The Persian Gulf

Near the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world’s most vital commercial chokepoints, lies an ancient trade route that powered civilisation 4,000 years ago: the Persian Gulf - where goods and ideas flowed between the great cities of Mesopotamia, Arabia and beyond to the far flung cities of the Indus Valley and the Indian subcontinent. In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Steffen Laursen and Dr Lloyd Weeks to uncover the story of this Bronze Age superhighway. How did this narrow sea connect such distant civilisations? What kinds of goods travelled its waters, and who controlled these vital routes? From the thriving Bahraini port of Dilmun to the wider networks beyond the Gulf, discover how this region became a crossroads of trade, culture and power, and why it still matters so much today. MORE Ea Nasir and the World's Oldest Letters: Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000738350099 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/6a5mDAW5O22fM8sE9tkrUB?si=s47ePjKEStKiGH99gOB1nw The Romans and India: Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000668187744 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0RSacQ0ngYW2YjrE2UMeVF?si=zviaM1KtQ3WJRaP_u-DjDg Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:34Speaker 01

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one.

• 0:41Speaker 02

  And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact? Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 1:18Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 2:00Tristan Hughes?

  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

• 2:40Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 3:09Tristan Hughes?

  Our guests today are Dr Stefan Lawson, Senior Curator at Al Ain Museum in Abu Dhabi, and a leading expert of Bronze Age Dilmun, and Dr Lloyd Weeks, Professor of Archaeology at the University of New England.

• 3:29Tristan Hughes?

  Lloyd, Stefan, it is such a pleasure to have you both on the podcast today.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us. Yes, an honour to be here.

• 3:37Tristan Hughes?

  And I mean Lloyd, you're in Australia, Stefan, you're in Abu Dhabi, if I'm correct as well, Stefan?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Yes, Abu Dhabi.

• 3:43Tristan Hughes?

  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.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  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.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, people have actually been calling it the first commercial superhighway.

• 4:22Tristan Hughes?

  Really? Wow. So Stefan, did this allow the great cities of Mesopotamia, the likes of Babylon, Aruk and so on, to trade with other big civilizations beyond the end of the Gulf?

• 4:35Speaker 03

  It made the exchange of really large quantities of materials and goods possible with ship faring, where the other kinds of trade that had happened over land didn't allow these volumes to be exchanged.

• 4:49Tristan Hughes?

  And Lloyd, how far did it allow these Bronze Age powers of Mesopotamia and so on to trade? I mean, how extensive did these trade routes become?

• 4:57Speaker 04

  I think if we start in Mesopotamia, we can see trade routes extending down through the Gulf, past Bahrain and South Eastern Arabia, all the way over to South Asia, to modern day India and Pakistan. The Indus Valley civilization certainly would have been reached through the Gulf. But the Gulf would also have allowed southern Mesopotamia to reach perhaps more easily communities in South Eastern Iran as well.

• 5:19Tristan Hughes?

  And Lloyd, we've said the Bronze Age and as Stefan mentioned, this time this kind of this earliest trade superhighway. No such thing is a silly question though. When exactly are we talking about with the Bronze Age in this area of the world?

• 5:33Speaker 04

  If we're thinking about the Bronze Age in its broader sense, then we're beginning probably in the middle of the fourth millennium B.C., maybe 3,500 B.C. And we're going down for a little over 2,000 years to the end of the second millennium B.C., somewhere around about 13 or 1200 B.C.

• 5:49Tristan Hughes?

  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?

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Well, we have archaeology and we have ancient texts. And this area and this region is special because we have these, 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 trade 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.

• 6:32Tristan Hughes?

  And just to ask a bit more on those texts, Stefan, is it fair to say that the Babylonians and the people of these various Mesopotamian cities, they're quite bureaucratic, they liked recording the trade deals and the objects and, you know, the imports and the trading and so on. I mean, Lloyd, you're kind of going, you're shaking your head side to side at the same time. So, I mean, it's just an interesting source of information, just how much you have surviving relating to that trade from these texts.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  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 that I 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?

• 7:35Speaker 03

  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. It's because you had huge storerooms for recording how much packing materials you had. And then sometimes people... People come and check out some packing materials for sealing containers going to the Indus Valley or to Eastern Arabia or to ancient Dillman.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  And then we we can sort of record these things or you have a shipyard that is issuing materials for repairing a ship that's going to the Gulf. So it's more by accident and because of the need for this enormous bureaucracy that we have our information, so we have to put it together by these indirect references.

• 8:38Tristan Hughes?

  Does the information then go hand in hand with that other key source that you you've mentioned already, which is the archaeology itself, Lloyd, which is going to these sites, for instance, in Arabia or wherever, being out there in the field and getting more of a sense of what the situation was actually like for these communities that lived along the Gulf?

