The Persian Gulf

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It'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 far away cultures in

Oman, Arabia and the Indus River Valley some 4,000 years ago, trading goods like textiles,

ceramics, carnilion and of course copper, the metal which was so vital for the Mesopotamian

cities making bronze.

Here 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.

Dotted 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 Dilman, 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, giving us a clearer idea of just how instrumental this

highway was for trade and connections some 4,000 years ago.

Welcome 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 Alain Museum in Abu Dhabi and

a leading expert of Bronze Age Dilman and Dr. Lloyd Weeks, professor of archaeology at the

University of New England.

Lloyd, 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've been Lloyd, you're in Australia, Stefan, you're in Abu Dhabi.

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.

But 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 toss it 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 period where things were really happening during the Bronze Age.

Yeah, people have actually been calling it the first commercial superhighway.

Really, wow.

So Stefan, did this allow the great cities of Mesopotamia, the likes of Babylon,

O'Rourke 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 shipfaring, where the other kinds of trade that had happened overland

didn't allow these volumes to be exchanged.

And 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 started Mesopotamia, we can see trade routes extending down

through the Gulf past Bahrain and South East and 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 South East and Iran as well.

And Lloyd, we've said the Bronze Age, and as Stefan mentioned this time,

this earliest trade is superhighway.

No such thing as a city 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 broader sense,

then we're beginning probably in the middle of the fourth millennium BC, maybe 3500 BC,

and we're going down through a little over 2,000 years to the end of the second millennium BC,

somewhere around about 13 or 1200 BC.

And 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.

It 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 asking a bit more on those texts, Stefan,

is if Ed say that the Babylonians and the people of these various Mesopotamian cities,

are quite bureaucratic, they like recording the trade deals and the objects and the imports

and the trading and so on.

I mean, Lloyd, you're kind of going, you're shaking your head side to side at the same time.

So 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 I worried about, the local situation,

the movement of goods and materials into and out of their economies.

What we know about international traders 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 was as interested and 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.

A lot of the information we have from ancient texts about long-distance trade,

sort of, they are by accident. It'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 Dillman,

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, so we have to put it together by these

indirect references. Does the information then go hand in hand with the 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. And when you're doing that, there's always attention.

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, 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. Although they seem important from

the texts, when we work archaeologically, we're largely working in the absence of these sorts of

organic remains. I can mention here that regarding textiles, we know about a city in southern

Babylonia called Waba, which means the sea coast, which probably was the most important

port of trade going into Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age. It consisted of three townships,

and American asiologists have calculated that approximately 10,000 people at one point

were employed in the textile industry there. And 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 and the

sheet textiles, and that's incredible. Well, 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 send 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? I mean, actually 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 sheep aren't going, which is part of the story about the

straightforward moves 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. We 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. As 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 McGahn,

that were sailing up and down the Gulf at this period. But I might throw just

different on that because that's really his area. Please do, let's do it.

Yeah, it might come 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 canelian 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.

I should say what to do with copper, isn't it? 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 and 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. Lloyd, you mentioned the Calcolithic 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 that 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. But

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 would 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 a hundred 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 hall moons.

And 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 hall moons, moving north through the millennia until it reached just high

state maybe about 6,000 years ago where sea levels were a couple of meters higher than they are now.

But all of that potentially terrific late Pleistocene and very earliest holocene archaeology

now under the drink, under the water and very inaccessible.

Yet 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 like

some 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 route way too.

We can see that all the way back to what we call the obate 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. But 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 we simply leg 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 purling industry that might have already been there

at the time before the Bronze Age and was that quite a big, well that's probably a difficult

question to ask, but there is our logical evidence for purling from thousands of years ago in that

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 fisheyes and it's never been proven you know

beyond any doubt, but it's very very likely that this thing they were trading called fisheyes were

in fact the oyster pearls and they were a coveted sort of trade good and luxury that was coming

from the lands of Dilman and Magan as they call 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 that 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 because the growth of cities urbanisation

is something that didn't occur in all places of the Gulf during the Bronze Age. Some places, yes,

in Dilman, that I'm sure Stefan will be talking about later on, but in areas where I've worked mostly

in South East in Arabia, the modern day UAE and Saldana 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 inter-connectivity over very large

distances.

