Dr. Steffen Laursen

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.

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 sort of demand for food in the Gulf region.

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 3rd millennium had a trade ministry and they commanded a fleet of more than 300 ships.

And for instance, 11 of these ships at one point were called Magalgal.

And Magalgal means very big ships.

And they had a huge capacity and they were going down the Gulf with cargo to be exchanged for...

Luxury goods from the East, like ivory and carnelian beads, but first and foremost, to feed the demand for copper from the mountains of Oman for these cities and their armies and their production.

Gosh, it's all to do with copper, isn't it?

We can see that all the way back to what we call the Ubaid period in Iraq, people trading a particular kind of pottery and volcanic obsidian glass, they were living along the shores of the Gulf Coast.

And so clearly there was contact along the water, like down the line exchange between groups.

But before that, in the time where Lloyd refers to the Gulf as a huge, fertile river valley, we don't have any physical evidence from this river valley that Lloyd refers to that existed where the Gulf is today.

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.

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.