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B
Thanks for having us.
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C
Yeah, it's an honor to be here.
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A
And I mean, Lloyd, you're in Australia. Stefan, you're in Abu Dhabi, if I'm correct as well. Stefan.
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C
Yes, Abu Dhabi.
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A
And I'm here in London. So we've got three time zones doing this interview across. It's great. I 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 dotted all along this coastline.
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B
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.
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C
Yeah. People have actually been calling it the first commercial superhighway. Really?
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B
Wow.
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A
So, Stefan, did this allow the great cities of Mesopotamia, the likes of Babylon, Uruk and so on, to trade with other big civilizations beyond the end of the Gulf?
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C
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 overland didn't allow these volumes to be exchanged.
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A
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?
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B
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.
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A
And, Lloyd, we've said the Bronze Age, and as Stefan mentioned, this time, this kind of, this earliest trade superhighway. No such thing as a silly question, though. When exactly are we talking about with the Bronze Age in this area of the world?
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B
If we're thinking about the Bronze Age in its broadest sense, then we're beginning probably in the middle of the fourth millennium BC, maybe 3500 BC, and we're going down for a little over 2000 years to the end of the second millennium BC, somewhere around about 13 or 1200 BC.
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A
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?
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C
Well, we have archaeology and we have ancient texts. And this area and this region is special because we have these, 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 archeology.
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A
And just asking a bit more on those texts, Stefan, is it fair to say that the Babylonians and the people of these various Mesopotamian cities, they were 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 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.
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B
Well, I should probably let Steffen answer this because he's written more directly about it. But I would say our textual record is incredibly important, but it's also very fragmentary. And I think, to be honest, this has come 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 they were worried about the local situation, the movement of goods and materials into and out of their economies. What 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?
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C
Yeah, I agree. And I also say, Tristan, you mentioned that they were very bureaucratic, which in, in a sense is true. But the moment you started having tens of thousands of people living in cities, you. 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. 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 Dilmen. And then we, 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.
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A
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?
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B
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 a tension. Sometimes the sources are in clear alignment. The archaeological evidence kind of maps onto 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.
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A
Yeah.
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C
I can mention here that regarding textiles, we know about a city in southern Babylonia called Guaba, 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 archaeologists 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.
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A
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.
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C
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 sent huge fleets of cargo ships with grain to supply the. The sort of demand for food in the Gulf region.
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A
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, 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?
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B
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, 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 Cacolithic, 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, 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.
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A
Please do. Let's do it.
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C
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, 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, of Oman for these cities and their armies and their production.
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A
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. Lloyd, 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?
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B
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. 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 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. And this river valley would have probably been quite a very 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 population 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. But all of that potentially terrific late Pleistocene and very earliest Holocene archeology, it's now under the drink, under the water, and very inaccessible.
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A
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 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 route way too?
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C
We can see that all the way back to what we call the Ubait 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, you know, refers to the Gulf as a. 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 simply lack the evidence to say how and why.
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A
Stefan, you're currently in Abu Dhabi and I remember 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. And 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.
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C
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. And they were a coveted sort of trade, good and luxury that was coming from the lands of Dilmun and Magan, as they called them in the Gulf.
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A
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?
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B
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, urbanization 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 southeastern Arabia, the modern day UAE and Sultanate of Oman, settlements become bigger, towns expand, but we don't see cities developing 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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A
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C
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C
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- [23:10]
A
Hit wherever you get your podcasts. 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?
- [23:41]
B
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 Falika island, like Bahrain, and also the coast of Saudi Arabia adjacent to Bahrain, which show evidence for settlement. And 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, settlements really limited to just a few locations.
- [24:31]
A
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? Dilmun?
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C
Dilmun 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 Dilmen. They sometimes refer to an island called Dilmen, and they sometimes refer to a region called Dilmen. And all of this was around ancient Bahrain, where we found the city of Dilmen and then the coast from Bahrain all the way up to modern day Kuwait. That was what they meant by Dilmen. Dilmen 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 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 Diluvial flood. So 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. So they were a middle market.
- [26:48]
A
Right. So are the people of Dilman, 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, those ports nearer the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, for instance.
