The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  Without knowledge of the winds, medieval Arabic writers insisted, a captain would prove himself ‘an ignorant and inexperienced adventurer’. From December onwards the winds come from the north and reach as far as Madagascar. By spring, vast quantities of water have been dumped on India and on the southern tip of Arabia (creating an extraordinarily fertile zone in western Oman). Even so, the changes in the winds were predictable rather than certain, and a wise captain knew that helping winds could blow earlier in the season than expected, or that the monsoons could vary in ferocity from year to year. The captain would also take into account the seasonal changes in the currents, though these were heavily influenced by the monsoon winds: in the Red Sea the summer current ran helpfully from north to south, but in winter the movement of water was more complex, and navigation along this sea, already littered with reefs, could be quite perilous; the Persian Gulf followed a similar pattern in summer but thankfully made an uncomplicated reverse in winter.6

  These characteristics of the Indian Ocean affected the movement of people and the conduct of trade to a much greater degree than one would find in the narrow space of the Mediterranean, where it was possible to challenge the winds and currents, even out of season. The monsoon cycle imposed on travellers a long stay in port as they awaited the turning of the winds. Differences in the wind direction and currents in the western and eastern sectors of the Indian Ocean meant that sea journeys generally had to be conducted in stages. This was even true in the confined space of the Red Sea, where merchants had to await suitable winds in way stations along the coast such as Bereniké and Qusayr al-Qadim, which developed into quite substantial towns servicing the trade routes in the Roman and medieval periods. It is therefore no surprise that in the medieval period, at any rate, the spice route was cut into segments and different stretches were handled by merchants and sailors of different origins – Malays, Tamils, Gujaratis, Persians, Arabs of Arabia, Jews or Copts or Arabs of Egypt. Southern India was the limit of penetration of so-called Roman merchants, that is, businessmen seeking to pipe spices and perfumes into the Mediterranean via the Red Sea. Only with the coming of the Portuguese did a sailing nation appear that sought to span all the great trade routes of this ocean, but they were as confined by the monsoon season as anyone when trading to and beyond Calicut and Goa.

  II

  The Persian or Arabian Gulf is a small area into which many contrasts have been packed: its north-eastern shore leads steeply upwards to the mountains of Persia, offering few good harbours; its south-eastern shores are dry, sandy spaces, mainly flat but afflicted by the intense heat of Arabia and the high humidity of an area close to the warm sea; its northern tip is waterlogged, filled with the silt of the Tigris and Euphrates that has carried the shoreline ever southwards and gives access to lands rich in wheat, themselves contained by desert and upland. After about 4000 BC a relatively benign phase came to an end which had seen moderate rainfall in Arabia, and increasing aridification set in – this, indeed, provided a stimulus to trade, as self-sufficiency broke down. Another major change occurred with a fall in sea levels of about two metres by around 6000 BC, so that archaeological sites that would have been originally on the shoreline now stand a little higher up, a short way inland.7 Within the Gulf, islands and peninsulas have offered stopping points for travellers, notably at Bahrain, Qatar and Umm an-Nar (near Abu Dhabi); and then, beyond the narrowing of the sea at the Strait of Hormuz, backed by the mountains of Oman, there is access to the ocean itself, and the chance to make way along the coasts of what are now Iran and Pakistan as far as the opening of other rivers: the Indus and the many river systems of north-west India. These different environments were not generally self-sufficient and depended upon exchange; date palms played a particularly important part in the networks of maritime trade that emerged as early as the sixth millennium BC.

  At this time a relatively advanced culture developed in southern Iraq that has been given the name Ubaid; by 4500 BC it came to be characterized by temples, palaces and the beginning of towns.8 The domestication of animals and the cultivation of the soil, already under way several thousand years before, produced, in several corners of Asia and the Middle East, hierarchical and increasingly sophisticated societies, the ancestors of those that would create the massive cities and spectacular artworks of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and (though rather later) the Indus Valley. It is impossible to underestimate the importance in these societies of the great rivers, not so much as means of communication, though that came later, but as sources of fresh water for agriculture. However, knowledge of Ubaid is still very fragmentary. Over so many centuries there must have been enormous transformations, and identifying them is rendered no easier by the sparse and often inconsistent dating that has been suggested by archaeologists.

  The basis of the wealth of the Ubaid culture seems to have been mastery over agricultural produce and the possession of flocks, used not just as food but as the foundation of leather and cloth industries, though inevitably the hard evidence consists mainly of Ubaid pottery, with its distinctive and often elegant linear decoration. Who controlled this proto-urban society cannot be said with any certainty; but the occasional presence of traders can be assumed with some confidence. This is because Ubaid pottery turns up regularly on sites away from southern Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in Oman and on the other side of the Gulf in Iran.9 Shards of very early Ubaid pottery, with a green tinge and purple decoration, are definitely of Mesopotamian origin. Yet other Ubaid goods, such as the typical southern Mesopotamian figurines, have not appeared on sites along the Arabian coast, leading archaeologists to conclude that the pottery fragments are evidence for occasional visits by merchants from Iraq, but not proof that a fully fledged trading network had come into existence. The people of the coast were still limited in their technology to fairly standard stone tools, and did not have the wherewithal, as far as one can tell, to launch expeditions across the water; nor were their own settlements long-lasting towns in germ, but rather villages that came and went off the map.10 As early as the late sixth millennium, dates, apparently traded, were arriving in Kuwait and on the island of Dalma off Abu Dhabi, for their carbonized remains have been identified by archaeologists; then as now the date was an everyday stand-by in the daily diet, a reliable source of energy and a quick stomach-filler.