• 8:57Speaker 04

  Absolutely, it's part of the the joy of working in this area at this time period that you get to employ both of these sources of evidence. And when you're doing that, there's always a tension. Sometimes the sources are in clear alignment, the archaeological evidence uh kind of maps on to what we might be hearing from the textual sources. Sometimes they're not so much in alignment, we might see a lot of evidence talking to a particular kind of exchange relationship, but that's not really appearing on the ground. And certainly a lot of the materials that are being discussed in texts are what we might call invisibles in the archaeological record. They don't necessarily stick around particularly well in the ground, things like textiles, which only survive in certain kinds of burial environments. Although they seem important from the texts, when we work archaeologically,

• 9:43Speaker 04

  we're largely working in the absence of these sorts of organic remains.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can mention here that regarding textiles, we know about a city in southern Babylonia called Guaba, which means the seacoast, which probably was the most important port of trade going into Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age. It consisted of three townships and American archaeologists have calculated that approximately 10,000 people at one point were employed in the textile industry there.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  And when you place a textile industry and you you you literally bring millions of sheep there 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.

• 10:39Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, that's amazing. Everyone thinks nowadays about the copper, but there's much more than the copper and the sheet textiles. That's incredible.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  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 the sort of demand for food in the Gulf region.

• 11:12Tristan Hughes?

  Lloyd, can we get more of a sense of the nature of Bronze Age trade, the nature of Bronze Age shipping at that time? I mean, naturally, today you've got those great tankers and they're going day and night, you know, for months on end. But what should we be imagining with the shipping itself, the nature of trading itself back in the Bronze Age?

• 11:32Speaker 04

  Well, at the moment, some of those ships aren't going, which is part of the story about the Strait of Hormuz at the moment, I guess. But in the Bronze Age, certainly, I mean, we can begin very early back before the Bronze Age and start to look at some very fragmentary archaeological evidence, which tells us about the importance and the nature of ships and shipping in the Gulf, even into the Calcalithic and further back into the Neolithic periods. We find small fragments of bitumen which show impressions on them, which tell us about the nature of the craft, which were being produced at that time, made of wood and potentially of reeds as well. And we sometimes find models of ancient watercraft in various archaeological contexts, in the Gulf and in southern Mesopotamia. So already

• 12:13Speaker 04

  this maritime technology that was ratcheted up in the Bronze Age had a very long tradition in this part of the world, where local communities, Mesopotamian communities, were using transport over water for a variety of purposes, to move people and to move goods. As we move into the Bronze Age, we get the feeling that the size of the vessels, the scale and the nature of the exchange are all increasing quite dramatically. And although our archaeological evidence is still very fragmentary, it's at this this kind of juncture where we can bring in evidence from Mesopotamian texts, the ones that Stefan was talking about earlier, which tell us about the scale and nature of the ships, the so-called big ships of Magan that were sailing up and down the Gulf

• 12:56Speaker 04

  at this period. But I might throw to Stefan on that because that's really his area.

• 13:00Tristan Hughes?

  Please do. Let's do it.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, it might it might come as a surprise to many, but we actually know that in the Babylonian province, Lagash, this huge state in the late third 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 with cargo to be exchanged for luxury goods from the east like ivory and Canilian 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.

• 13:45Tristan Hughes?

  Which has all to do with copper, isn't it? Well, we'll certainly cover that more as our chat goes on. And we're going to kind of explore these various key sites, these peoples who lived along the Gulf from the northern end of the Gulf all the way towards the Strait of Hormuz, because Stefan, I know you're more of an expert on the northern part in your archaeology, and Lloyd, yourself on the south. But before we get to that, I must ask, and you did kind of touch on it briefly, the fact that there's evidence of trade, there's evidence of people using this waterway before the Bronze Age. Lloyd, you mentioned the Chalcalithic and the Neolithic at the end of the Stone Age beforehand. And is it, you raised this in an email before we got on a call, Lloyd, is it also a fact

• 14:28Tristan Hughes?

  that the Gulf wasn't actually always a Gulf?

• 14:33Speaker 04

  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 metres lower than they are now globally. What is now the

• 15:13Speaker 04

  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. And 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 this highest state maybe about 6,000 years ago, where sea levels were a couple of metres

• 15:58Speaker 04

  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.

• 16:08Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, to think what kind of late Ice Age archaeology there could be under the Gulf, that's a really interesting thing to consider. Stefan, if we briefly touch on the Stone Age, when Lloyd mentioned that, you know, the Gulf has risen by like some 6,000 years ago. In the Stone Age, should we be imagining farming communities also dotted along, not the great cities of the Bronze Age, but but communities dotted along the Gulf and and and trading or taking advantage of that route way too?

• 16:36Speaker 03

  We can see that all the way back to what we call the Ubay 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, you know, refers to the Gulf as a, as a huge fertile river valley, we don't have any physical evidence from this river valley that Lloyd refers to, uh, 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,

• 17:20Speaker 03

  probably also early evolution of, of what later became the cities and the Neolithic revolution and all these things. But we, we simply lack the evidence to say how and why.

• 17:32Tristan Hughes?

