Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What ancient trade routes existed in the Persian Gulf?
It's been called the first commercial superhighway, the body of water that connected the great cities of Bronze Age Mesopotamia – Ur, Uruk and later Babylon – with faraway cultures in Oman, Arabia and the Indus River Valley some 4,000 years ago, trading goods like textiles, ceramics, carnelian and of course copper, the metal which was so vital for the Mesopotamian cities making bronze.
Here in the West, many know it as the Persian Gulf. In Arabia, it's known as the Arabian Gulf. And back in Babylonian times, they called it the Lower Sea. Whatever you call it, 4,000 years ago, just as it remains today, this gulf was a vital waterway. Another key area of the world that allowed for extensive sea trade and far-reaching connections.
another fascinating area of Bronze Age archaeology. Dotted along the Gulf were thriving ports and settlements, safe havens for boats laden with goods that could be destined either for Mesopotamia, for elsewhere along the Gulf or even for lands beyond the Strait of Hormuz.
There was even one port city so striking and so prominent that it became a place of wonder to many Mesopotamians, the city of Dilmun located on modern-day Bahrain Island.
In this episode, we are going to explore the amazing archaeology that continues to emerge at sites all across the Gulf, giving us a clearer idea of just how instrumental this highway was for trade and connections some 4,000 years ago. Welcome to the Ancients, I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the Bronze Age Gulf.
Our guests today are Dr. Stefan Lawson, Senior Curator at Al Ain Museum in Abu Dhabi and a leading expert of Bronze Age Dillman, and Dr. Lloyd Weeks, Professor of Archaeology at the University of New England. Lloyd, Stefan, it is such a pleasure to have you both on the podcast today. Thanks for having us. Yeah, it's an honour to be here. And I mean, Lloyd, you're in Australia.
Stefan, you're in Abu Dhabi, if I'm correct as well, Stefan? Yes, Abu Dhabi. And I'm here in London. So we've got three time zones doing this interview across. It's great. I don't 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.
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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Chapter 3: How did the Persian Gulf serve as a commercial superhighway?
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.
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?
Well, we have archaeology and we have ancient texts. And this area and this region is special because we have 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 trait 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 archaeology.
Just to ask you a bit more on those texts, Stefan, is it fair to say that the Babylonians and the people of these various Mesopotamian cities are 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 shaking your head side to side at the same time.
It's just an interesting source of information, just how much you have surviving relating to that trade from these texts.
Well, I should probably let Stefan answer this because he's written more directly about it. But I would say, I mean, 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?
Yeah, I agree. And I also say, Tristan, you mentioned that they were very bureaucratic, which in a sense is true. But the moment you started having tens of thousands of people living in cities, 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.
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Chapter 4: What goods were traded across the Persian Gulf in the Bronze Age?
And 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?
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.
This river valley would have probably been quite an 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 populations 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 archaeology is now under the drink, under the water, and very inaccessible.
Yeah, to think what kind of late Ice Age archaeology there could be under the Gulf, that's a really interesting thing to consider.
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Chapter 5: What archaeological evidence reveals about the city of Dilmun?
I mean, do you start seeing a bit of a societal shift? Do you start seeing the emergence of larger settlements along the Gulf?
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 develop in 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.
And do you see a richer concentration of settlements in the northern part of the Gulf, nearer the Mesopotamian cities, or in the south of the Gulf, or is it pretty much spread evenly across?
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, settlement's really limited to just a few locations.
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?
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Chapter 6: How did trade routes extend from Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley?
Lloyd, you've been listening in very intently at the last part of this chat, and I've got a couple more questions on Dilman before we go on. But I just also wanted 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 Dilman at all?
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 Dilman takes over this role as middleman and lead agent of exchange in the Gulf region.
It's interacting with Southeastern Arabia and 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.
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 Fylika, where I've looked at some of the metal artifacts from the excavations there by Stefan 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 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. Dillman is really winning the picture in terms of the textual sources, but also the archaeological evidence for this time period.
We've got to talk about copper then, come on. Stefan, at the height of Dillman, at the height of the Bronze Age, just how extensive was the copper trade that was going through the port of Bahrain, the Phylaka Island, and so on at that time?
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.
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