Society for Arabian Studies Monographs No. 7
Series editors D. Kennet & St J. Simpson
Intercultural Relations between
South and Southwest Asia
Studies in commemoration of
E.C.L. During Caspers (1934-1996)
Edited by
Eric Olijdam
Richard H. Spoor
BAR International Series 1826
2008
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Society for Arabian Studies Monographs No. 7
Intercultural Relations between South and Southwest Asia: Studies in commemoration of E.C.L.
During Caspers (1934-1996)
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INTERCULTURAL RELATIONS BETWEEN SOUTH AND SOUTHWEST ASIA.
STUDIES IN COMMEMORATION OF E.C.L. DURING CASPERS (1934-1996)
E. Olijdam & R.H. Spoor (eds)
BAR International Series 1826 (2008): 12-18
The Indus-Mesopotamia Relationship Reconsidered
Julian Reade
Anyone wishing to investigate relations between the point. In contrast, Salonen’s compilation (1970) and Craw-
Indus and Mesopotamia in antiquity will soon be consult- ford’s presentation (1973: 233-235) of the evidence for
ing one of the many papers on this theme written by Inez fish exploitation in 3rd millennium Mesopotamia is
During Caspers and listed elsewhere in this volume. It is a echoed by recognition of the importance of fish in the
pleasure to contribute, in her memory, a paper which Indus diet (Belcher 1994). This suits the proposal that it
treats the relationship as an intensification of processes was not primarily the development of canal-systems, but
which began far back in prehistory; this is a view which the interaction of fish-eating, pastoral and palm grove/
she herself advocated. I think she would also be pleased agricultural communities which underlay the develop-
that recent work on Mesopotamian chronology supports ment of Sumerian civilisation (Reade 1997: 222-223).
the theory, maybe first proposed by Bibby (1970: 355), Aquatic resources, which were far more reliable than
that long-distance trade between the two partners was those available to inland hunter-gatherers, may have had
initiated from the Indus. Scholars besides Inez who have comparable significance in human evolution generally
contributed to the debate include Ratnagar (1981), and specifically in the emergence of civilisation in the
Chakrabarti (1990), Potts (1990), Edens (1993) and Possehl Indus, Egypt, Mexico, northeast China, and elsewhere.
(1996); they provide extensive references not repeated A poorer variant of the Gulf lifestyle is attested on the
below. Arabian Sea in Southeastern Arabia and Baluchistan,
where throughout recorded history there have been
The prehistory of the Indus-Mesopotamia relationship resilient communities exploiting marine resources. The
Greeks called them Ichthyophagoi, ‘Fish-eaters’. Strabo (15.
Because of variables in the rate of icecap melting since 2.2) described those residing along the coast of Baluchis-
the end of the last Ice Age, and the uncertainties of alluvi- tan in the 4th century B.C. as follows:
ation, subsidence, and plate tectonics, it is not yet
possible to chart the exact location of world coastlines “The country of the Fish-eaters is flat, and most of it
through the last 15,000 years (e.g. Nair & Hashimi 1988; has no trees except the palm, a type of thorn, and the
Potts 1990: 14). The overall effect was that sea-levels rose tamarisk. Water and cultivated foods are scarce. They
by something in the region of 100 m, and low-lying coasts themselves and their animals rely on rainwater and
were flooded and lost. The effect of sea-level rise on the wells. The meat smells of fish. The houses are mostly
coastline of the Indian subcontinent was locally dramatic, made of whale bones and oyster shells, with the ribs
but the situation around Arabia was on a different scale. as beams and uprights and the jaws as doorways. The
The depth of the Persian Gulf is around 30 m near the vertebrae are their mortars: they bake fish in the sun,
Strait of Hormuz, and the rest is shallower. So what is pound them, add a little flour, and make cakes. For,
now the Gulf once consisted of rivers, lagoons, marshes although there is no iron, they do have millstones,
and dry land, and the mouth of the great rivers of Iraq which is not so surprising as they can be brought
and Iran was once close to the Strait, very much further from elsewhere. How do they recut them once they
southeast than it is today [Fig. 1]. As sea-levels rose, the are worn down? With stones, they say, which they
mouth retreated north-westward, roughly to its current also use to sharpen their fire-hardened arrows and
position. In other words, Mesopotamia —if we take that spears. They do bake fish in clay containers, but
term as describing the floodplain of the Tigris and mostly eat them raw. The fish are caught with nets
Euphrates— was once 1,000 km rather than its present made of palm-bark fibre”.
2,000 km from the mouths of the Indus. The Sumerians of
southern Iraq in the 3rd millennium B.C. occupied an Fish-eaters are recorded by Classical historians from the
environment comparable in many respects with that of Red Sea eastward to India. No doubt there were many
the earlier Gulf, and many of their ancestors may have more further afield. Archaeologically they are attested by
lived much further to the south-east. midden sites, such as those in Arabia which go back to the
The wealth of the marine and deltaic environment, 5th or 6th millennium B.C. (e.g. Biagi 1994: 29); earlier
with its abundance of fish, shellfish, marine mammals remains will mostly be under the sea. The obvious
and turtles, is often neglected in the archaeological litera- hypothesis is that such people existed long beforehand,
ture, which tends to be written from an agrocentric view- probably before the Ice Ages, certainly back to the time
12
0 2000 km
Fig. 1: The western coastline of the Indian Ocean about 10,000 BC; an approximation necessarily inaccurate in detail (drawn by Ann Searight).
when the Gulf was part of Mesopotamia. 441-448; Possehl & Rissman 1992: 465-478), we may expect
Given the existence of prehistoric communities ex- to find occasional items of the material culture of Gujarat,
ploiting aquatic resources in the Gulf and the Indus delta, for instance, both south along the coast towards Kerala
and along the coast between them, we should expect and west along the coast towards Baluchistan.
some evidence for interaction. It is unlikely to be abun- This is a maritime equivalent of the local exchange
dant because all of them will have primarily relied on systems which gave fish-eaters access to the potentially
very similar marine resources, and it does not mean that more variable resources used by inland hunter-gatherers
there was necessarily any direct long-distance sea com- and farmers, people who will have welcomed marine
munication. There is no problem, however, with indirect products such as dried fish or ornamental shells in
low-level communication, movement along the shoreline exchange for whatever they had to offer themselves. The
by exchange of people and goods among neighbouring kind of indirect exchange which must have been com-
communities. There is the possibility of some degree of monplace in prehistory is well represented by a necklace,
long-distance mutual awareness, some understanding of found in a grave of the Halaf period in northern Iraq; this
the existence of strange communities and of exotic was buried before 5000 B.C. (Mallowan & Rose 1935: 97, Pl.
materials, objects, animals, plants, and ideas. So, whereas XI). The beads on it are partly made of obsidian —a vol-
the first discovery of Mesopotamian types of ‘Ubaid canic glass that had travelled a long distance overland
pottery in the northern Gulf was greeted with amaze- from Turkey— and partly of cowrie shells that had travel-
ment, recent discoveries of it in the Oman peninsula have led at least 800 km from the Gulf coast. There should be
become predictable (Potts 1990: 41, 55-58). It would not many more such examples of interaction between fish-
now be surprising to find occasional ‘Ubaid sherds on the eaters on the Indian Ocean coast and inland communities.
shores of Baluchistan. We need no longer think, as was During Caspers (1979; 1991) has already attempted to
done in the 1960s, of prehistoric predecessors of the ‘sea- demonstrate a prehistoric Indus-Mesopotamia relation-
faring merchants of Ur’ gradually venturing further and ship on art-historical grounds. The connection was also
further into unfamiliar seas, but of a long string of native recognised by Kinnier Wilson (1987), although there is no
coastal settlements, fish-eaters sometimes possessing im- need for his additional conclusion that the ‘Sumerians’
ported pottery or other items, who occupied the whole emigrated from the Indus. Sumerian itself has been
length of the Gulf and the Arabian Sea, from the Middle described as combining characteristics of several lan-
East to India. In exactly the same way, in the prehistoric guages (Høyrup 1992); this is what we might have
periods preceding the Indus Civilisation (Shaffer 1992: expected of a coastal language interacting with several
13
others inland, perhaps with Semitic, Proto-Dravidian to imagine anyway: that communities along the coasts
(Diakonoff 1992: 3), and a few more. exchanged goods with their neighbours, and that a few
goods continued to travel in ever diminishing quantity
Long-distance exchange in prehistory until a few of them reached places very far from their
points of origin. This is evidence, not that there was any
Trade or exchange over very long distances along the organised prehistoric trade though even that is not
shoreline in prehistoric periods is difficult to document. A inconceivable in some circumstances, but that, just as a
handful of examples may be adduced from the late 3rd valuable material like obsidian could travel great
and 2nd millennia B.C.; by that time there were well distances overland, and similarly things could move a
established contacts between the historical civilisations remarkably long way along the shores of Asia and Africa.
of the Indus and Mesopotamia, but these examples take
us much further afield into regions which can still be Absolute chronology: 2500-1500 B.C.
described as prehistoric. The examples are isolated and
need further support, but they give an inkling of the There are two preliminary problems involved in under-
possible scope of indirect long-distance coastal communi- standing the Indus-Mesopotamia relationship during the
cations not merely in the 3rd and 2nd millennia but much late 3rd and early 2nd millennia B.C. One is that western
further back in time (Reade 1996). scholars discovered Mesopotamia long before they dis-
covered the Indus, and research in Mesopotamia has been
1. Analysis of a bead which was excavated from a late 3rd- more intensive: people have therefore tended to look to
millennium grave at Tell Asmar in central Iraq is said to Mesopotamia first. The other problem is that, despite
demonstrate that it is made of copal, a specific tree resin repeated warnings (e.g. Reade 1979: 5-6), scholars outside
only found in East Africa (Meyer, Todd & Beck 1991). If Mesopotamia have persisted in assuming that the
this is correct, then the bead could either have travelled Mesopotamian chronology is reasonably well fixed. In
all through Africa to Egypt, and thence overland to Iraq, fact this is so only for dates back to about 1450 B.C., which
or much more naturally along the coasts of Africa and are supported by a solid interlocked framework of Meso-
Arabia, passing from hand to hand between one commu- potamian and Egyptian texts. From then on backwards
nity and another, until it reached its destination as an there are serious problems, and the widely quoted Middle
exotic material far from the sea. Chronology date of 1792-1750 B.C. for Hammurapi, the
famous king of Babylon, is almost certainly wrong.
2. Excavations at several cave sites in East Timor, dated to A majority of archaeologists attending a 1987 confer-
“the late second or first millennium B.C. onwards”, pro- ence (Aström 1989: 2) preferred the so-called Low Chro-
duced goat bones (Glover 1996: 377). This animal is not nology (i.e. Hammurapi: 1728-1686 B.C.), and almost all
indigenous to the area, far from it; it is usually thought to participants at a smaller chronology seminar at Ghent in
have been domesticated in the Middle East. The obvious 2000 were content either with the Low Chronology or
explanation is that the animals came by sea, or rather by with the latest minimalist proposal (Gasche et al. 1998),
transmission along the coast of South-East Asia, ulti- according to which Hammurapi’s dates were 1696-1654
mately from the Bay of Bengal and further west still. It is B.C., and the Ur III period lasted ca. 2018-1911 B.C. [Fig. 2].
possible that the dingo dog reached Australia by a similar The latest proposal has been supported on independent
route; mariners have often employed guard-dogs, and a grounds by Reade (2001). Even if the precise Gasche et al.
coastal midden site of the late 3rd millennium B.C. at Ra’s dates are incorrect, they cannot be raised by much more
al-Hadd in Oman has produced evidence that dogs were than half a century. Sargon of Agade, the first Meso-
sometimes eaten too (L. Martin, pers. comm.). potamian ruler to make a clear reference to Meluḫḫa —
which can hardly be anywhere other than Baluchistan or
3. Excavations at Terqa, a 2nd millennium B.C. site on the the Indus area—, now belongs around 2300 or 2250 B.C.,
middle Euphrates in Syria, were reported by Buccellati and Reade (2001) proceeds to conclude that the dates of
(cited by Reade 1986: 330) to have produced a jar contain- the Royal Tombs of Ur should also be substantially
ing carbonised clove heads. This spice, though very lowered, from the traditional ca. 2600-2500 BC down to a
extensively cultivated nowadays in several tropical areas, range around 2400 B.C. There is growing evidence for
typically Zanzibar, is thought to be native to the Moluccas Indus imports at Ur after, very approximately, 2350 B.C.,
in Indonesia. If it had spread from this area by the 2nd which suits a reference to Meluḫḫa in what is thought to
millennium, the obvious explanation would be that it had be an Early Dynastic text (Michalowski 1988), though
done so by human agency. There would then be the sug- there may well have been some earlier contact.
gestion of travel north-westward along the coasts of Meanwhile, since Braunswig’s outline of Indus chrono-
South-East Asia, across the Bay of Bengal or along its logy (1975), a broad consensus appears to have been
coast to eastern India, and so to western India and the reached on the overall timespan of the Mature Harappan
Gulf. It must be emphasised, however, that Buccellati has phase. Lal (1994: 23) opts for ca. 2600-2000 B.C. “as a rea-
still to present confirmation of the report. sonable span for the Mature (Urban) Phase .... , with a
possible but a limited extension beyond the latter date”.
At later dates long-distance peregrinations are attested Shaffer (1992: 448) opts for 2500-2000 B.C. For the latter
with ever-increasing frequency. What these examples part of the period, i.e. “the major occupational phase as
suggest, however, is that the situation in the 3rd and 2nd represented at Mohenjo-daro”, Franke-Vogt (1994: 45)
millennia was exactly as common sense would have led us suggests 2350-2000/1900 B.C. Herman (1996: 106) provides
14
Early Mesopotamian Chronologies and the Gulf Trade
Dates steady after ca. 1450 B.C., preceded by Early Kassite period of unknown length
Lowest Low Conventional selected references
Fall of Babylon 1499 1531 1595
Hammurapi 1696-1654 1728-1686 1792-1750 imports from Dilmun
Ur III dynasty 2018-1911 2048-1940 2112-2004 Magan trade secured:
imports from Meluḫḫa,
Gudea ca. 2018 ca. 2048 ca. 2112
Magan, and Dilmun
Post-Akkadian period if 40 years if 80 years
Agade kings Lowest Low Conventional
Šarkališarri 2083-2059 2113-2089 2217-2193
Naram-Sin 2120-2084 2150-2114 2254-2218 invades Magan
Maništušu 2135-2121 2165-2151 2269-2255 invades Magan?
Rimuš 2144-2136 2174-2166 2278-2270
Sargon 2200-2145 2230-2175 2334-2279 Meluḫḫa, Magan, and
Dilmun ships at Agade
End of the Early Dynastic period imports from Dilmun:
literary reference to
Ur Royal Tombs ca. 2400-2300 ca. 2600-2500 Meluḫḫa and Magan
Fig. 2: Alternative chronologies for Early Mesopotamia and the Gulf trade.
a convenient chart with similar figures, bringing the final consideration of the entire Indus-Mesopotamia relation-
phase down to 1850/1800 B.C., as seen from the perspec- ship. This paper cannot address the full range of issues
tive of Gujarat. These Indus dates mainly rely on a pleth- that deserve further thought, but some suggestions
ora of consistent radiocarbon determinations. follow.