And do you see a richer concentration of settlements in the northern part of the Gulf,

you know, 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 Farlecker Island,

like Bahrain, and also the coast of Saudi Arabia adjacent to Bahrain, which so evidence for settlement,

and we've got evidence for settlement in South East in 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, settlements really

limited to just a few locations. Let'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, Dilman? Dilman is the word, the ancient

Mesopotamians used to describe some place in the Gulf. And through our research over the years,

it's been become clear that this place was several different things. They sometimes refer to a city

called Dilman. They sometimes refer to an island called Dilman, and they sometimes refer to a

region called Dilman. And all of this was around ancient Bahrain, where we found the city of Dilman,

and then the coast from Bahrain all the way up to modern-day Qwait. That was what they meant by

Dilman. Dilman was also a mystical place in their mythology, so 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 founded in a 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 Luvial flood. So in that sense, it was an

unreal mythical place. But from the textural 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,

so they were a middle market. Right. So while the people of Dilman are they very much kind of

are they renowned or aside from this kind of mythical link as well? Are they renowned by the people

of Babylon, Mesopotamia? As you say, the middlemen, 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, those ports

nearer the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, for instance. Yes, in some of their narratives

about Dilman is called the storeroom at the end of the K. So 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 because this main city is in Bahrain. But the Dilman, do we say culture?

How does the name Dilman, therefore, also get aligned with other key trading centers further

north in the Gulf? For instance, you mentioned Kuwait earlier.

The around the turn between the third and the second millennium, this Dilman culture changes

and Dilman society from a more tribally organized society into a, like a city state and a kingdom.

And the kings of Dilman take control of a small Kuwaiti island called Philika 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.

And how important a settlement, a trading post, does a place like Philika 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 so 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 Philika was a key point in that transaction.

You probably already had to change from rivercraft to sieve worthy vessels when you

reach 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, a port town at the sea coast, that was probably where canals would lead

barges with goods for repacking and then going on sea worthy vessels. And then they would head

to the Gulf. We actually have an idea that there was a great development in the the sea going

vessels over time. So around the 21st century, Babylonia was controlled by what we called the

third dynasty of Ur. And that was a huge territorial state with a enormously well-organized

infrastructure. And they had these large ships, the Magalgal. And they could go as probably

as far as Gujarat in India. But 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. So they could only reach as far as Bahrain. And that's actually when we can see

at the same moment that Dilman, you know, really starts to prosper. And this

Dilman kingdom suddenly emerges. So they were able to control the trade suddenly and become the

the central middleman. But before that, people were sailing all the way.

So 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, was something like that,

you know, kind of creating outposts elsewhere, trade entrepreneurs, you know, that allow them.

There I say it too many modern terms. I know like a monopoly, but a prime position

on the trade routes, you know, of this Bronze Age super highway at the time.

Yeah, you could say it's sort of emerged as a kind of Singapore off the Bronze Age at some point

there. And 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 War Three States trade empire and their

trade fleet. 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 both of them, Stefan, Philika, Ireland, and at Bahrain, what should we be imagining with

these assessments in their prime? Should we be imagining bustling harbours and then lots of

markets straight away? So as soon as you go through the harbor, 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 Dilman, not just the trading? I think it will be a surprise to

many, but if we, if we look at the city of Dilman, the site is today called Calala Bahrain,

because the Portuguese, they decided to build a huge fortification right on top of it in the

15th century. But it would be a surprise to many that this was actually a 25 hectare city,

where the stone-built city wall with towers going all the way around it. And when you enter the

city, you would go through large double leaf city gates. There would be custom offices where

your goods would be, we wait and you would be, someone would be levy, levy in Texas.

And when you enter the heart of the city, you would be in the palatial quarters. And in the

palatial quarters, there is a 12 meter wide boulevard going through the city. And on both

side of this boulevard, you have huge stone-built monumental storerooms on both sides going down

this 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 Knosus at

Crete. So around 20,000 square meter palatial border 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. That's the Minoan palace. Knosus, supposedly underneath the other

labyrinth in the Minotaur, but 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, Stephen? Completely. We don't have the artistic developments with this enormous

surplus going into artistry and pottery making that you see in Minoan Crete. But in many ways,

the city is its architecture and organization is at that level. If we then move to Phylica,

you asked about religion and so forth. On Phylica Island, we are lucky that in the Bronze Age 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

Insak, who was the tutorialary deity of Dilman, and that the small temple was dedicated to his

wife or consort Hanipa. Is there a call of a mystery around these particular gods worshiped by

the people of Dilman? It is shrouded in a bit of a mystery. We assume that Insak 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 Ali in Bahrain, in huge

Mausoleums, we know that they used the title servant of Insak of Agaru, or Agaru. So probably the

ancient Dilmanites didn't call them their own city Dilman to begin with. They called it Agaru.