  Stefan, you're currently in Abu Dhabi and I'm doing a bit of research about this some time ago. But I must also ask about this Stone Age purling industry that might have already been there at the time before the Bronze Age and was that quite a big, well, that's probably a difficult question to ask, but there is archaeological evidence for purling from thousands of years ago in that area.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Yes, uh, you, you find pearls going back to the Neolithic, natural pearls from the different oyster species in the Gulf. And they were clearly selected and, and they were, they were perforated and worn as jewellery. But from the text, we also know of a thing called fish eyes. And it's never been proven, you know, beyond any doubt, but it's very, very likely that this thing they were trading called fish eyes were in fact the oyster pearls. And they were a coveted sort of trade good and luxury that was coming from the lands of Dillman and Magan, as they called them, in the Gulf.

• 18:30Tristan Hughes?

  So Lloyd, is it around 5,000 years ago? Is it at the beginning of the Bronze Age? I mean, do you start seeing a bit of a societal shift? Do you start seeing the emergence of larger settlements along the Gulf?

• 18:43Speaker 04

  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, urbanisation is something that didn't occur in all places of the Gulf during the Bronze Age. Some places, yes, in Dillman, um, that I'm sure Stefan will be talking about later on. But in areas where, where I've worked, mostly in South Eastern 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.

• 19:35Speaker 05

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• 20:20Speaker 05

  network, History Hit.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one. And I'm Carter Roy and this is What the Fact. Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 21:04Tristan Hughes?

  And do you see a richer concentration of settlements in the northern part of the Gulf, you know, nearer the Mesopotamian cities, or in the south of the Gulf? Or is it pretty much spread evenly across?

• 21:16Speaker 04

  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 Falica 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 South Eastern 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.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  But on the coastal fringe itself, settlements really limited to just a few locations.

• 22:06Tristan Hughes?

  Let's now explore evidence in the northern parts of the Gulf. And Stephen, 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. Stephen, we've mentioned the word a few times already, so can you please explain it to us? What is and where are we talking with this word, Dilmun?

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Dilmun is the word the ancient Mesopotamians used to describe someplace in the Gulf. And through our research over the years, it's been become clear that this place was several different things. They sometimes refer to a city called Dilmun. They sometimes refer to an island called Dilmun, and they sometimes refer to a region called Dilmun. And all of this was around ancient Bahrain, where we found the city of Dilmun, and then the coast from Bahrain all the way up to modern day Kuwait. That was what they meant by Dilmun. Dilmun was also a mystical place in their mythology. So it was a magical place of creation.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  It was a place where the ancient hero and king of Uruk, Gilgamesh, went to look for eternal life. He found it in the form of a fruit underwater, which was probably a natural pearl. But he lost it to a snake on his way back to Uruk, a bit like mortality was lost in the biblical narrative of original sin later on.

• 23:39Speaker 03

  And it was the place where the Babylonian Noah was allowed to live with his wife after saving the animals in the ark after the the Luvial flood. So in that sense, it was a an unreal mythical place. But from the textual records on trade, we can see that it was also a word and a name used for a city and a place where the Babylonians exchanged luxury goods and copper from further east. 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.

• 24:22Tristan Hughes?

  Right, so are the people of Dillman, are they very much kind of, are they renowned, or aside from this kind of mythical link as well, are they renowned by the people of Babylon Mesopotamia as, as you say, the middlemen, as, as the seafarers, as the traders, as the people who are owning the boats and are bringing all of these items to and from, you know, those ports nearer the mouth of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, for instance?

• 24:46Speaker 03

  Yes, in some of their narratives about Dillman, it's called the storeroom at the end of the cave. So that was, you know, where you could go and get all this luxury goods that the cities were craving. You could get chameleon, you could get ivory, you could get hardwood, you could get copper, you could get silver and gold. So it was, it was literally, you know, they literally used the metaphor, the storeroom.

• 25:13Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned that this main city is in Bahrain, but the Dillman, dare we say, culture, how does the name Dillman therefore also get aligned with other key trading centres further north in the Gulf? For instance, you mentioned Kuwait earlier.

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Around the turn between the third and the second millennium, this Dillman culture changes and Dillman society from a more tribally organised society into a, like a city, state and a kingdom. And the kings of Dillman take control of a small Kuwaiti island called Faleka. 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.

• 26:03Tristan Hughes?

  And how important a settlement, a trading post, does a place like Phylika Island become as the Bronze Age progresses?

• 26:12Speaker 03

  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 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 Phylika was a key point in that transaction.

• 26:47Tristan Hughes?

  Forgive me for my terrible knowledge of the Gulf's layouts, but is it almost the use of river craft to get down the Euphrates or the Tigris towards the Persian Gulf? And then going to somewhere like Phylika Island where those goods could then be transferred onto a more sea-durable vessel, something like that?

• 27:07Speaker 03

  You probably already had to change from river craft to seaworthy 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, the port town at the seacoast, that was probably where canals would lead barges with goods for repacking and then, you know, 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,

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Babylonia was controlled by what we call the Third Dynasty of Ur. And that was a huge territorial state with a enormously well-organized infrastructure. And they had these large ships, the Magalgal. And they could go as probably as far as Gujarat in India. But around 2004 B.C., the city of Ur is sacked by an attacking army from Susiana in western Iran. And this empire or this territorial state collapses.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  And with it, this trade fleet disappears. And from that time, we don't hear of ships going that far again. So probably the ships that were built after that point were smaller and had a shorter range. So they could only reach as far as Bahrain. And that's actually when we can see at the same moment that Dillman, you know, really starts to prosper. And this Dillman kingdom suddenly emerges. So they were able to control the trade suddenly and become the central middleman. But before that, people were sailing all the way.

• 29:04Tristan Hughes?

  So it's taking control of the trade themselves, which allows them to rise from being one city in Bahrain to controlling more. It almost feels like the Phoenicians, I guess, or something like that, you know, kind of creating outposts elsewhere, trade entrepôts, you know, that allow them, dare I say, too many modern terms, I know, like a monopoly, but a prime position on the trade routes, you know, of this Bronze Age superhighway at the time.

• 29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, you could say it sort of emerged as a kind of Singapore of the Bronze Age at some point there. And in part, they were, of course, they were clever, but they're, and they were able to exploit a vacuum that emerged after this collapse of the Uthri States trade empire and their trade fleet. Yeah, and we see it as a bit of a collapse in the other places, but it was probably very short-lived. And everybody adjusted to this new situation and then they, and everybody started prospering for it in their own way.

• 30:02Tristan Hughes?

  And from the archaeology of the sites, I know you've been working at both of them, Stefan, Fylaker Island and at Bahrain. What should we be imagining with these settlements in their prime? Should we be imagining bustling harbors and then lots of markets straight away? So as soon as you go through the harbour, you enter these commercial areas? Or do we get more of a sense of everyday life, of their religion? Are they giving us more of an insight into the whole culture of Dillman, not just the trading?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  I think it will be a surprise to many, but if we if we look at the city of Dilman, the site is today called Kalala Bahrein, because the Portuguese, they decided to build a huge fortification right on top of it in the 15th century. But it will be a surprise to many that this was actually a 25 hectare city with a stone-built city wall with towers going all the way around it. And when you entered the the city, you would go through large double-leaf city gates. There would be custom offices where your goods would be weighed and you would be, someone would be levy levying taxes. And when you entered the heart of the city, you would be in the palatial quarters.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  And in the palatial quarters, there is a 12-meter-wide boulevard going through the city. And on both sides of this boulevard, you have huge stone-built monumental storerooms on both sides going down this street. And this, we should probably imagine, we haven't excavated that much yet of it, but we should probably imagine a palatial institution of the size of what you see in Knossos at Crete. So around 20,000 square meter palatial quarter neighborhood. And the quality of the the masonry and everything is is completely compatible to what you see in in sort of high palatial cultures in the Mediterranean.

• 31:57Tristan Hughes?

  That's the Minoan palace, Knossos, supposedly underneath you have the labyrinth and the minotaur. But, you know, the excavations there just reveal just how complex that palace was with administrative areas, lots of different rooms, a throne room and so on. So these were kind of the beating hearts of society and administration and bureaucracy and all of that. So something similar, do you think, Stefan?

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Completely. We don't have the artistic developments with this enormous surplus going into artistry and and pottery making that you see in in Minoan Crete. But in many ways, the city is, its architecture and organization is at that level. If we then move to Philika, you asked about religion and so forth. In in, on Philika Island, we are lucky that in the Brontic colony, we have both a large and a small temple. And then at the settlement, we have a small temple, like sanctuary.

• 32:54Speaker 03

  And we have a pretty good idea that the large temple was dedicated to the god Inzak, who was the tutelary deity of Dilman, and that the small temple was dedicated to his wife or consort, Hanipa.

• 33:09Tristan Hughes?

  Is there a call of a mystery around these particular gods worshipped by the people of Dilman?

• 33:14Speaker 03

  It is shrouded in a bit of a mystery. We, we assume that, that Inzak was the god of water and we think his symbol or his sort of avatar was the date palm, but our knowledge is very limited. We know from the kings who were buried at a site called Ali in Bahrain in huge mausoleums, we know that they used the title servant of Inzak, of Agarum or Agaru. So probably the ancient Dilmanites didn't call them their own city Dilman to begin with, they called it Agaru.

• 33:48Tristan Hughes?

  Lloyd, you've been listening in very intently at the last part of this chat and I've got a couple more questions on, 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? I mean.

• 34:04Speaker 04

  Well, absolutely, because what's happening in South Eastern 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, as middleman and lead agent of exchange in the Gulf region. It's interacting with South Eastern Arabia and the sort of 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 traders heading to South Eastern Arabia to maintain this Gulf exchange system in a changed way from what it was in the third millennium. So South Eastern 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 South Eastern

• 34:49Speaker 04

  Arabia, but also some of the material as it's been exported to sites in Bahrain and also on Philika, where I've looked at some of the metal artefacts 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 South Eastern Arabian Magang copper in this period of the early second millennium B C. And that is one thing that aligns perfectly with what we know texturally about the continuation and even the expansion of the copper trade at this time. Although in the place that's producing the copper in South Eastern Arabia, finding archaeological evidence for this production is quite challenging. So Dilman is really winning the picture in terms of the textual sources,

• 35:34Speaker 04

  but also the archaeological evidence for this time period.