Confrontation of this Indus chronology with the lower
Mesopotamian chronologies has a drastic effect on per- 1. Just as there is no need to look outside the Gulf for
ceptions of the Indus-Mesopotamia relationship. Possehl basic reasons underlying the development of Uruk urban
(1996: 187-188), in referring to the rapid emergence of civilisation in the 4th millennium, there is no need to
Mature Harappan, once floated the idea that “trade and look outside the Indus valley to explain the Indus civilisa-
its cultural implications offer us a convenient mechanism tion. In both instances the urban population may have
for understanding this astonishing paroxysm of change”. had very mixed origins, and there is a host of reasons
His idea depended on a chronology in which the Ur tombs including political leadership and environmental change
were dated ca. 2600-2500 B.C., so that the actual emer- which can be adduced as potentially relevant, but the
gence of Mature Harappan was concurrent with a sub- basic reason for the emergence of these cities lies in the
stantial export of Indus products through the Gulf. If the range and nature of local resources in the two river
Mesopotamian chronology is reduced by two centuries, valleys (e.g. Possehl 1996).
however, the Harappan cities existed before the trade
began. 2. Many states lay alongside the Upper Gulf. Besides lower
Mesopotamia, there was Susa and the Iranian state of
Further considerations Elam, and to the south there was Arabian Dilmun. Elabo-
rate networks of communication existed among these
The sparse but growing evidence for prehistoric areas, with trading links whose origins can be traced back
interaction along the coasts of the Arabian Sea, and the long before the Early Dynastic III period. These areas
very strong evidence that Mesopotamian chronologies were in turn linked by land to others further afield: Syria
should be substantially lowered, necessitate drastic re- and Turkey; northern Iran and Central Asia; probably
15
Yemen; and they were linked by both land and sea to the possibility is that Ur owed its political importance in this
Lower Gulf. Although there were obvious practical uses to period to wealth acquired as a result of its position as an
some of the items traded, e.g. grain, metal, timber and entrepôt on the Gulf.
bitumen, there were so many luxuries, e.g. textiles, orna-
ments, and specialised organic products, that there is no 6. Gulf trade in the Early Dynastic period must originally
prospect of reconstructing the system except in very have been in the hands of people living close to it.
broad terms. Mesopotamia was at its heart. The civilisa- Traders from Meluḫḫa, initially perhaps involved in
tions of the Indus and the Nile were geographically Magan, then came to participate, extending their
marginal. interests westward. The Indus sites of Sutkagen-dor and
Sotka-koh near the Baluchistan coast, with their obvious
3. The Indus-Mesopotamia trade developed in part parallel to Shortugai near the lapis lazuli sources of
because ships had many advantages over caravans for the Afghanistan, may be associated with this kind of enter-
long-distance transport of products that were also prise. The well-known use of the Indus weight-system in
theoretically available from alternative sources, and in Dilmun, and the Indus and Indus-derived script on some
part because, for some desirable products, there was no Gulf seals and probably on the copper stamp-seals of
readily available alternative source. Nonetheless overland Indus shape in Oman (e.g. Reade 1995), demonstrate that
caravan trade existed between east and west, both the Indus was more influential in commercial relations
through Iran and through Arabia; sea-trade through the than Mesopotamia. More and more Indus pottery is
Gulf cannot be viewed in isolation. Furthermore, the steadily being recognised at sites in Oman and the Gulf.
Indus traded not only with Mesopotamia but also with Edens (1993: 354-355) notes the degree to which Indus
southern Iran. The two areas have different histories, products were imitated in Arabia.
though often interlocked, and both have to be considered
together in assessing Indus relations with the Upper Gulf 7. Exactly when the Indus acquired this influence, and
region. whether it did so directly or through Magan, is arguable.
