Dr. Steffen Laursen

Absolutely.

I mentioned that we only have a small window into the city of Dillman through the archaeology, and perhaps today only as much as 4% of the volume of the city has been excavated.

So there is absolutely a lot more to learn.

We also tend to overlook that the population in Eastern Arabia was probably many, many times larger than the population in Dilmun.

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 tended to downplay, but they were on a much larger scale.

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 Dilmun.

And we see a new city wall also.

So something has happened, but exactly what happens is unclear.

We also don't know much about the golf trade going through Dillman after 1600.

So there are many things that we need to explore further before we can say anything qualified about the Bronze Age collapse, I think.

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 Bandar Bashir today had some kind of Dilmun settlement on it as well.

But it's been investigated more than 100 years ago, so we don't know much about it.

But it probably had parallels to what we see on Fylika Island and could have been part of this sort of tiny sea empire controlled from the city of Dilmun 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.