Rulers and the sea
Southern Mesopotamia lies close to the head of the Gulf, and the cities of Sumer, such as Ur and Lagash, were within reach of the sea. In the third millennium BCE, rulers organised voyages down the Gulf to obtain materials the region lacked, notably metal, stone and timber. Our knowledge comes mainly from cuneiform inscriptions and administrative tablets. These are valuable, but they were written for specific purposes, such as praising a king, and they say little about the ships or the voyage itself.
The places in the texts
Three names recur in the sources.
- Dilmun is usually identified with Bahrain and nearby areas of the eastern Arabian coast, including the island of Failaka in Kuwait. It was a trading hub rather than a producer of most of the goods it handled.
- Magan is generally identified with the Oman peninsula, a source of copper and hard stone such as diorite.
- Meluhha is most often linked with the Indus valley civilisation, though some uncertainty remains.
The identifications rely on a combination of texts and archaeology, and scholars still discuss their precise boundaries.
What the inscriptions say
Several rulers refer to such contacts in their inscriptions. Ur-Nanshe of Lagash, early in the third millennium BCE, is said in an inscription to have received timber from foreign lands, with Dilmun ships bringing wood. The inscriptions of Sargon of Akkad, who reigned in the later twenty-fourth century BCE and later, claim that ships from Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha moored at the quay of his capital, Akkad. Because later copies are the main source for these texts, and because they were written to celebrate the king, the claim is best read as a statement of prestige rather than a record of regular traffic.
A grander record comes from Gudea, a ruler of Lagash around 2100 BCE. In his inscriptions about building a temple, he describes gathering materials from distant regions, including timber and stone, and he names Magan as a source of diorite. His text is detailed, but it is a literary and religious composition, and it should not be taken as a precise account of shipping. His accounts, as well as those of Naram-Sin of Akkad, who campaigned against Magan, show that Gulf contacts could involve both trade and force.
From royal voyage to merchant trade
Early records suggest that the palace and temple organised much of the exchange. Over time, merchants took a growing share. By the early second millennium BCE, texts from Ur mention traders who travelled to Dilmun, sometimes called “Dilmun traders” (alik Tilmun in Akkadian). They are recorded as dealing in copper, with silver and textiles used to pay for it. This change from state-led expeditions to a merchant economy is a theme in the article on the Gulf copper trade.
Royal expeditions did not disappear. In later periods, the Assyrian and Babylonian rulers sought to control the Gulf, and some inscriptions boast of sea voyages. For instance, Sennacherib of Assyria in the early seventh century BCE is said to have built ships using skills of foreign shipwrights for an expedition in the Gulf region. The details are uncertain and rely on royal inscriptions, so they should be treated with care.
Ships and the voyage
The texts rarely describe the ships. Likely vessels included reed boats coated with bitumen, as described in the article on bitumen-sealed hulls, and in later periods planked boats with sewn fastenings. A voyage from southern Iraq to Dilmun could be done by coasting down the Gulf, which is shallow and has few hazards of the open-ocean kind, though storms and shoals did exist. To Magan and the Indus, the journey was longer and probably involved crossing the mouth of the Gulf and following the Iranian or Makran coast. The role of the monsoon trade winds in later Indian Ocean sailing may be relevant, but the evidence for their use in these early voyages is limited.
What came back
The goods mentioned include copper, diorite and other stones, timber, ivory, gold, carnelian, lapis lazuli and pearls. Archaeological finds back up some of this. Indus-style seals and weights have been found at Mesopotamian sites, including Ur, and Mesopotamian objects have been discovered in Bahrain and Oman. These finds suggest real contact, but they do not tell us who carried the goods or how many voyages took place.
A note on certainty
It is easy to overstate what these records show. Royal inscriptions exaggerate, tablets survive by chance, and the ships left few traces. A sober reading is that rulers were involved in organising long-distance sea contacts, that these gradually became more commercial, and that the Gulf formed a connected region long before the classical age. For the later story of the sea, see the article on the Persian Gulf and the wider ancient maritime commerce of the early civilizations.