Mesopotamia and the Gulf: The History of a Relationship

Mesopotamia and the Gulf: The History of a RelationshipAuthor(s): Harriet CrawfordSource: Iraq, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 41-46Published by: British Institute for the Study of IraqStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4200598 .

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41

MESOPOTAMIA AND THE GULF: THE HISTORY OF A RELATIONSHIP1

By HARRIET CRAWFORD

The economic relationship between Mesopotamia and the Gulf is a long one which spans millennia, rather than just a few centuries, and which took many forms. Indeed, it can be suggested that the changing nature of this relationship reflects the economic and social changes taking place in southern Iraq and of the related changes in Dilmun.2 There was an increasing demand by Mesopotamia for both raw materials and exotica from the sixth millennium, when we have the earliest evidence for a relationship, until the annexation of Dilmun by the Kassites in the mid- second millennium. This increasing demand seems to reflect the growing complexity in social organisation in the region. The emergence of an elite group within society in southern Sumer, first seen in the late Uruk phase, and then notably in the mid-third millennium when the group expanded, encouraged an increased demand for status goods and materials (Van De Mieroop 2002). Such goods are used initially to enhance the power and prestige of the group itself, both by display and by gift-giving, because gift-giving binds both men and gods, through offerings, ever more closely into the group. In Mesopotamia such exotic materials also played a role in the birth of what Baines and Yoffee have called "high culture" in these newly emergent complex societies. Baines and Yoffee define this high culture as "the production and consumption of aesthetic items under the control, and for the benefit of, the inner elite of a civilization" (Baines and Yoffee 1998: 235). High culture becomes a vital part of the identity of any civilization. Maintaining a supply of luxuries thus becomes a political necessity, rather than an indulgence, as it helps the essential identity of the group to survive.

Any visit to a museum with a display of material from Mesopotamia demonstrates clearly that many of the prestige artefacts are made of materials foreign to the region in which they were found, for Mesopotamia lacks metals and all but poor-quality stone. Many of these materials appear to have travelled via the Gulf from a variety of sources in Arabia, Iran and the Indian sub-continent to reach their final destination. These exotic materials include soft stones such as chlorite and steatite, often used for vessels and stamp seals, carnelian, agate, conch shells and at least some of the lapis lazuli prized not only for its colour, but also for its magical properties. More prosaically these imports also include commodities which Postgate has designated "semi- staples", copper, widely used by all sections of the community from the mid-third millennium onwards, possibly tin, and the large timbers which were used to roof public buildings from the same period and probably earlier (Postgate 2003: 7). Manufactured goods of foreign origin are less common, but they certainly occur and are usually, again, elite in nature. In summary we have small-volume, high-value materials and artefacts, and large-volume utilitarian goods of southern origin appearing in Mesopotamia from the end of the fourth millennium onwards. Some originated in the Gulf itself, some were shipped from further afield.

The earliest evidence we have for contact between the Gulf region and southern Mesopotamia comes from the western shores of the Gulf and dates mainly to the earlier part of the Ubaid period, specifically to the Ubaid 2/3 period, though later Ubaid material is present at a handful of sites. This relationship has been the subject of much debate between scholars, and interpretations of the archaeological remains originating in Mesopotamia have seen them variously as the product of interaction spheres between equals and as the detritus left by the earliest seafarers from Sumer on their journeys southwards (Oates et al. 1977; Masry 1997). Recent work by the British Archaeological Expedition to Kuwait at a small site known as H3 at the north end of Kuwait bay has suggested the possibility of a third interpretation. The finds from this site show that there

IThis paper is a revised version of one first given at a seminar at the Metropolitan Museum in May 2003 to mark the opening of the magnificent "Art of the First Cities" exhibition. I would like to express my warmest thanks to

Joan Aruz for inviting me to take part in the seminar. 2Dilmun is generally located first on the north-eastern sea-

board of Arabia and then on the islands of Bahrain. It later expanded to include Failaka island, off the coast of Kuwait.

