The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Bibby’s team unquestionably made great progress in identifying key sites on Bahrain and then further afield, notably in Qatar and off Abu Dhabi, and even some way into Saudi Arabia; but, precisely because they tried to cover so much ground, they never (to pursue the pun) dug deeply enough into the history of any of these regions. Still, the importance of Bahrain and its identity as the major centre of Dilmun became clear as more and more sites along the Arabian coast were identified. Bibby and Glob uncovered city walls and streets at Qala’at al-Bahrain (Bahrain fort) on the northern tip of Bahrain; but at Barbar a few miles away they made their most outstanding single discovery: a temple of the late third millennium BC, containing a well, for one of the secrets of Bahrain was the availability of sweet water rising, as the Sumerians would have said, from the abyss of abzu.51 The motives for creating a town on Bahrain island are thus not hard to deduce – and as well as water there were abundant supplies of fish, with 700 edible species swimming around the Gulf in modern times, so that fish remains a prominent part of the diet in the Gulf states. It was no different in the Bronze Age: 60 per cent of the bones found at Qala’at al-Bahrain were of fish, though the inhabitants ate a variety of meats as well, even including mongoose, which is not native and must have been brought from India; they also imported dairy goods and cereals from Mesopotamia, so they had quite a varied diet.52

  One day in Bahrain a workman in Bibby’s team found a distinctive round stamp seal made of soapstone and decorated with two human figures; and more seals turned up in the well of the great temple. As he smoked his pipe, Bibby wondered whether round stamp seals, thirteen of which had been found at Ur and three in Mohenjo-daro, made of steatite and even (at Ur) occasionally adorned with Indus script, might be the product of a place halfway between the two great cities, Bahrain/Dilmun, no less.53 These seals are (like Dilmun itself) intermediate between Sumerian and Indus styles, their patterns matching those of neither grand civilization, but more a mélange of the two to which some individuality had been added, as in the case of a seal showing four stylized heads of gazelles arranged in the shape of a cross – roast wild gazelle was a local delicacy, to judge from the animal bones that have been found in Bahrain. As more seals have come to light, it has been found that around one third carry signs from the Indus Valley writing system, but – before anyone jumps to the conclusion that the Dilmunites conversed in Indus-speak – the letters are combined in ways not found on inscriptions from the Indus Valley itself.54 Further weighty evidence of the Indus Valley connection came from stone globes and cubes used to weigh goods; Bibby was excited to find that these followed the Indus Valley system of weights and measures and not that of the Sumerians, but the Dilmunites also used Mesopotamian weights, which came to light later.55 This apparent confusion of weights neatly brings out the role of Dilmun as an intermediary between the cities of Sumer and those of the Indus, a place where goods were exchanged and where merchants both from Sumer, such as Ea-nasir and his agents, and from India congregated and did business together.56

  Dilmun, then, was both a town that serviced maritime trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley and the capital of a region dotted with other coastal or island settlements that must have functioned as safe harbours for shipping sailing up and down the Gulf. It was a place where merchants could hang around doing business all year round – between the months of Nissannu and Addaru, to cite again one of the Sumerian tablets. Whether its population was an ethnic mix of Indians and Sumerians or consisted to a large degree of other people is simply unknown, but it makes sense, bearing in mind the seals, to assume that there was a large Indian settlement there. Over the many centuries of its existence, this no doubt became an integral part of local society, as ‘native’ as anyone else (indeed, it is a striking feature of several of the Gulf states today that a massive proportion of the population hails from India and Pakistan). However, the political life of Dilmun cannot be grasped, beyond the sense that it was a well-ordered place. Dilmun had tax collectors, a not always welcome sign of systematic central management. Population was rising in the region as a whole, which was good for the tax collectors, but this also suggests that Dilmun acted as a magnet for settlers and stimulated production up and down the coast from Bahrain.57 Further down the coast, in Oman, society remained more obviously tribal and mobile, and settlements came and went. We should thus think of Dilmun as a small trading city with offshoots along the western coast of the Persian Gulf, as far south as Umm an-Nar, which gave access to the copper of Magan.