• 35:37Tristan Hughes?

  We've got to talk about copper then, come on. I mean, Stefan, at the height of Dilman, at the height of the Bronze Age, just how extensive was the copper trade that was going through, you know, the port of Bahrain, the Philika Island and so on at that time?

• 35:55Speaker 03

  I think we have to imagine it being very extensive. We have textual records from Ur mentioning the transshipment of up to eighteen tonnes 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. The fact that this relatively small island, the size of Jersey, could produce huge city and all these monuments. There is approximately a hundred thousand burial mounds built in this period on Bahrain Island. That just testifies to something extraordinarily happening.

• 36:39Tristan Hughes?

  I feel I have to, Stefan, I'm really sorry. I feel I have to bring up his name at this point because he is everybody's favourite copper merchant today because of the memes and everything like that and his links to Dilman. This copper merchant from Ur, Ayanatia, as Amanda Padani has said in the past, you know, he's not a king, he's not a noble, he's just a trader, but he's become more important, more famous, more legendary. There are many kings and leading figures of the Bronze Age in this area of the world, and he was a copper trader.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  Yes, he was. And we have these different documents from his. House and you know, what happens is the testimony of a dispute he had with people he was exchanging copper with. And they are complaining that he has tricked them. And from them, it's, you know, it's very relatable because we can all see that this copper trader, Iannasi. He was a, you know, he was a con man and he made someone, you know, pay good money for bad copper and he wasn't giving in. It's so relatable to us today.

• 37:40Tristan Hughes?

  And he has a link to Dilman in particular, so we can imagine this interaction, this work and play, this conning. There is a Dilman link there because that's where through most of the copper trade came at that time.

• 37:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, Iannasi's merchant title was Aliq Til Moon and that literally means he who goes to Dilman. So that was his, that was his game. He was sailing back and forth or sending his people back and forth and running this trade. So definitely the copper he was trading had come to Dilman from Southeast Arabia and then went to Ur.

• 38:16Tristan Hughes?

  And my last question on copper at that end of the Gulf. If someone mentions like copper ingots, Bronze Age, I might immediately think of the big oxhide ingots that you find from shipwrecks near Cyprus. When we're talking about the copper trade at this time, should we just be thinking of, of large copper bars? Or should we be thinking something like these bizarre oxhide ingots or some other kind of object?

• 38:38Speaker 04

  I would say in this case, no oxhide ingots in the Gulf. We wish that would be very interesting. What we've got more is what we might technically call plano-convex ingots, but regular people would call bun-shaped ingots. Maybe about ten or fifteen centimeters in diameter, flat on the top, curved at the bottom, hence the name bun-shaped. And these seem to be one of the most common forms in which copper was traded during the Bronze Age in the third and second millennium B.C. Occasionally we find larger lumps of copper that might have slightly different shapes. There's one from a site called Telebrac. From the early second millennium B.C. that's almost pyramid shaped, but mostly we're looking at bun-shaped ingots.

• 39:17Tristan Hughes?

  Stefan, it sounds really amazing how much archaeology is revealing about this, this culture so far and the tablets. But I'm presuming there's still so much more to learn about this culture, these traders and their prominence in the Bronze Age world going forward.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mentioned that we only have a small window into the city of Dilman through the archaeology and perhaps today only as much as four percent of the volume of the city has been excavated. So there is absolutely a lot more to learn.

• 39:46Tristan Hughes?

  So Lloyd, we're now going towards the southern end of the Gulf. And can you give us a picture of what we think at the moment the world of the Gulf looks like, once someone would have got past Dilman and is going towards the Strait of Hormuz?

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Well, what we see as we move into the southern Gulf is a kind of a cultural transition. So we move from the central Gulf, which is fairly culturally homogeneous in terms of its material culture, we might call this Dilman. When we get into the south, we see different kinds of assemblages of material, whether it's ceramics or metal artifacts or soft stone vessels that are distinct from those that we find in Dilman, but that are relatively homogeneous within this area of southeastern Arabia, the UAE and Oman. Typically, in the third millennium, we would call this the Ummunna culture or the Ummunna period. And as we move into the second millennium, we give it different names, the Wadi Suk period and the Late Bronze Age.

• 40:43Speaker 04

  And we see different levels of integration within this society, but it's always culturally distinct from what's happening in the central Gulf, although they're deeply interconnected.

• 40:53Tristan Hughes?

  And are these communities, when we get, you know, to southeastern Arabia area, are they defined at this time, these Bronze Age cultures, are they defined by those amazing dry stone tombs that you find in those beautiful picturesque locations? Almost looks like they're in the desert.