Iraq LXVII/2 (2005)



42 HARRIET CRAWFORD

was a local Neolithic society well adapted to the difficult local conditions, living from a mixed economy of herding, hunting and above all fishing. It had a distinctive and sophisticated chipped- stone industry, a shell-ornament industry, and a tradition of circular stone architecture quite unlike anything further north. A coarse local pottery may have been imported from further south from a source in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. In addition, there was a small number of what might loosely be called luxury goods originating in Mesopotamia. These included both fine and coarse Ubaid pottery, with the fine wares predominating, and small articles of adornment such as little plugs and "labrets" of various materials (Carter and Crawford 2001, 2002). The evidence is, in a sense, the reverse of that found in the third and second millennia when luxuries travelled north and perishable goods apparently travelled south.

There is also evidence at H3 for the presence of boats made of reeds and coated with local bitumen which suggests that the people of the Gulf were, theoretically at least, equipped to play an active part in the contacts between the two regions, rather than the passive role suggested by Oates (Oates et al. 1977). Although people from the Gulf had the technology to allow them to travel north to acquire foreign goods, it is striking that no artefacts of indisputable Gulf origin of this period have been found in south Mesopotamia. This suggests either that no goods were in fact travelling north, or that the goods were perishable. It is possible that some of the rather limited numbers of shell beads found in Ubaid levels in Mesopotamia may have originated in the Gulf and that pearls may also have travelled north (Oates et al 1977: 233) but it should be remembered that both shell and pearls can be obtained from the rivers of Mesopotamia. If the first proposition is correct, and little or nothing was travelling north, we can suggest that the Mesopotamian pottery and trinkets at H3, and at other contemporary sites on the shore of the Eastern Province of Arabia, may have been gifts given to the local inhabitants by sailors from the north in order to establish friendly relations. They may have been exchanged for services of some sort, perhaps specifically fresh water and the right to shelter and fish in tribal waters. Such a relationship is better described as gift exchange than as commercially oriented trade. Such a mechanism would no doubt have been well established in the predominantly small-scale society which seems to have existed at this time in south Mesopotamia. It is generally accepted that Mesopotamia's diverse natural resources would have encouraged this sort of exchange of goods within the plain, between people some of whom grew grain, some of whom bred sheep, goats and cattle, and some of whom made their living fishing, and so would have been familiar to the sailors (Algaze 2001). The mechanisms described above are not, of course, mutually exclusive; several may have been in use simultaneously.

The relationship between Mesopotamia and the Gulf seems to have declined in the Ubaid 4 period and to have petered out during the Ubaid 5 period. In the succeeding Uruk period there is very little evidence for contact between the two areas, although small amounts of Uruk pottery and a clay bulla containing tokens have been found in the Eastern Province (Potts 1990: 53; Schmandt-Besserat 1992: 35), and on Bahrain a fragment of a bevelled-rim bowl was identified from a surface survey near the site of Saar (Moon, personal communication). It seems, however, that at this period the commercial energies of Mesopotamia were focused on Syria and other regions upstream from the plain. Heavy goods such as copper and timber could more easily be floated down the Euphrates to south Mesopotamia than brought up the Gulf in sailing boats against the prevailing wind. We also see the development of a range of extremely sophisticated mechanisms for facilitating this northerly trade which included the famous trading colonies, way stations, and small groups of expatriate merchants resident in foreign towns and cities (Stein 1999).

By the early third millennium there is slightly more evidence for Mesopotamian goods in the Gulf region. Although the paint does not generally survive, a few "Jemdat Nasr"-style painted pots have been identified in the collections of the Bahrain National Museum, and many more in better condition have been found in small stone-built tumuli which lie along an important route west of the al Hajar mountains (Vine 1993: 16, bottom left; Potts 1990: 74 if.). This route connects many of the ancient copper sources in the mountains of Oman to the coast, and was apparently already of considerable importance at this early date. We can only guess at how these prestige pots arrived in the graves, but it seems reasonable to infer that the trade in copper played some part in the process. There is also the well-known reference to a Dilmun axe and a Dilmun tax



MESOPOTAMIA AND THE GULF 43

collector in the archaic texts from Uruk dating to about the same time (Englund 1983). The evidence is insufficient to allow us to deduce whether the traders were people from Mesopotamia or entrepreneurs from the Gulf.

