different levels of integration within this society. But it's always culturally distinct from what's happening in the central Gulf, although they're deeply interconnected. And are these communities, when we get,

41:01you know, to the southeast Arabia area, are they defined at this time, these Bronze Age cultures, are they defined by those amazing dry stone tombs that you find in those beautiful picturesque locations? Almost looks like they're in the desert. Well, that's right. Some are in the desert, some are coastal, some are in different locations. But yes, there's a very long tradition of the creation of substantial stone-built burial monuments in southeastern Arabia that begins right at the start of the Bronze Age in what's called the Hafit period,

41:31maybe 5,000 or 5,200 years ago. And by the time we get into the Umana period, around 4,000 to 4,500 years ago, this tradition of tomb building has changed and transformed into one in which they build large, circular, stone-built tombs, collective tombs, anywhere between about 5 and 15 metres in diameter and several metres high, sometimes with two storeys. And into these tombs went all members of the community. And so some of the tombs we have evidence

42:02for 400, 500, even more people being buried inside in these large collective burials. And on the outside, certainly as this technique of tomb production reached its apogee, at the end of the third millennium, we have very elaborately and smoothly carved blocks of stone of pale white stone, limestone ashlars, which create a really incredible appearance for the exterior of these tombs as well. As the saying goes,

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43:25Do we get a sense that these people are just as much, it might be too difficult a question to answer, but like, are just as much sea-facing, seafarers, traders, as the people of Dillman further north? Because I must admit that the name Dillman seems to have more prominence than these cultures

43:55a bit further south. Well, I guess a lot of Dillman's prominence comes from the fact that it's prominent in the Mesopotamian textual sources. And you know, once we push an extra several hundred kilometres further south in the Gulf, then we're really moving to and beyond the edge of the known world for most Mesopotamians and mentions of this part of the world are far fewer than we have for Dillman. So our picture from those textual sources is much more scant. But the archaeological evidence tells us that of course these societies they lived in

44:26all different parts of the environment in southeastern Arabia in the mountains in the Piedmonts but they're also very populous in coastal areas and there were coastal settlements that we know in the Persian Gulf region and around the Strait of Hormuz also in the Sea of Oman as well. So yes, coastal resources were critical to these societies. We've got evidence for lots of fishing and shellfish gathering through the Bronze Age with peaks and troughs in these kinds of practices and this existed alongside traditional agriculture date palm agriculture and the raising of domesticated

44:57sheep, goat and cattle. Go for it, Stefan. We also tend to overlook that the population in Eastern Arabia was probably many, many times larger than the population in Dillman and even though trade shifted around the turn of the millennium the people in Southeast Arabia clearly started interacting a lot more with people in modern-day India and Pakistan and Eastern Iran. So there are things that because we have been focused on the textual sources

45:29then there are things that we have tend to downplay but they were on a much larger scale. One particular site that you've been working on Lloyd near the Strait of Hormuz which is this site of Shimaur. I apologize if I've said that wrong but can you explain to us what this site is and what we should be thinking of with this particular location? Okay, so Shimaur is a site that's in the Emirate of Ras Khaima in the very northern part of the UAE very close to the Strait of Hormuz as you mentioned near the Musendam Peninsula

45:59and it's a Bronze Age site which has evidence from multiple different periods from the Omanar period and in the Second Millennium from the Wadi Suk and the Late Bronze Ages and having occupation across all those periods makes it a rather rare site for that particular region but across that time period of a thousand years or more the nature of the evidence changes very substantially in the Omanar period in the Third Millennium we have a couple of very large Omanar tombs that we know from Shimaur but we have really

46:30no idea of where people were living at that time we've got no evidence for the settlement of the people who were buried in those tombs. We think that was in the area of the modern Date Palm Gardens which are all through the Northern Emirates in this location and the thing about Date Palm Gardens is that the earth is constantly turned over as the gardens are renewed and the crops are renewed and so that destroys a lot of archaeological evidence in and around Date Palm Gardens but this is a location where water was available close to the surface good fresh water for gardening where rain falls a bit higher