  Sometimes it is the tiniest and humblest archaeological discoveries that reveal the most astonishing results. This has been particularly true of evidence for the types of ships these merchants would have used. A good point to begin is the description of the boat Ziusudra or Atrahasis built during the great flood that destroyed the rest of mankind and that was described on the Sumerian and Babylonian tablets (and later in the book of Genesis). Here, as a newly discovered tablet reveals, the boat was supposedly a gigantic version of a round hide-covered boat; the hides were plastered with bitumen and animal fat on to a frame made of miles and miles of wickerwork, within which a wooden three-storey structure housed the animals and the hero and his family.58 Round, keel-less hide boats were well suited to floating downstream, with the help of a couple of large paddles, though for the return journey they would have been dismantled and carried back overland; and a massive round boat with nowhere to go could happily float in the flood waters that covered the entire world. But for journeys out into the Gulf long boats were more suitable; a steering oar could be attached, and a sail provided propulsion. As along the Tigris and Euphrates, reed boats were widely used within the Gulf. The fragments of bitumen from Kuwait mentioned earlier leave no doubt that boats constructed wholly or partially from bundles of reeds were used out at sea around 5000 BC.59 It is conceivable that masted reed boats, hugging the shore all the way, made the journey from Dilmun to Iraq and from Dilmun to the mouth of the Indus.

  Unfortunately boats made out of reeds tend to leak a good deal, even when coated with tar, but they are still used for fishing in the Gulf; and they are quite buoyant, an ancient equivalent of inflatable craft, since the hollow reeds contain so much air.60 But in Oman, at Ra’s al-Junz, the imprint of long-vanished wooden planks can be detected on pieces of bitumen dated to the second half of the third millennium BC; Ra’s al-Junz stands at the eastern tip of Oman, commanding access to the Indian Ocean, and all the evidence suggests that it was a regular port of call for ships that must often have needed repairs in mid-voyage, for its hinterland had little to offer. Moreover, cuneiform tablets mention the caulking of ships bound for Dilmun and Magan.61 This bitumen was gathered around what are now oilfields, as thick mineral deposits seeped up from below and left pools of tar on the surface of the soil. Bitumen was used for a great many tasks beyond the caulking of ships, including the sealing of earthenware pots, which by nature are very porous.62 All this serves as a reminder that it is far too easy to concentrate on the traffic in exotic goods such as carnelian and ebony, and to forget that humdrum items – bitumen, dates and fish – were most likely to be found in the cargo space of a boat sailing the Gulf in the Bronze Age, and long after. Such cargoes would have perfectly suited a reed boat able to carry a dozen people at most, with limited storage space. But there is good reason to assume that the ancestors of the dhow had already come into being; the quantities of copper being shifted from Magan towards the Sumerian cities demanded sturdy and well-defended vessels able to carry tons of metal at a time; nor would Ea-nasir and his colleagues have entrusted their shekels of silver to small, open, reed boats that could easily become the prey of pirates. These wooden ships also carried timber from Meluḫḫa and no doubt from the facing shores of Iran. Indeed, some of that wood may well have been used to build ships, as the coasts of Arabia and the marshlands of southern Iraq largely lack suitable timber.63 Craft constructed out of wood were stitched together; holes were driven through planks and the planks were
then bound together using long stretches of coir rope, made out of the husks of coconuts. Bitumen, animal fat and padding were then applied to seal the boat. This type of boat was very resilient, as the hull was quite flexible, and better suited to the open ocean than more rigid construction using a skeletal hull, which was the norm in the ancient Mediterranean.64 Sewn-plank boats would remain a feature of Indian Ocean sea traffic for millennia.

