Dr. Steffen Laursen

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.

Absolutely.

The freshwater 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.

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 3rd millennium and early 2nd millennium Dilmun 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.

Yeah, going back to the Bronze Age, 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 Phylika Island and later it conquers Bahrain also and establishes 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 Fylika, and they conquer Bahrain and establish themselves.

And obviously, they don't do that for the good fishing rights.