The increasingly complex society which began to re-emerge in Mesopotamia soon after the beginning of the third millennium saw the appearance of a prosperous class of professional people in addition to the group of families at the top of the social pyramid known from earlier periods. This class seems to have included priests, civil servants, merchants and master craftsmen of many kinds. As these people prospered they too apparently wished to acquire prestige materials to enhance their status. Their graves increasingly indicate that they were successful in their attempts, leading to an intensification in the demand for foreign materials (for example see Woolley 1934 for the private graves at Ur, and Breniquet 1984 for the Kish "A" cemetery). This intensification, which can be seen from the later third millennium into the third quarter of the second millennium, also had a profound effect on Dilmun, the intermediate source of most of the goods, and contributed to the emergence by the later third millennium of a complex society there too. It is not suggested that long-distance trade alone causes such developments, but it is often closely involved as one of a tightly knit web of stimuli which interact to encourage urbanism and the accompanying changes in the social hierarchy.

It is only by the middle of the third millennium that our evidence improves sufficiently in both quality and quantity to allow a more accurate interpretation of the relationship. Many of the high-value/low-bulk goods which travelled up the Gulf, such as etched carnelian beads and some of the soft-stone vessels found in Early Dynastic contexts, could also theoretically be explained as the product of gift exchange, but inscriptions are known from the reign of Ur-Nanshe of Lagash, and later from that of Lugalanda of Lagash at the end of the ED III period, which paint a different picture. They refer to building timbers from Dilmun, and to shipments of copper of up to one hundred kilograms indicating the increasing importance of copper in the economy (Potts 1990: 181 ff.). The nature of these commodities and the large quantities involved suggest that we are looking at a commercial operation. We also see changes in the status of the semi- staples, the metal and timbers, which now become essentials and are effectively reclassified as staples, thus intensifying demand. The inscriptions also point to the fact that this trade was state- sponsored, the palace putting up the necessary capital in goods for each expedition and taking most, if not all, of the goods. There is no evidence for private enterprise at this time, although we have to remember the institutional bias in the texts at our disposal. Few private houses have been excavated where the archives of businessmen might have been found.

It is still unclear what was being traded southwards, but two poorly provenanced items from the island of Tarut, apparently an important manufacturing centre for soft-stone vessels in the mid-third millennium, do appear to show Mesopotamian influence. The first is the imposing standing figure of a naked man who wears only a triple belt, clearly of Mesopotamian design, and who holds his hands clasped in front of him in a pose that again finds its closest parallels in Mesopotamia. The proportions of his head, however, and the treatment of his ears resemble those of a statue from Susa and it can be suggested that he is a local product which blends these two traditions. The second piece shows a tiny cloaked, seated figure made of lapis, and it can be related to votive figures from Mesopotamia. One side is broken away; is it perhaps half of what was originally a pair of figures such as, for example, those much larger ones in stone from Nippur and Mari? The final piece which is thought to show Mesopotamian influence is the well-known bull's head from the Barbar temple, although it also has parallels with Central Asian material (Aruz 2003: respectively Nos. 222, 223 and 206). More prosaically, buff Mesopotamian pottery from the lowest levels at the Qala'at al Bahrain forms ten per cent of the pottery corpus (H0jlund and Andersen 1994: 140 Fig. 390). Both closed and open forms are found, and this suggests that in some cases the pottery was being traded for its contents, perhaps the oils and foodstuffs mentioned in the texts, and in others for itself. Further south, at the site of Umm-an-Nar island outside the territory of Dilmun, and later at Tell Abraq on the mainland, we again find evidence for Mesopotamian pottery in what seem to have been trading entrepots as well as in the communal graves of the Umm-an-Nar period on the Arabian mainland (Potts 1990: 102 ff.).