47:00than in Southeastern Arabia so it was a great place for people to live in the Omanar period but in the nature of their living has helped to destroy much of the evidence that they left behind in terms of settlement so we have their tombs only. As we move into the second millennium at Shimaur it's famous for its huge vast megalithic graveyard where we have more than a hundred large megalithic tombs of different designs than in the Omanar period usually made of cruder stone but huge pieces of stone

47:32weighing tons that are used to make monuments that might be 20 or 25 metres long and used for collective burials. These are situated at the back of the plain at the base of the mountains away from the good agricultural land and it seems that we have evidence for a large population in this part of the Northern Emirates from these burial remains even though we still have no evidence for settlement at this period. So Shimaur is a real enigma in the early part of the second millennium BC it's clear that people are living there in large numbers during a period where population

48:03declines elsewhere but we haven't got their settlements just their burials and as we move from the early second millennium BC into the late second millennium after about 1500 BC settlement across southeastern Arabia declines really quite dramatically and at this time Shimaur's burial record tails off dramatically but all of a sudden its settlement record takes off so we've got really good evidence for quite a substantial scale settlement at the site during the late Bronze Age and it's one of the few sites in the region which can tell us

48:34the story of how people were adapting to changing environments and intercultural interactions at this time period. Maybe changes in trade as well because of course the word the phrase that comes up when you get to the end of the Bronze Age late Bronze Age end of the second millennium BC is is Bronze Age collapse? Yeah. As the Bronze Age nears its end do you reckon there is a collapse in this area along the Gulf changes in trade and so on what the archaeology is suggesting? I think our resolution in the archaeological record

49:05is you know perhaps not sufficient at the moment to connect it with the discussion that's going on about the Bronze Age collapse in the Levant and beyond but there are clearly changes going on so a little bit afterwards we see new palaces being built in the city of Dilmun and we see a new city wall also so something has happened but exactly what happens is unclear we also don't know much about the Gulf trade

49:36going through Dilmun after 1600 so there are many things that we need to explore further before we can say anything qualified about the Bronze Age collapse I think I would totally agree with Stefan on that one it really is sort of a mosaic and one thing if we could take anything out of this discussion about collapse is that there's no one uniform collapse which exists across this region it just doesn't work that way although there is climate change at certain times which may have affected societies in different ways

50:07they reacted they showed resilience they adapted in different ways and so at a period which is regarded as one of decline in southeastern Arabia where our number of known settlements shrinks the size of the settlement shrinks the evidence for international contacts is nevertheless maintained in other areas like Dillman populations seem to be growing and thriving at this period of so-called collapse if we look across the gulf into Iran again it's a picture of difference in southeastern Iran

50:39which was the home of a very large and complex civilization which might map onto what the Mesopotamians knew as Mahashi in the third millennium the evidence for settlement in that region after 2000 BC really almost disappears entirely it's just a few sites that are left and by 1500 BC we know almost nothing but if we look in north further north in Fars province or in Kuzestan we see thriving societies in this period so there's no one picture of collapse I mean Lloyd exactly because I appreciate we haven't really

51:09talked about the northern side of the gulf Fars province Iran and so on so we should mention that now a really interesting archaeological picture from there as well that you know it's not just all trade was going along the south side it was also going along the north side as well absolutely we can see these Iranian societies as tightly integrated into the broader exchange systems of what we might call the greater gulf region they're connected with southeastern Arabia they're connected with Dillman they're connected with Babylonia absolutely some of that trade is overland

51:39through the Zagros and its various valleys and some of that trade is undoubtedly through the gulf as well I mean Iranian societies are also connected with South Asia and the Indus Valley they're connected with Central Asia so it's a very interconnected world during the Bronze Age with ebbs and flows during different periods the Strait of Hormuz is very much in the news today trade choke point control of it dictating trade and so on