Lloyd, you've been a listing in very intensely at the last part of this chat. And I've got

got a couple more questions on on Dilman 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 Dilman at all?

Well, absolutely, because what's happening in Southeastern Arabia where I've mostly worked

at this time period is still intimately connected with what's happening in Dilman when Dilman takes

over his role as as middleman and lead agent of exchange in the Gulf region. It's interacting with

Southeastern Arabia and the 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 Dilman traders heading to Southeastern Arabia to maintain this golf exchange system.

In 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 Buckrain. And also,

on Philika, 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 Maaghan copper

in this period of the early second millennium BC. And that is one thing with that alliance 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 Dilman 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

Dilman, at the height of the Bronze Age, just how extensive was the copper trade that was going

through the Port of Bahrain, the Philika island, and so on at that time? I think we have to

imagine it being very extensive. We have textual records from Ua 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 is 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

favorite copper merchant today because of the memes and everything like that and his links to Dilman,

this copper merchant from Ur, A and that's here. As Amanda Padani has said in the past, 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 what happens is the testimony of a dispute he had with people he was exchanging copper with,

and they are complaining that he has tricked them. From them, it's very relatable because we can

all see that this copper trader Yarnasi, he was a con man and he made someone 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 Dilman in particular so we can imagine this interaction, this work

complete, this conning. There is a Dilman link there because that's where through most of the

copper trade came at that time. Yarnasi's merchant title was Alik Til Moon and that literally means

he who goes to Dilman. 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 Dilman

from Southeast Arabia and then went to Ur. And my last question on copper at that end of the

Gulf. If someone mentions copper ingots, Bronze Age, I might immediately think of the big ox

hiding guts 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 ox hiding guts or some other kind of object? I would say in this case,

no oxide 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 centimeters in diameter, flat 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 third and second millennium BC. Occasionally we find

larger lumps of copper that might have slightly different shapes. There's one from a site called

Telebrack from the early second 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

this culture so far and the tablets but I'm presuming there's still so much more to learn about

this culture, these traders and their prominence in the Bronze Age while going forward.

Absolutely. I mentioned that we only have a small window into the city of Dilman through

the archaeology and perhaps today only as much as 4% of the volume of this city has been excavated

so there is absolutely a lot more to learn. So Lloyd, we're now going towards the

the southern end of the Gulf and can you give us a picture of what we think at the moment the

world of the Gulf looks like once someone would have got past Dilman and is going towards the

street of Hormies. Well, what we see is we move into the southern Gulf is is a kind of a cultural

transition. So we move from the central Gulf which is fairly culturally homogenous in terms of

its material culture. We might call this Dilman. When we get into the south we see different kinds of

assemblages of material whether it's ceramics or metal art effects or soft stone vessels that are

distinct from those that we find in Dilman but that are relatively homogenous within this area

of south eastern Arabia, the UAE and Oman. Typically in the third millennium we would call this

the Umanar culture or the Umanar period and as we move into the second millennium we give a

different name, the Waysuke 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 to it, 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 exactly there 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 south eastern Arabia that the begins right at the start of the Bronze

Age and what's called the herfete period, maybe 5,000 or 5,200 years ago and by the time we get

into the Omanar period around four to four and a half thousand 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 five and fifteen meters in diameter and several

meters high sometimes with two stories and into these tombs went all members of the community

and so some of the tombs we have evidence for four or five hundred even more people being buried

inside in these large collective burials and on the outside certainly is this technique of

tomb production reached its apogee at the end of the third millennium we have buried elaborately

and smoothly carved blocks of stone of pale white stone limestone ash layers which create a really

incredible appearance for the exterior of these tombs as well

do you get a sense that these people are just as much it might be too difficult question to answer but

are just as much seafacing, seafarers, traders as the people of Dilman further north because I

must admit that the name Dilman seems to have more prominence than these cultures a bit further south.

Well I guess a lot of Dilman'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 kilometers

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 Dilman

so our picture from those textual sources is much more scanned but the archaeological evidence

tells us that of course these societies they lived in all different parts of the environment in

southeastern Arabia in the mountains in the pede months but they're also very populace 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 pigs and troughs in these kinds of practices and this existed alongside traditional agriculture

date palm agriculture and the raising of domesticated chip goat and cattle. Go for a siphon.