State sponsorship of the trade continued into the early Sargonid period, if Sargon's famous



44 HARRIET CRAWFORD

inscription referring to ships from Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha gives us the whole picture (Potts 1990: 183). However, later in the Agade period, two new factors could theoretically have come into play. At least two of the Agade kings mounted raids into Magan and the "Lower Sea" in search of the black diorite which was preferred for royal statues. The arguments about the location of Magan need not concern us here, but the inscriptions serve as a useful reminder that such freebooting activities were another tried and tested way of acquiring desirable raw materials. Such methods do not seem likely to have been used in Dilmun as it had no desirable natural resources. Inscriptions from the same period also indicate the presence of a Mesopotamian merchant "colony" in the city of Susa, dealing in a wide range of goods (Foster 1993: 63). This is the first "colony" for which we have evidence since the Uruk period. Unfortunately we do not know if it was state-sponsored or the result of private enterprise, but the second cannot be ruled out, and a mixture of activities may be the reality. Once more, we have to say that there is no firm evidence for Mesopotamian merchants resident in Dilmun, but the evidence of the pottery quoted above raises the possibility that such a colony could have been present at the Qala'at in level Ila.3

Recent work by Reade and others (2001) has made a convincing case for suggesting that the dates of the Early Dynastic, Agade and Ur III periods should all be lowered by perhaps two hundred years. This would suggest that the founding of the Barbar temple and the building of City Ila at the Qala'at al Bahrain (H0jlund and Andersen 1994: 174), together with the earliest settlement at Saar (Moon et al. 1995: 155, Table 1) should now all be seen as contemporary with the late ED or Agade periods on the evidence of the limited C'4 dates available to us from Dilmun. This redating of the Mesopotamian sequence would then put City Ila into the period of the merchant colony at Susa and strengthen the possibility that such a group of expatriate traders could also have been resident in Dilmun to facilitate the exchange of goods.

By the Ur III period our documentation has again improved, due largely to the retrieval of a merchant archive from Ur,4 the main port of entry for goods from Dilmun, dating to the reign of Ibbi-Sin. This archive, together with evidence from private archives from Umma and Nippur, allows us to state with some certainty that merchants were now combining the roles of private entrepreneurs with that of state employees (Neumann 1999); some of them seem to have played a diplomatic role as well. By the time of the famous Ea-Nasir of Ur (Potts 1990: 221 ff.), in the Isin-Larsa period, it is clear that private capital was playing an important part in the Dilmun trade. By this time society in the cities of Mesopotamia had become even more diversified and the professional classes referred to above were numerous and increasingly wealthy. In addition to the merchants there were many scribes of varying levels of expertise, a large number of priests and other temple servants, such as singers and diviners, a host of civil servants, and a wide range of craftsmen. They seem, at least in the case of the merchants, to have been organised into houses or guilds of some sort with officials who acted on behalf of the whole group. The senior members of these groups were not necessarily members of the old elite, made up of the ruler and his family, but were prosperous men and women who no doubt quickly developed a taste for the elite goods which had previously been beyond their reach. This "consumerism" must have acted as a powerful spur to the increasing involvement of private capital in trading ventures like those to Dilmun, where so many luxuries could be procured in addition to the essential supplies of copper now used for a wide range of tools and weapons.

This trade is best understood for the period when it was apparently at its most active in the early second millennium as there is archaeological evidence from both Mesopotamia and the Gulf, while texts from Mesopotamia fill in some of the gaps in the archaeological data (for a summary see Potts 1990). The texts tell us that the exports traded in exchange for the goods listed above were mostly perishable: oils, foodstuffs, leather goods and textiles. It is therefore unsurprising that very few goods of Mesopotamian origin have been found in early second-millennium contexts in the Gulf, although Mesopotamian influence can be seen in the use of Mesopotamian weights, together with those of the Indus valley, and in the presence of certain Mesopotamian motifs on

3Level I seems to have been a mere village so, in spite of the presence of Mesopotamian pottery, a resident group of

merchants does not seem likely. 4For the Lu-Enlilla archive see Potts 1990: 145.