  This was not just a simple route up and down the Gulf, linked to the settlements of Ubaid. Beads of carnelian, a semi-precious stone from Iran or Pakistan, have been found in Qatar, as also in Iraq.11 Plenty of boats were being built along the shores of the Gulf in the fifth, fourth and third millennia BC. Around 5000 BC, to judge from impressions left in fragments of bitumen found at as-Sabiyah in Kuwait, boats were constructed out of reed bundles covered with tar. There are traces of barnacles, a sign that these boats set out across saltwater.12 Further evidence survives in the form of a pottery model of a ship and a small painted disc carrying the image of a sailing vessel. Tunny-fishing was certainly one maritime activity of the inhabitants of early Bahrain, to judge from the fish bones found there by archaeologists. The finds of Ubaid pottery are neatly spread out along the Arabian coast, which suggests that boats were jumping from one waterhole to another as they wended their way down the Gulf.13

  It would be hard to insist that this water traffic had yet become the economic mainstay of Ubaid Iraq, however important it was to the developing communities of Bahrain and other Gulf stopping places. Ubaid enjoyed increasingly intense land traffic towards Syria in the west, Afghanistan in the east and central Asia in the north; southern Arabia would become more and more important in later phases, when the search for metal ores was under way. The maritime inhabitants of the Persian Gulf lagged behind Ubaid in technological sophistication, living in barasti huts made of wooden poles and palm leaves, while the Mesopotamians increasingly accustomed themselves to stone-walled houses.14 Fourth-millennium Ubaidi traders came to collect dates from the Arabian coast and delivered grain or cloth in return as well as acquiring Gulf pearl
s, in demand in the increasingly sophisticated towns of Iraq. Pearl-fishing has been a mainstay of economic life in the Gulf over many millennia, and references in the earliest cuneiform tablets from Mesopotamia to the importation of ‘fish-eyes’, meaning pearls, leads one to suspect that this trade goes back very far in time; pearls, given their organic origin, tend to survive much less well on archaeological sites than precious stones made out of minerals.

  The traders also brought down the Gulf that upmarket cutting material of volcanic origin, obsidian, which came all the way from Anatolia by way of Mesopotamia. Rather than imagining that somewhere in the Caucasus beside Lake Van a merchant had thought of sending this item to a distant village on a remote sea, we should assume that this was handed from person to person, taking many years or even generations to end up where it did.15 This may all look rather unpromising. What product or process could create firmer links between the ever more magnificent civilization of ancient Mesopotamia and a sea bordered by sand dunes and rough mountains? One answer is that those mountains contained a particular mineral much in demand in the luxurious cities of early Bronze Age Mesopotamia.

  III

  The discovery of Sumerian civilization came as a great surprise to the archaeologists who painstakingly excavated and reconstructed the cities of a much more familiar group of civilizations in Mesopotamia that were mentioned in the Bible. It was known that the early Babylonian kings, speakers of the Semitic language known as Akkadian, called themselves ‘kings of Sumer and Akkad’. But where and what was Sumer? The unearthing of the lowest levels at Ur and other cities brought, particularly to the British Museum, astonishing treasures 2,000 years older than the enormous Assyrian carvings and reliefs of around 700 BC that were also carted to London. The Assyrians and Babylonians proved to be the heirs to a very much older civilization of the third millennium BC that did not make use of a Semitic language, as they did, but that wrote in a similar cuneiform script; and this could be deciphered once the sound values of the Akkadian of Babylonia were known, as the enormously plentiful Akkadian tablets that still survive helpfully include bilingual texts and dictionaries of Sumerian.16 Sumerian literature exerted a fascination for Babylonians long after Sumer was buried beneath the rubble, rather as knowledge of ancient Rome and its language has persisted over the centuries in Europe and beyond. Sumerian myths were rewritten for Babylonian audiences, notably the series of tales about Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. Indeed, it was the Sumerians who as far as we know invented the first coherent, standardized system of writing, even if other civilizations such as that of Egypt preferred not to use the clay tablets impressed with a dense mass of often microscopic letters that came to be favoured in Mesopotamia. But these tablets make up in durability (once baked) for their apparent illegibility.