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Well, that's right. Some are in the desert, some are coastal, some are in different locations. But yes, there's a very long tradition of the creation of substantial stone-built burial monuments in southeastern Arabia that begins right at the start of the Bronze Age in what's called the Hafith period, maybe 5,000 or 5,200 years ago. And by the time we get into the Ummunna period, around four to four and a half thousand years ago, this tradition of tomb building has changed and transformed into one in which they build large circular stone-built tombs, collective tombs, anywhere between about five and 15 metres in diameter and several metres high, sometimes with two stories. And into these tombs went all members of the

• 41:53Speaker 04

  community. And so some of the tombs we have evidence for four, 500, even more people being buried inside in these large collective burials. And on the outside, as certainly as this technique of tomb production reaches apogee, at the end of the third millennium, we have very elaborately and smoothly carved blocks of stone of pale white stone, limestone ashlars, which create a really incredible appearance for the exterior of these tombs as well.

• 42:28Speaker 05

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• 43:18Speaker 01

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• 43:58Tristan Hughes?

  Do you get a sense that these people are just as much, it might be too difficult question to answer, but like, are just as much sea facing seafarers, traders as the people of Dillman further north? Because I must admit that the name Dillman seems to have more prominence than these cultures a bit further south.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  Well, I guess a lot of Dillman's prominence comes from the fact that it's prominent in the Mesopotamian textual sources. And you know, once we push an extra several hundred kilometres further south in the Gulf, then we're really moving to and beyond the edge of the known world for most Mesopotamians. And mentions of this part of the world are far fewer than we have for Dillman. So our picture from those textual sources is much more scant. But the archaeological evidence tells us that of course, these societies, they lived in all different parts of the environment in South Eastern Arabia, in the mountains, in the Piedmonts. But they're also very populous in coastal areas. And there were coastal settlements that we know in the Persian Gulf region and around the

• 44:58Speaker 04

  Strait of Hormuz, also in the Sea of Oman as well. So yes, coastal resources were critical to these societies. We've got evidence for lots of fishing and shellfish gathering through the Bronze Age with peaks and troughs in these kinds of practices. And this existed alongside traditional agriculture, date palm agriculture, and the raising of domesticated sheep, goat and cattle.

• 45:20Tristan Hughes?

  Go for Stefan.

• 45:21Speaker 03

  We also tend to overlook that the population in Eastern Arabia was probably many, many times larger than the population in Dillman. 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 tend to downplay, but they were on a much larger scale.

• 45:56Tristan Hughes?

  One particular site they've been working on Lloyd, near the Strait of Hormuz, which is this site of Shimal. I apologise if I've said that wrong, but can you explain to us what this site is and what we should be thinking of with this particular location?

• 46:09Speaker 04

  Okay, so Shimal is a site that's in the Emirates of Ras Al-Khamra, in the very northern part of the UAE, very close to the Strait of Hormuz, as you mentioned, near the Musandam Peninsula. And it's a Bronze Age site, which has evidence from multiple different periods, from the Ummahna period and in the second millennium from the Wadi Suk and the late Bronze Ages. And having occupation across all those periods makes it a rather rare site for that particular region. But across that time period of a thousand years or more, the nature of the evidence changes very substantially. In the Ummahna period, in the third millennium, we have a couple of very large Ummahna tombs that we know from Shimal, but we have really no idea of where people were living at that time.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  We've got no evidence for the settlement of the people who were buried in those tombs. We think that was in the area of the modern date palm gardens, which are all through the northern Emirates in this location. And the thing about date palm gardens is that the earth is constantly turned over as the gardens are renewed and the crops are renewed. And so that destroys a lot of archaeological evidence in and around date palm gardens. But this is a location where water was available, close to the surface, good fresh water for gardening, where rainfall's a bit higher than in south eastern Arabia. So it was a great place for people to live in the Ummahna period, but in the nature of their living has helped to destroy much of the evidence that they left behind in terms of settlement. So we have their tombs only.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  As we move into the second millennium at Shimal, it's famous for its huge, vast megalithic graveyard, where we have more than 100 large megalithic tombs of different designs than in the Ummahna period, usually made of cruder stone, but huge pieces of stone weighing tonnes that are used to make monuments that might be 20 or 25 metres long and used for collective burials. These are situated at the back of the plain, at the base of the mountains, away from the good agricultural land. And it seems that we have evidence for a large population in this part of the northern Emirates from these burial remains, even though we still have no evidence for settlement at this period.

• 48:16Speaker 04

  So Shimal is a real enigma in the early part of the second millennium B.C. It's clear that people are living there in large numbers during a period where population declines elsewhere. But we haven't got their settlements just their burials. And as we move from the early second millennium B.C. into the late second millennium after about fifteen hundred B.C., settlement across southeastern Arabia declines really quite dramatically. And at this time, Shimmel's burial record tails off dramatically, but all of a sudden its settlement record takes off. So we've got really good evidence for quite a substantial scale settlement at the site during the late Bronze Age. And it's one of the few sites in the region which can tell us the story of how people were adapting

• 48:57Speaker 04

  to changing environments and intercultural interactions at this time period.