MESOPOTAMIA AND THE GULF 45

the so-called Early Dilmun seals from the Gulf. These include a god with a horned crown and, later, the bull-man with a standard (Crawford 2001). The texts also inform us about the workings of the trade and of the activities of the alik Tilmun, as the Dilmun merchants were known.

The accession of Hammurabi to the throne of Babylon saw the beginning of the end of the status of Dilmun as a vital entrepot in the copper trade from the south. As Hammurabi pushed northwards up the Euphrates, extending his control into the middle Euphrates, copper was again able to flow south from Anatolia, and for the first time we hear of copper coming in to south Mesopotamia from Cyprus in the West. Other sources for the luxuries may also have been found. Dilmun does not seem to have been able to find alternative markets and gradually ceased to be a major player on the international scene. By the middle of the second millennium, when the name again occurs in the Kassite official records, the region had been annexed to the Kassite empire, was ruled by a Mesopotamian governor and paid its taxes in foodstuffs rather than copper.

In this early relationship between Mesopotamia and the Gulf, which, as we have shown, extended over three and a half millennia, we can detect the presence of a number of different types of mechanism which may be invoked to explain the presence of foreign goods in each of the regions. These include gift exchange and both publicly and privately funded trade which may have been facilitated by the presence, from the Agade period onwards, of groups of resident merchants from Mesopotamia. These mechanisms are not mutually exclusive, and several may have been in use at any one period: gift exchange may have oiled the wheels for more commercial transactions, while diplomatic marriages at all levels of society may also have brought exotic dowries with them, creating demand. Indeed, women were, effectively, a valuable commodity. Raiding parties may also have been used to acquire less well-guarded raw materials. In the third millennium the evidence suggests that all three of these major mechanisms were employed and that their relative importance shifted from a reliance on gift exchange in the earliest contacts to a fully commercial relationship in the early second millennium, funded by both public and private capital. These changing mechanisms can in turn be seen in the context of the social changes which can be identified over the same period of time in south Mesopotamia and which, it has been suggested, had profound effects on them by fuelling demand.

Although the evidence for a causal relationship between developing social complexity and an increased demand for elite goods is strong, this demand did not itself determine the source of these items. A wide range of other factors has to be considered when trying to explain the changing pattern of Mesopotamian trade with the Gulf from the sixth to the second millennia. The direction of the prevailing winds and a high sea level may explain the initial exploration of the Gulf by people from south Mesopotamia; the decline of these contacts in the early fourth millennium may, conversely, be linked to a drop in the sea level which coincided the opening up of the Euphrates route. By the middle Uruk period "colonies" were already appearing on the middle Euphrates at places like Sheikh Hassan. This route was to remain the major artery of communication till the end of the fourth millennium, when unknown forces caused its disruption and a consequent renewal of interest in the southern sea route. The southern route in turn predominated until the time of Hammurabi in the first half of the second millennium. The Gulf trade reached its maximum volume in the Isin-Larsa phase and then began to decline for a variety of reasons: the abandonment of the cities of the Indus valley meant that goods, including copper, and lapis lazuli from Badakshan, were no longer being channelled down the Indus and up the Gulf; Hammurabi's conquest of Mari opened the Euphrates route again and allowed the entry of copper both from Anatolia and from Cyprus, while political problems in south Mesopotamia led to the destruction of Ur, the major port of entry for goods travelling up the Gulf. The combination of these factors seems to have led to the final abandonment of the route. The Gulf trade cannot be looked at in isolation. Many natural, social and political factors have to be taken into account to explain its fluctuations, but we can say that, in some sense at least, Dilmun lay at the heart of a genuine world system for more than a thousand years.

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Mesopotamia and the Gulf: The History of a Relationship