Abstract
A variety of philological and archeological evidence indicates that a vast maritime commercial network linking polities in Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf, and the Indus Valley emerged in the second half of the third millennium BCE (before the common era). Here, we propose that the climate of the western Indian Ocean during the third millennium BCE was an important but heretofore unrecognized influence on the development of this maritime exchange system. Recent reconstructions have revealed a gradual weakening of the Indian Summer Monsoon (ISM) during the past 10,000 years. However, during parts of the third and fourth millennia, the data show the trend temporarily reversed and the ISM intensified—as, crucially, did the power of eastward-blowing trade winds across the Arabian Sea and the western Indian Ocean. This intensification peaked late in the third millennium, precisely at the time when the aforementioned maritime contacts expanded dramatically. As the ISM system strengthened, so too did the associated summer westerly winds which facilitated maritime trade. We argue that this allowed polities in southern Mesopotamia, to refocus many of their resource procurement efforts from the north and northeast toward the Persian Gulf and points south and east by employing ocean-going sailboats to more efficiently import high-bulk metal ores and to export low-value, high-bulk agricultural and pastoral goods at scale for the first time in their history. We further propose that by ca. 2200 BCE, some coastal Arabian and Indus Valley participants in this trade may have used bulk imports of grain and textiles from Mesopotamia as a way to mitigate the effects of drought at that time.
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Notes
It should be noted that the brief sketch of the salient features of the Early Bronze Age trans-Arabian Sea maritime exchange system provided here is not intended to serve as a comprehensive review of the subject. We refer those readers seeking a more exhaustive treatment of the maritime network to During Caspers (1973), Lamberg-Karlovsky (1972), Ratnagar (1981), Laursen and Steinkeller (2017), and references therein.
For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that, while Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha are generally considered major players in this trading system, some scholars (e.g., Laursen and Steinkeller 2017) also include a fourth trading partner in this group – a polity known to the Mesopotamians as Marhaši, which is identified archaeologically with the Jiroft Civilization, and whose territory “roughly corresponds to the Iranian province of Kerman, in particular the Halid Rud river basin” (Laursen and Steinkeller 2017: 3). Marhaši is not discussed further in this paper as any connections it had with polities participating in the Early Bronze Age maritime network were entirely mediated via overland communications.
But see Michaux-Colombot (2018) for a dissenting view.
It is interesting to note that the timing of the annual grain harvest in Mesopotamia, which still today falls in late April and May (cf. Postgate 1992: 169), meant that the beginning of the season for eastward maritime travel across the Arabian Sea would have taken place shortly after grain stocks were replenished each year.
Under ancient Near Eastern conditions, sea transport of bulk commodities would have been roughly 4 times more efficient than river transport and roughly 8 times more efficient than overland transport using donkey caravans. For a preliminary back-of-the-envelope type quantification of the efficiencies of river and seaborne transport for bulk commodities in comparison to those inherent to overland carriage in the area, see Algaze 2018: 80–87.
Potts (2019) provides an exhaustive discussion of the pertinent zoological, documentary, and iconographic evidence for wild and domestic water buffalo in Mesopotamia.
But note, however, a single sketchily drawn Jemdet Nasr style seal of uncertain provenience but datable to the transition of the fourth and third millennia on stylistic grounds which ambiguously depicts what could well be a masted sailboat (Carter 2012: Fig. 19.3:7).
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Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge support for the first author (A.S.) from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and also funding provided by an Innovative Seed Grant from the University of Colorado-Boulder. Support provided to the second author (E.G.) for her work on the analysis by the National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral research fellowship award AGS-PRF-152465 is also thankfully acknowledged. We also thank Dr. Ian Jones for his generous assistance with the map shown in Figure 1.
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This work was supported by a 2016 Innovative Seed Grant from the University of Colorado-Boulder.
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AWS and BR wrote the first draft of the manuscript; AWS and GA dealt with most internal revising of subsequent drafts. AWS and GA oversaw the design of Fig. 1 (which was provided courtesy of Dr. Ian Jones), while ECG and BR created Fig. 2. All authors discussed the results and provided input on the manuscript.
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Schneider, A.W., Gill, E.C., Rajagopalan, B. et al. A Trade-Friendly Environment?: Newly Reconstructed Indian Summer Monsoon Wind Stress Curl Data for the Third Millennium BCE and Their Potential Implications Concerning the Development of Early Bronze Age Trans-Arabian Sea Maritime Trade. J Mari Arch 16, 395–411 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11457-021-09309-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11457-021-09309-w