• 49:03Tristan Hughes?

  Maybe changes in trade as well, because of course the word, the phrase that comes up when you get to the end of the Bronze Age, late Bronze Age, end of the second millennium B.C. is, is Bronze Age collapse?

• 49:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:13Tristan Hughes?

  As the Bronze Age nears its end, do you reckon there is a collapse in this area along the Gulf? Changes in trade and so on, what the archaeology is suggesting?

• 49:23Speaker 03

  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 Dillman. 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 Gulf trade going through Dillman after sixteen hundred. So there are many things that we need to explore further before we can say anything qualified about the Bronze Age collapse, I think.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  I would totally agree with Stephen on that one. It really is sort of a mosaic. And one thing, if we could take anything out of this discussion about collapse, is that there's no one uniform collapse which exists across this region. It just doesn't work that way, although there is climate change at certain times, which may have affected societies in different ways. They reacted, they showed resilience, they adapted in different ways. And so at a period which is regarded as one of decline in southeastern Arabia, where our number of known settlements shrinks, the size of the settlement shrinks, the evidence for international contacts is nevertheless maintained.

• 50:48Speaker 04

  In other areas like Dillman, populations seem to be growing and thriving at this period of so-called collapse. If we look across the Gulf into Iran, again, it's a picture of difference. In south-eastern Iran, which was the home of a very large and complex civilisation, which might map on to what the Mesopotamians knew as Mahashi in the third millennium, the evidence for settlement in that region after 2000 B.C. really almost disappears entirely. It's just a few sites that are left, and by 1500 B.C. we know almost nothing. But if we look in north, further north, in Fars province or in Kuzistan, we see thriving societies in this period. So there's no one picture of collapse.

• 51:27Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah. I mean, Lloyd, exactly, because I appreciate we haven't really talked about the northern side of the Gulf, Fars province, Iran and so on, so we should mention that now. A really interesting archaeological picture from there as well, that, you know, it's not just all trade was going along the south side, it was also going along the north side as well.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  Absolutely. We can see these Iranian societies as tightly integrated into the broader exchange systems of what we might call the Greater Gulf region. They're connected with south-eastern Arabia, they're connected with Dillman, they're connected with Babylonia. Absolutely. Some of that trade is overland through the Zarros and its various valleys, and some of that trade is undoubtedly through the Gulf as well. I mean, Iranian societies are also connected with South Asia and the Indus Valley, they're connected with Central Asia. So it's a very interconnected world during the Bronze Age, with ebbs and flows during different periods.

• 52:18Tristan Hughes?

  The Strait of Hormuz is very much in the news today, trade choke point, control of it, dictating trade and so on. The Strait of Hormuz back in the Bronze Age as well, is there evidence, we've mentioned Shimmol already, but is there evidence for settlement either side of it? Could there have been? You know, chances even back in the Bronze Age where settlements near the Strait of Hormuz could have commanded traffic through that important, you know, copper superhighway between the, you know, the copper of Oman and Dillman and so on and so forth.

• 52:54Speaker 04

  I don't think we have any evidence that would tell us about any settlements in and around, directly around the Strait of Hormuz that could have controlled trade through that location. I think technically that was probably beyond the capacity of any communities in that zone. And in fact, we don't know of very many coastal communities from southern Iran from the Bronze Age. Just in the last 10 years or so, excellent work by Ali Reza Kozrozadeh on Keshem Island has identified the first Bronze Age sites, settlements and burials that we know from Keshem Island. It's very large, an important island that's directly at pretty much the Strait of Hormuz on the northern side and currently owned by Iran. So a few sites are beginning to appear, but even if we move on to mainland Iran and look

• 53:37Speaker 04

  at the coastal area, it's really not much known around the Strait of Hormuz in terms of coastal sites. It's not until you get beyond that first mountain range into areas like Rudan and then further north into Giraf that you see very large and complex Bronze Age sites. But they were still engaged with the Gulf trade. They weren't just positioned directly on the Gulf.

• 53:59Speaker 03

  One perhaps should also mention that, that the geography of Iran is in a way creating a barrier in some places where the, where the mountain ridges are sort of blocking easy flow of, of people and goods. But you have a, you have islands that are perhaps part of a controlled system, like Bandabushir today had some kind of Dillman settlement on it as well. But it's been investigated more than a hundred years ago. So, so we don't know much about it, but it was probably something, it probably had parallels to what we see on Fileka Island and could have been part of this sort of tiny sea empire

• 54:42Speaker 03

  controlled from, from the city of Dillman on Bahrain Island. Another thing I, I think we should remember is that this is a very, very dry, arid region. So water and accessibility to water is, is the, above and beyond everything, the most limiting factor. And what made Bahrain Island special in the Gulf was the presence of enormous quantities of underground freshwater, spring water.

• 55:12Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 55:12Speaker 03

  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.