  It is extraordinary, at such a remote period in the past, that we can make use of all three building blocks out of which the early history of mankind has to be constructed, rather than just one of them: works of literature; archaeological finds; and the day-to-day documents left by business houses in the third millennium BC. Taken together, they show how the Gulf emerged as one of the great maritime thoroughfares of that millennium, and how it experienced decline. They help us understand not just the economic foundations of the first true civilization in the world, Sumer, in southern Iraq, but its connections to other great civilizations, especially that of the Indus. They provide the first glimpses of communities of merchants and their hangers-on who settled in ports en route from India to Sumer and left behind their detritus – seals, pottery, necklaces. The exotic lands of Dilmun and Meluḫḫa emerge from a fog, and with increasing confidence they can be located on the mental map of the Sumerians. But even citing these names raises problems. Like the term ‘Indies’, the names Dilmun and Meluḫḫa meant different things at different times, and the assumed location of Meluḫḫa eventually shifted from Asia to east Africa, long after the Sumerians had been conquered by the Babylonians and Assyrians. And as for Dilmun, it entered literature as a never-never land, a paradise where resided Ziusudra, known to the Babylonians as Uti-napishtim; he was the survivor of the Great Deluge that swept away the rest of mankind in a version of the story of the Flood that in many precise details, such as the sending out of birds to test the waters, anticipates the account of Noah in the book of Genesis. In the Sumerian Flood narrative, Ziusudra was sent by the gods to Dilmun, which was to be found ‘where the sun rises’, and was granted the eternal life that others, such as the hero Gilgamesh, sought but did not find. Bilgames, as the Sumerians called that hero, even sought out Ziusudra in ‘the Land of the Living’; but in the end Bilgames too was fated to follow his great friend Enkidu down into the gloomy Netherworld where disconsolate souls flitted about but there was nothing to enjoy.17

  Dilmun appears again and again in the cuneiform tablets that have been excavated in the Sumerian cities.18 The one Sumerian word to have reached modern English and many other languages is ‘abyss’, recalling the Sumerian abzu, the great freshwater deeps on which the world was said to float, with the seabed forming a barrier between saltwater and the waters of the abzu which welled up and fed the springs of life on earth. The god of the abzu was Enki, who was both the patron of the oldest of the Sumerian cities, Eridu, and a frequent visitor to Dilmun. And one can see why he would wish to go there and escape the chatter of humans, which had driven the gods to such distraction that they unleashed the flood waters on the earth, for, as one tablet proclaims:

  The land of Dilmun is holy, the land of Dilmun is pure,

  The land of Dilmun is clean, the land of Dilmun is holy …

  In Dilmun the raven utters no cry,

  The wild hen utters not the cry of the wild hen,

  The lion kills not,

  The wolf snatches not the lamb,

  Unknown is the kid-devouring wild dog,

  Unknown is the grain-devouring boar.19

  There, there is neither sickness nor old age. Indeed, such is the store of plenty that Dilmun has become the ‘house of the docks and quays of the land’, in other words a rich centre of trade.20 Dilmun slid from being an Eden on earth to a real place with ships, merchants and treasures piled up in its storehouses. The god Enki blessed Dilmun and listed the places with which it would trade in luxury products: gold from a place called Harali, lapis lazuli from Tukrish (presumably Afghanistan, the great source of the vivid blue mineral), carnelian and fine wood from Meluḫḫa, copper from Magan, ebony from the ‘Sea Land’, but also grain, sesame oil, fine garments from Ur in Mesopotamia, handled by skilled Sumerian sailors:

  May the wide sea bring you its abundance.

  The city – its dwellings are good dwellings,

  Dilmun – its dwellings are good dwellings,

  Its barley is very small barley,

  Its dates are very large dates.21

  If, as will be seen, Meluḫḫa was a major neighbouring civilization and Magan was a land rich in copper, then what was being portrayed here was a great trading city blessed by a great god that lay somewhere towards or within the Indian Ocean, an entrepôt intermediate between Sumer, Magan and Meluḫḫa; the task is to see if anything in the archaeological record proves Dilmun was not simply a fantasy of Sumerian poets.

  The clay tablets are the place to begin. Official documents – religious litanies, royal inscriptions, and so on – enumerated products such as black wood from Meluḫḫa, presumably ebony, and a table and chair from Magan, so the places mentioned by the Sumerian poets were real ones. There are several references to boats of Dilmun, Magan and Meluḫḫa; they are known to have reached Akkad in the reign of King Sargon the Great, who was probably the most dynamic ruler of Sumer and Akkad, and who lived in the twenty-third or twenty-second century BC: ‘at the wharf of Agade he made moor ships from Meluḫḫa, ships from Magan and ships from Dilmun … 5,400 soldiers ate daily in his palace’.22 This hardly comes as a surprise: supposedly the son of a gardener who became royal cupbearer and eventually usurped the throne,
Sargon, like many a usurper, assumed that magnificence and luxury would cast a veil over his controversial origins and path to power. After Sargon’s reign, there was an interruption in ties to Magan, for some mysterious reason, and one of his successors, Ur-Nammu (2112–2095 BC) displayed special pride in restoring this contact, for he had four cones made out of clay and inscribed with the same inscription in honour of the god Nanna: