Dr. Steffen Laursen

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.

Yes, in some of their narratives about Dillman, it's 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 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.

And around the turn between the third and the second millennium, this Dilmun culture changes and Dilmun society from a more tribally organized society into a city-state and a kingdom.

And the kings of Dilmun take control of a small Kuwaiti island called Failaka.

And they establish a colony, they establish some temples and an industrial facility and a settlement.

And they used this colony as a bridgehead for the trade further north to the cities of Babylonia.

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 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 Fylika was a key point in that transaction.

You probably already had to change from river craft to sieve-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, a 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.