- [27:11]
C
Yes. In some of their narratives about Dilman, it's called the storeroom at the end of the quay. So that was, you know, where you could go and get all this luxury goods that the cities were craving. You could get carnelian, you could get ivory, you could get hardwood, you could get copper, you could get silver and gold. So it was literally, you know, they literally used the metaphor, the storeroom.
- [27:39]
A
You mentioned that this main city is in Bahrain, but the Dilmen, dare 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, around
- [27:57]
C
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 Dilmen take control of a small Kuwaiti island called Phailaka, 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.
- [28:28]
A
And how important a settlement, a trading post, does a place like Thylaca island become? As the Bronze Age progresses, it becomes
- [28:38]
C
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 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 Freike was a key point in that transaction.
- [29:13]
A
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 Filaca island where those goods could then be transferred onto a more sea durable vessel, something like that?
- [29:32]
C
You probably already had to change from river craft to sea 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 going on seaworthy vessels, and then they would head to the Gulf. We 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 as probably as far as Gujarat in India. But around 2004 BC, the city of Ur is sacked by an attacking army from Sujiana 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.
- [31:30]
A
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 or something like that, you know, kind of creating outposts elsewhere, trade entrepots, you know, that, 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.
- [31:58]
C
Yeah, you can say it sort of emerged as a kind of Singapore of 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 U3 states 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.
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A
And from the archaeology of the sites, I know you've been working at both of them. Stefan Filika island and at Bahrain. What should we be imagining with these settlements in their prime? Should we be imagining bustling harbors 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 Dilman, not just the trading?
- [32:54]
C
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 Kalal 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 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 levy, levying taxes. 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 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.
- [34:22]
A
That'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?
- [34:43]
C
Completely. We don't have the artistic developments with this enormous surplus going into artistry and pottery making that you see in in Minoan Crete. But in many ways the city is. Its architecture and organization is at that level. If we then move to Filaca, you asked about religion and so forth on Filaca 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 Imsak, who was the tutelary deity of Dilmun, and that the small temple was dedicated to his wife or consort, Hanipa.
- [35:34]
A
Is there quite a lot of mystery around these particular gods worshipped by the people of Dilmun?
- [35:39]
C
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 Bahrein, in huge mausoleums, we know that they used the title servant of Insaq of Agarum or Agaru. So probably the ancient Dilmanites didn't call them their own city, Dilmun to begin with. They called it Dilman. Agaru.
- [36:13]
A
Lloyd, you've been listening in very intensely at the last part of this chat, and I've got a couple more questions on on Dillman 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 Dmann at all? I mean.
- [36:29]
B
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 Dillman takes over. This role as. 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 Dilman trade is heading to southeastern Arabia to maintain this Gulf 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 Bahrain and also on Filaca, where I've looked at some of the metal artefacts from the excavations there by Steffen 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. Of southeastern Arabian Magan copper in 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 Dilman is really winning the picture in terms of the textual sources, but also the archaeological evidence for this time period.
- [38:03]
A
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, you know, the port of Bahrain, Filica island and so on at that time?
- [38:20]
C
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 is by looking at the explosion of wealth in Bahrain, the fact that this relatively small island the size of Jersey, could produce 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.
- [39:04]
A
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 Dillman, this copper merchant from Ur, a Nazir. 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?
- [39:35]
C
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. And from them it's very relatable because we can all see that this copper trader, Ianasi, 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.
- [40:05]
A
And he has a link to Dillman in particular. So we can imagine this interaction, this work, complete, this conning. There is a Dillman link there because that's where most of the copy trade came at that time.
- [40:16]
C
Yeah. Ianasi's merchant title was Alik Tilmun 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.
- [40:41]
A
And my last question on copper at that end of the Gulf, if some are mentions like copper ingots, Bronze Age, I might immediately think of the big ox hide 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 ox hide ingots or some other kind of object?
- [41:03]
B
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 Telebrac from the early second millennium bc. That's almost pyramid shaped, but mostly we're looking at bun shaped ingots.
- [41:42]
A
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. Well, going forward, absolutely.
- [41:56]
C
I mentioned that we only have a small window into the city of Dilmen 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.
- [42:11]
A
So, Lloyd, we're now going towards 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 Strait of Hormuz?
- [42:27]
B
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 Dilman. When we get into the south, we see different kinds of assemblages of material, whether it's ceramics or metal artifacts or soft stone vessels that are distinct from those that we find in Dilman, but that are relatively homogeneous within this area of southeastern Arabia, the UAE and Oman, typically in the third millennium, we would call this the Umm an culture or the Ummana period. And as we move into the second millennium, we, 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.
- [43:18]
A
And are these communities, when we get, you know, into it, Southeast Arabia area, are they defined at these time, these Bronze Age cultures, are they defined by those amazing dry stone tombs that you find in those, those beautiful picturesque locations? Almost looks like they're in the desert.
- [43:33]
B
Well, that's right, some, 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, maybe 5,000 or 5,200 years ago. And by the time we get into the Umm an 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 5 and 15 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 4, 500 even more people being buried inside in these large collective burials and on the outside, as 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.
- [44:54]
A
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- [45:49]
A
hit wherever you get your podcasts. Do we get a sense that these people are just as much it might be too difficult question to answer, but like are just as much sea facing 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.
- [46:28]
B
Well, I guess a lot of Dillman's prominence comes from the fact that it's, 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 scant. 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 Piedmont, 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 sheep, goat and cattle.
- [47:30]
A
Go for it, Stefan.
- [47:31]
C
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 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, then there are things that we have tend to downplay, but they were on a much larger scale.
- [48:06]
A
One particular site they've been working on, Lloyd, near the Strait of Hormuz, which is this site of Shimaul. 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?
- [48:20]
B
Okay, so Shimel is a site that's in the emirate of Ras Al Khaimah in the very northern part of the uae, very close to the Strait of Hormuz, as you mentioned, near the Musindam Peninsula. And it's a Bronze Age site which has evidence from multiple different periods, from the Ummana period and in the second millennium, from the Wadi Souq 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 Umm? An period in the third millennium, we have a couple of very large Ummana tombs that we know from Shimel, 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 Umm an 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 Shimel. It's famous for its huge, vast megalithic graveyard, where we have more than 100 large megalithic tombs of different designs than in the Ummahnar 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. 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 Shimel is a real enigma. In the early part of the second millennium B.C. 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 really quite dramatically. And at this time, Schimmel'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.
- [51:13]
A
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 Mellon BC is. Is Bronze Age collapse.
- [51:22]
B
Yeah.
- [51:23]
A
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?
- [51:32]
C
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 are clearly changes going on. So a little bit afterwards, we see new palaces being built in the city of Dilmen, 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 there are many things that we need to explore further before we can say anything qualified about the Bronze Age collapse.
- [52:18]
B
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 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 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 Khuzestan, we see thriving societies in this period. So there's no one picture of collapse.
- [53:37]
A
Yeah, I mean, Lloyd. Exactly. Because I appreciate we haven't really talked 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, north side as well.
- [53:53]
B
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 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.
- [54:28]
A
The Strait of Hormuz is very much in the news today. Trade choke point, control of it, dictating trade and so on the straight of Hormuz back in the Bronze Age as well.
- [54:39]
C
Is there evidence.
- [54:40]
A
We've mentioned shimmer already, but is there evidence for assessments either side of it? Could there have been chances even back in the Bronze Age where settlements near the Strait of Hormuz could have commanded traffic through that important copper superhighway between the copper of Oman and Dilman and so on and so forth?
- [55:04]
B
I don't think we have any evidence that would tell us about any settlements in and around directly around the Strait of Hormuz that could have controlled trade through that location. 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 Alireza Khosrazade on Kesham island has identified the first Bronze Age site settlements and burials that we know from Keshim Island. This very large and important island that's directly at pretty much the Strait of Hormuz on the northern side and currently owned by Iran. So a few sites are beginning to appear. But even if we move on to mainland Iran and look at the coastal area, there's really not much known around the Strait of Hormuz in terms of coastal sites. It's not until you get beyond that first mountain range into areas like Rudan and then further north into Jiroft 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.