We also tend to overlook that the population in eastern Arabia was probably many many times

larger than the population in Dilman and even though trade shifted around the turn of the millennium

the people in southeastern Arabia clearly started interacting a lot more with people in modern day

India and Pakistan and eastern Iran so so there are things that because we have been focused on

the textual sources then there are things that we have tend to downplay but they were on a much

larger scale. One particular site they've been working on Lloyd near the street of Hormuz which

is this site of Shemou. I apologise 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 Shemou is a site

that's in the Emirate of Rasakhkamer and the very northern part of the UAE very close to the

strait of Hormuz as you mentioned near the Moussendam Peninsula and it's a Bronze Age site which has

evidence from multiple different periods from the Ummanar period and in the second millennium from

the Wadi Suk and the Lake 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 Ummanar period in the third millennium

we have a couple of very large Ummanar tombs that we know from Shemou but we have really no 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 than in southeastern Arabia so it was a great place for

people to live in the Ummanar 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 Shemou 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 Ummanar

period usually made of cruder stone but huge pieces of stone weighing tons that are used to make

monuments that might be 20 or 25 meters long and used for collective burials there's a 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 Shemou 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 declines

elsewhere but we haven't got these 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 are really quite dramatically and at this time Shemou'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

the 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 into the second millennium BC is

Bronze Age collapse as the Bronze Age nears its end do you reckon there is a collapse in this area

along the Gulf changing trade and so on what the archaeology is suggesting I think our resolution

in the archaeological record is 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

clearly changes going on so a little bit afterwards we see new palaces being built in the city of

of Dilman 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 going through Dilman after 1600

so 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 they 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 the settlement shrinks the evidence for international contacts is nevertheless

maintained in other areas like Dilman 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 which was the the home of a of a very large and complex civilization which

might map on to what the Mesopotamians knew as Mahashi in the third monium 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 Farz province or

in Kuzastan we see thriving societies in this period so there's no one picture of collapse yeah I mean

Lloyd exactly because I appreciate we haven't really talked about the northern side of the Gulf

Farz province Iran and so on so we should mention that now and 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 Dilman they're connected with

Babylonia absolutely some of that trade is overland through the Zargros and it's 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 street

of all moves is very much in the news today you know trade choke point control of it dictating trade

and so on the straight of all moves back in the Bronze Age as well is there evidence we've

mentioned shim all already but is there evidence for assessments either side of it could there have

been you know chances even back in the Bronze Age where assessments near the straight of all moves

could have commanded traffic through that important you know copper super highway between the

you know the copper of Oman and Dilman and so on and so forth I don't think we have any evidence

that would tell us about any settlements in and around directly around the straight of

former is they could have controlled trade through that like action I think technically that was

probably beyond the capacity of any communities in that zone and in fact we don't know of very many

coastal communities from southern Iran from the Bronze Age just in the last 10 years or so

excellent work by Ali Reza Pazarazade on Keshem Island has identified the first Bronze Age

sites settlements and burials that we know from Keshem Island is very large an important island

that's directly at pretty much the straight of all moves on the northern side and currently

owned by Iran so a few sites are a beginning to appear but even if we move on to mainland Iran

and look at the coastal area this is really not much known around the straight of all moves in

terms of coastal sites it's not until you get beyond that first mountain range into areas like

and then further north into giraffe that you see very large and complex Bronze Age sites but

they were still engaged with the Gulf trade they weren't just positioned directly on the Gulf

one perhaps should also mention that geography of Iran is in a way creating a barrier in some places

where the mountain ridge is a sort of blocking easy flow of people and goods but you have islands

that are perhaps part of a controlled system like Banda Bouchier today had some kind of

dillmond settlement on it as well but it's been investigated more than a hundred years ago so

so we don't know much about it but it was probably something it probably had parallels to what we

see on phylica island and could have been part of this sort of tiny sea empire controlled from

from the city of dillmond on Bahrain Island another thing I think we should remember is that this

is a very very dry arid region so water and accessibility to water is the above and beyond everything

the most limiting factor and what made Bahrain Island special in the Gulf was the presence of enormous

quantities of underground freshwater spring water right that gave it some you know completely

different options in periods of drought and it gave it the potential to carry a large concentrated

population and produce a lot of extra food in a small amount of space and so forth

that access to freshwater of course we've been talking about the Gulf we've been talking

lots of water but sea water freshwater whether you're a stone age person who's gone over to

mortar or living in dillmond or so on freshwater decides you know the lifestyle that follows so

actually Stefan would you say that is when we bring it back to the basics one of the reasons why

dillmond is so successful why grows so much is this favorable access to freshwater on Bahrain Island

absolutely the freshwater is the foundation on which they build everything else and the site around