  Dilmun may not possess the grandeur of Ur or the sheer scale of Mohenjo-daro, but what has come out of the earth is extraordinary evidence for how Ur and Mohenjo-daro interacted in the centuries around 2000 BC. Copper, not gold, was the metal on which Dilmun set its trademark. With the decline of the Indus civilization early in the second millennium BC the history of this connection came to an end. Why this civilization declined has been the subject of lively debate. The traditional view that an invasion of Aryan conquerors, speaking an Indo-European language, shattered the Indus civilization is no longer widely supported. More attention is paid nowadays to the environmental changes that dried out the Indus Valley and resulted in the gradual decline of the great cities, while across the wider region something of Indus culture, even the writing system, lingered for several centuries, in some places until around 1300 BC.65 The great trade with Mesopotamia became a trickle; an occasional Indus object turns up on sites in Iraq, but routes across the sea had become less important to the inhabitants of north-west India. This did not mean the end of Dilmun, which still appeared (assuming it is the same place) in a document from eighth-century Assyria. And the history of Dilmun is also the history of the first maritime trading route along the coasts of Asia – to all intents the first trade route we know about anywhere in the world that linked two great civilizations. In later centuries, there were severe contractions and long interruptions during which trade and other contact faltered and vanished; but the history of the Indian Ocean as a great seaway began in the Persian Gulf.

  4

  The Journey to the Land of the God

  I

  One great Bronze Age civilization of the Middle East has been left out of this account so far: Egypt. The unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the early pharaohs, in around 2700 BC, resulted in the creation of a centralized, affluent society able to draw upon the rich resources in wheat and barley of the lands regularly inundated by the Nile. When we speak of the importance of water traffic in the life of Egypt, we refer inevitably, in the first place, to shipping moving up and down the Nile. The term ‘Great Green’ that appears in Egyptian texts was used vaguely, though it sometimes meant either the Mediterranean or the open sea in general, and could also be used for the Red Sea.1 In the second millennium BC much of the shipping and many of the merchants who traded with Egypt were foreigners from Syria, Cyprus or Crete. It has already been seen that there is no evidence for contact by sea between Egypt and Mesopotamia at this period, although around the time of the first dynasty in Egypt (c.3000 BC) artistic influences did reach Egypt from Mesopotamia; for instance an ivory knife now in the Louvre portrays a god in what looks very much like Sumerian garb.2 But such influences are far more likely to have trickled through overland, by way of Syria or along desert routes through what are now Jordan and the Israeli Negev, than by a sea route around the great mass of the Arabian peninsula. Still, Egypt did develop ties to the Indian Ocean in the third millennium BC; the Red Sea highway was used less intensively than the routes the Sumerians and Dilmunites created in the Gulf and beyond – perhaps, indeed, it was only used intermittently. But this highway too can be described with increasing certainty, thanks to extraordinary archaeological discoveries along the Red Sea coast, as well as one of the earliest and most engaging ancient Egyptian texts to survive.

  Before one can make sense of the Egyptian expeditions down the Red Sea, the most important products of the lands they visited need to be examined. There is a danger here of a circular argument: they went in search of incense; the ancient Egyptians’ word ‘ntyw found on inscriptions and in papyri must surely mean myrrh, because myrrh and frankincense were the most highly prized ingredients of incense in later times; therefore they visited the lands where these products could be found; which proves these lands were, variously, Eritrea, Somalia and Yemen. However, for all its logical faults, this argument points towards a central feature of the early voyages down and perhaps beyond the Red Sea: these expeditions went in search of perfumes rather than spices. The shift from a trade in perfumes and aromatics to one dominated much more by pepper and the other spices of the east became really noticeable during the Roman imperial period, when ships ranged much deeper into Indian Ocean waters; and in the meantime the trade in aromatics declined precipitously, after the suppression of pagan worship by Christian emperors deprived merchants of a market in the temples of the Middle East – though there was a partial recovery by the sixth century AD as Christian worship made increasing use of the same substances.3 But the history of the burning of incense before God or before pagan gods goes back very far in time. Pharaoh himself burned the incense called ‘ntyw before the Egyptian gods, to accompany animal sacrifices, and these ceremonies were especially lavish when a new temple was inaugurated, or when the ruler returned in triumph from war. Incense was burned during the elaborate ceremonies that sent off dead pharaohs to the Next World, and it was used extensively for embalming the dead, at which the Egyptians were the unrivalled masters.