- [56:09]
C
One perhaps should also mention that the geography of Iran is in a way, creating a barrier in some places where the mountain ridges are sort of blocking easy flow of people and goods. But you have islands that are perhaps part of a controlled system like Banda Bushia today had some kind of Dilmun settlement on it as well, but it's been investigated more than a hundred years ago, so we don't know much about it. But it was probably something. It probably had parallels to what we see on Filaca island and could have been part of this sort of tiny sea empire controlled from the city of Dilman 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 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.
- [57:22]
A
Right.
- [57:22]
C
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 and a small amount of space and so forth.
- [57:36]
A
That access to freshwater. Of course, we've been talking about the Gulf. We've been talking lots of water. But seawater, fresh water, whether you're a Stone Age person who's gone over to Malta or living in Dilman or so on, freshwater decides, you know, the lifestyle that follows. So actually, Steffen, would you say that is when we bring it back to the basics, One of the reasons why Dillman is so successful, why it grows so much, is this favorable access to fresh water on Bahrain Island?
- [58:03]
C
Absolutely. The fresh water is the foundation on which they build everything else. And the site around Schimmel that Lloyd has been investigating and talks about, it's to some extent the same situation.
- [58:17]
B
Absolutely. I think. I wouldn't call it a Dilman in miniature, because I don't think the water resources are quite as strong as they are in Dilman. But we are certainly looking at an area that within southeastern Arabia, has more than the average amount of rainfall, and which also, thanks to recharge of its aquifers and that rainfall being captured from the mountains behind Shimel, 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 Shimel 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 Shimel coast and Bahrain. We've got lots of beautiful Bahraini ceramics making their way to the northern Emirates at this time, which tell us that contacts are still happening at this time period between these two refugia.
- [59:17]
A
Well, of course, I mean, we see it nowadays with the Gulf and how important the trade route it is. Of course, the Bronze Age comes to an end, but as we get to the first millennium B.C. i get even later into the time of the Parthians, Persians, Sasanians and so on. Do we get a sense that the Gulf still remains incredibly important as a trade route between, let's say, India and Mesopotamia and so on down through those following centuries as well? Maybe the goods change, but the importance of this waterway endures. I'll throw it out to both of you, and whoever wants to come in first, feel free.
- [59:56]
C
I think when we sort of arrive at the time of Alexander the Great and the Macedonian conquest, things has really picked up again, and trade is probably going on on an enormous scale. And at that time, it also starts surpassing the heydays of the late third millennium and early second millennium Dilman 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, the demand for goods and the demand for exotic goods has grown. So at this time, everything just explodes.
- [60:34]
B
Yes, but 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 during 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 southeastern Arabia, it's scarce. But also in Dilman, Stefan. I believe.
- [61:20]
C
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 thing called the First Dynasty of the Sealand, this mystical kingdom, emerges south of Babylonia. It sort of carves itself out of Babylonia and then it becomes fairly strong and it actually conquers Pharlica island, and later it conquers Bahrain also and establish itself as a sort of local dominating power. And then later still, around 1450, a new huge territorial state called the Kassites in Babylonia. They conquer the Sealand and they conquer Filica 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 Dilmen for the trade.
- [62:21]
A
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 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. I will, of course, open the floor to you 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.
- [62:45]
B
Oh, I think we've hit some of the big picture items from the Bronze Age period, but of course, as you 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 if we just had a little more time.
- [63:11]
C
Yeah, I would say the same, that, you know, if this seems like a fractured puzzle, you should just hit the books and try fill the blanks because it's a fascinating region.
- [63:20]
A
Stefan. Lloyd, this has been absolutely fantastic. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Been great to be here.
- [63:27]
C
Thank you thank you for having us.
- [63:32]
A
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 4,000 years ago. Thank you so much for listening to the episode. I really do hope you enjoyed it. Now, if you have been enjoying the ancients, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favor if you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, where we'd really appreciate that. Lastly, don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including lots of ancient history and archaeology documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up@historyhit.com subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode. And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
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