• 55:27Tristan Hughes?

  That access to freshwater, of course, we've been talking about the Gulf, we've been talking lots of water, but seawater, freshwater, whether you're a Stone Age person who's gone over to Malta or living in Dillman or so on, freshwater decides, you know, the lifestyle that follows. So actually, Stefan, would you say that is where we bring it back to the basics, one of the reasons why Dillman is so successful, why it grows so much, is this favorable access to freshwater on Bahrain Island?

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Absolutely. The freshwater is the foundation on which they build everything else. And the site around Shimmel that Lloyd has been investigating and talks about, it's to some extent the same situation.

• 56:07Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I think, I wouldn't call it a Dillman in miniature because I don't think the water resources are quite as strong as they are in Dillman, but we are certainly looking at an area that within South Eastern Arabia has more than the average amount of rainfall and which also, thanks to recharge of its aquifers and, and that rainfall being captured from the mountains behind Shimmel, it's got good groundwater as well. And during a time where the climate does seem to have downturned for several centuries, that additional extra advantage in rainfall and groundwater allowed populations to continue living an agricultural life in the Northern Emirates around Shimmel in ways that weren't possible further to the south, in Oman in particular, where we see quite a substantial retraction

• 56:50Speaker 04

  in settlement. And indeed, during this period, we're seeing contact being maintained between the Shimmel coast and Bahrain. We've got lots of beautiful Bahraini ceramics making their way to the Northern Emirates at this time, which tell us that contacts are still happening at this time period between these two refugia.

• 57:07Tristan Hughes?

  Well, of course, I mean, we, we see it nowadays with the Gulf and how important the Trade route it is. Of course, the Bronze Age comes to an end. But as we get to the first millennium B C, I get even later into the time of the Parthians, Persians, Sasanians and so on. Do we get a sense that the Gulf still remains incredibly important as a trade route? Between, let's say, India and Mesopotamia and so on down through those following centuries as well? Maybe the goods change, but like the importance of this waterway ensures. I'll throw it out to both of you and whoever wants to come in first, feel free.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  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 third millennium and early second 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.

• 58:24Speaker 04

  Yes, but I would say in the period immediately before then, in the Iron Age, after the end of the Bronze Age, we're looking at one of these periods where actually finding evidence for maritime exchange through the Gulf is a bit more challenging. It's not as direct and obvious as it is during, earlier during the Bronze Age. And we have to work harder to join the dots between the little bits of evidence that we have to build up a picture that exchange nevertheless continued in the Gulf at this time, albeit potentially on a smaller scale, certainly less associated with large institutions in Mesopotamian society, for example. And we're looking at real dearth of evidence in particular areas. In southeastern Arabia, it's scarce, but also in Dilmun, Stefan, I believe.

• 59:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, going back to the Bronze Age, we can, we can see this continued interest in controlling the Gulf trade. Because around fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred B.C., a, 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 Phylaca Island, and later it conquers Bahrain also, and establishes itself as a sort of local dominating power. And then later still, around fourteen hundred and fifty, a new huge territorial state called

• 59:52Speaker 03

  the Casites in Babylonia, they conquer the sealand, and they conquer Phylaca, and they conquer Bahrain and establish themselves. And obviously, they don't do that for the good fishing rights. They do it because it's worth the while to set up a governor in Dilmun for the trade.

• 1:00:12Tristan Hughes?

  Well, guys, I think we could talk about this for many, many more hours to come, various parts of this archaeology, but I think we'll have to, to leave it there. I'm glad that we've largely focused on the Bronze Age because such an amazing period, such amazing source material for the Persian Gulf. I will, of course, open the floor to you both if you have any final words you would like to leave our lovely listeners with. Lloyd, I'll open it to you first, then Stephen.

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

  Oh, I, I think we've hit some of the, the big picture items from the Bronze Age period. But of course, as you mentioned, we could dig a lot deeper into all of this material. I think there's a lot more we could explore in terms of Iran's interconnection into the Gulf system. That's a story which we only barely touched on, and I think there's very interesting materials there, as well as the picture from the Indus. It's a story that could be told in a huge amount of depth if we just had a little more time.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say the same, that, you know, if this seems like a fractured puzzle, you should just hit the books and, and try to fill the blanks because it's a fascinating region.

• 1:01:10Tristan Hughes?

  Stephen, Lloyd, this has been absolutely fantastic. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  Been great to be here, thank you.

• 1:01:17Speaker 03

  Thank you for having us.

• 1:01:22Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr. Stefan Lawson and Dr. Lloyd Weeks talking through the archaeology, the Bronze Age archaeology that you can find all along the Persian Gulf. And just how important a waterway this was for copper merchants, some good, some less good, some 4,000 years ago. Thank you so much for listening to the episode. I really do hope you enjoyed it. Now, if you have been enjoying the ancients, please make sure to follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us. You'll be doing us a big favor. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Lastly, don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including lots of ancient history and archaeology

• 1:02:07Tristan Hughes?

  documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

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