  It would certainly be helpful to know exactly what ‘ntyw was, so as to be sure where the Egyptian Red Sea expeditions were heading. Since the way ‘ntyw was used coincides closely with the way myrrh can be used, the idea that ‘ntyw was actually some form of myrrh makes sense, though there are other gum-resins such as bdellium that could have been confused with it, and this is also true of frankincense.4 Gathering these resins takes much the same form, and the collection of frankincense was described with close attention by Pliny the Elder, a man whose obsession with scientific detail was so powerful that he lingered too long in the gas-filled air of the Bay of Naples and fell victim to the famous eruption of Vesuvius.5 One can wait for the trees to exude a greasy or sticky liquid that may later harden, and collect that; or one can make incisions in the bark of the tree out of which oil will seep; different colours and qualities of incense seep out depending on the process. Frankincense and myrrh are gum-resins that contain volatile oils – up to 17 per cent in the case of fresh myrrh. In the more benign climate of Bronze Age south Arabia and Eritrea their cultivation spread over a larger area than now, for myrrh has now become a prized rarity in Yemen, which has undergone desiccation over the centuries. Myrrh retains its perfume longer than any other aromatic, and both products have long been prized for their medical uses; myrrh is often an ingredient in high-quality toothpaste. In essence, myrrh was used for anointing, while frankincense was used for burning.6 These were not the only products that the Egyptians brought back from their expeditions, which also included gold and wild animals, dead and alive. For all of these, they turned southwards to the land of Punt, ‘the god’s land’.

  II

  Just as the Babylonians were often vague about where Dilmun, Magan and Meluḫḫa lay, the ancient Egyptians did not have a clear sense of where or what the land of Punt was. This name, which appears in all the modern literature, is a misreading of a name that generally appears in the form Pwene, and is sometimes defined as ‘the god’s land’. Punt appears to be the same place as Ophir, which is said to have been visited by the ships of King Solomon and King Hiram of Tyre in the tenth century BC. But their fleet would have sailed out of the Gulf of Aqaba more than 1,600 years after a ship named Praise-of-the-Two-Lands (Upper and Lower Egypt) was mentioned on an inscription containing part of the royal annals that has ended up in Palermo and that dates from the reign of Pharaoh Snefru, around 2600 BC. The ship was built of cedar or pine wood and apparently was involved with sixty or more other boats in a raid on the Nubians that brought back thousands of slaves and an impossible number of cattle (200,000). This ship was impres
sively large; its length was a hundred Egyptian cubits, or fifty-two metres.7 In case this is seen as another example of royal boasting, we can point to the funeral boat buried next to the Great Pyramid at Giza. This was built for Snefru’s son Khufu, or Cheops, and it lay for nearly 4,500 years in a dismantled state before it was unearthed; it is eighty-five cubits long (nearly forty-four metres), and is made of Lebanese cedar, for one of the eternal problems of Egypt has been the general lack of large quantities of good, hard wood.8 It is impossible to be sure that the defeated Nubians about whom Snefru brayed were what we would now call Nubians, that is, inhabitants of the upper reaches of the Nile to the south-east of Egypt; maybe they were other Africans, such as the ancient Libyans who lived to the west of Egypt. And maybe this was an expedition down the Nile rather than the Red Sea. Still, the Palermo Stone and the funerary barge between them show that the Egyptians could build ships with a seagoing capacity, even if many never ventured further than the Nile.