Shimmel that Lloyd has been investigating and talks about it's to some extent the same situation

absolutely I think I wouldn't call it a dillmond in miniature because I don't think the water

resources are quite as strong as they are in dillmond but we are certainly looking in an area

that within southeastern Arabia has more than the average amount of rainfall

and which also thanks to recharge of its aquifers and and that rainfall being captured from

the mountains behind Shimmel it's got good groundwater as well and during a time where the climate

does seem to have downturned for several centuries that additional extra advantage in rainfall and

groundwater allowed populations to continue living an agricultural life in the northern Emirates

around Shimmel in ways that weren't possible further to the south in Oman in particular where we see

quite a substantial retraction in settlement and indeed during this period we're seeing contact

being maintained between the Shimmel coast and Bahrain we've got lots of beautiful

Bahrainian ceramics making their way to the northern Emirates at this time which tell us that

context is still happening at this time period between these two refugees well of course I mean

we see it nowadays with the Gulf and how imposter trade route it is of course the Bronze Age comes

to an end but as we get to the first millennium BC I get even later into the time of the Parthians

Persians and Sasanians and so on do we get a sense that the Gulf still remains incredibly

important as a trade route to let's say India and Mesopotamia and so on down through those

following centuries as well maybe the goods change but like the importance of this waterway

injures I'll throw it out to both of you and whoever wants to come in first feel free

I think when we sort of arrive at the time of Alexander the Great and the at the Macedonian

conquest things has really picked up again and trade is is probably going on on an enormous scale

and at that time it also starts surpassing the heydays of the the late third millennium and early

second millennium Dilmond trade we also have to envision that a lot more city states and a lot more

kingdoms have appeared in this whole region and the population has grown that the demand for goods

and and the demand of for exotic goods has grown so at this time everything just explodes

yes well I would say in the period immediately before then in the Iron Age after the end of the

Bronze Age we're looking at one of these periods where actually finding evidence for maritime

exchange through the Gulf is a bit more challenging it's not as direct and obvious as it is

earlier during the Bronze Age and we have to work harder to join the dots between the little

bits of evidence that we have to build up a picture that exchange nevertheless continued

in the Gulf at this time albeit potentially on a smaller scale certainly less associated

with large institutions in Mesopotamian society for example and we're looking at real

dearth of evidence in particular areas in south east and arabia it scares but also in Dilmond

Stefan I believe yeah going back to the Bronze Age we can we can see this continued interest

in controlling the Gulf trade because around 1500 1600 BC a I think called the first dynasty

of the sea land at this mystical kingdom emerges south of Babylonia it sort of calves itself out

of Babylonia and then it becomes fairly strong and it actually conquers philica island and later

it conquers Bahrain also and establish itself as a sort of local dominating power and then later

still around 1400 and 50 a new huge territorial state called the Cassites in Babylonia they conquer

the sea land and they conquer philica and they conquer Bahrain and establish themselves

and obviously they don't do that for the good fishing rights they do it because it's worth

the while to set up a governor in Dilmond for the trade well guys I think we could talk about this

for many many more hours to come various parts of this archaeology but I think we'll have to

to leave it there I'm glad that we've largely focused on the Bronze Age because such an amazing

period such amazing source material for the Persian Gulf will of course open the floor to both

if you have any final words you would like to leave our lovely listeners with Lloyd I'll open it

to you first then Stefan oh I think we've hit some of the the big picture items from the Bronze Age

period but of course as he mentioned we could dig a lot deeper into all of this material I think

there's a lot more we could explore in terms of Iran's interconnection into the Gulf system

that's a story which we only barely touched on and I think there's very interesting materials there

as well as the picture from the Indus it's a story that could be told in a huge amount of

depth this week just had a little more time yeah I would say the same that you know if this seems

like a fractured puzzle you should just hit the books and try to fill the blanks because it's

a fascinating region Stefan Lloyd this has been absolutely fantastic it just goes me to say thank you

so much for taking the time to come on the show been great to be here thank you thank you for having us

well there you go there was Dr Stefan Lawson and Dr Lloyd Weeks talking through the archaeology the

Bronze Age archaeology that you can find all along the Persian Gulf and just how important a waterway

this was for copper merchants some good some less good some four thousand years ago thank you

so much for listening to the episode I really do hope you enjoyed it now if you have been enjoying

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