The Meluḫḫa trade recorded in Mesopotamian texts is
4. The Oman Peninsula and the Makran coast of Iran may unimpressive, but more must have been conducted
jointly correspond to ancient Magan; the fact that even through Dilmun and Magan. Sargon, in mentioning that
today the Musandam Peninsula of Oman is inhabited by ships travelling to or from Meluḫḫa, Magan and Dilmun
people speaking an Indo-Iranian language, whenever that docked at Agade, acknowledges the significance he
was introduced, emphasises the potential closeness of attached to such contacts. The great majority of datable
relationships between the two sides of the Gulf. Magan Indus artefacts and cultural influences in Mesopotamia,
was crucially placed at a point where the interests of the and of Mesopotamian ones in the Indus region, may be
Indus and Mesopotamia met. Archaeological finds attest ascribed to the Agade period (Possehl 1996: 147-182).
to contacts between Mesopotamia and Oman, either There is evidence for Mesopotamian imitation of Indus
direct or through Dilmun, by 3000 B.C.; there is no reason products, or vice versa, but it is not substantial. This
why there should not already have been contacts also contrasts with Edens’ observations on the extent of Indus
between Oman and coastal communities further east. The influence in Arabia.
prime reason for Magan’s importance to Mesopotamia is
probably that it supplied copper; timber, possibly from 8. Evidence for diminished contacts is intrinsically much
further east, may also have been significant. Mesopo- more evasive, although we should anyway expect irregu-
tamia continued to get copper from the Gulf until well larities and discontinuities in the processes of trans-
into the 2nd millennium B.C. Magan probably also mission. The absence of late 4th-millennium Mesopo-
supplied copper to the Indus; although the Indus had easy tamian pottery in the Gulf has been explained by Potts
access to other sources too, the availability of fuel to (1990: 62) as a result of climatic aridity and of temporarily
smelt the ore, and the expense of transporting it over lowered sea-levels, which would mean that coastal sites
long distances if smelting on site was impossible, are of the period are now under water. Some exotic varieties
among factors which would have made a range of sources of stone used in the manufacture of seals seem to have
desirable. become more scarce in Mesopotamia in the later Agade
period (Reade 1979: 25; Collon 1990: 31-32), but something
5. Archaeological remains suggest that about the second like the shortage of lapis lazuli may reflect problems
quarter of the 3rd millennium there was in Mesopotamia elsewhere. It is notable that, of some twenty-four stone
some kind of widespread problem or cultural hiatus, weights of the Mesopotamian barrel-shaped type found at
associated in legend with the ‘Flood’. At this stage there Mohenjo-daro and Harappa (During Caspers 1979: 125-
was probably a decline in contacts between Mesopotamia 126), none appear to be made of haematite; During
and the Gulf. In the course of the following Early Dynastic Caspers described them as “black slate (?) or horn-
IIIA period, however, one stage of which is attested in the blende”. While individual Mesopotamian weights are
Royal Tombs of Ur, ca. 2400-2300 B.C., large quantities of difficult to date, it is probable that haematite was the
metals and stone beads were imported, and many of the most common material used for them, as it was for
latter may have derived from the Indus. At Ur there cylinder seals (Collon 1986: 5), in the four centuries
seems to have been rapid technological advance, as following the Ur III period, i.e. ca. 1900-1500 B.C. according
craftsmen first learnt how to work gold and silver, and to the lowest chronologies. By then, on this scheme,
then how to use these materials economically. One direct Indus-Mesopotamia contacts had virtually ceased.
16
Indus Magan Dilmun Mesopota-
3100- Jamdat Nasr-
2700 Early Dynastic I
2600 Early Dynastic II
2400-
Early Dynastic III
2300
2200 End of Early Dynastic
2150-
2100 Middle Agade
2050 End of Agade
2018- Early-Middle Ur III
1930
1911 End of Ur III
1900- Isin-Larsa/Old
1650 Babylonian
Fig. 3: The evolution of commercial expeditions between the Indus and Mesopotamia: one of many possible models sug-
gesting the principal destinations of outward-bound ships.
9. Trade was liable to be disrupted by political and other (e.g. Edens 1993: 346-347), which was probably introduced
problems, such as those in Iraq at the end of the Early after ca. 1950 B.C. It is quite possible, as Braunswig (1975:
Dynastic III period which were temporarily resolved by 145) may have been the first to remark, that Gujarat
the accession of Sargon. We have no stated motive for continued to supply Dilmun traders with goods for Meso-
campaigns to Magan by two later Agade kings, but by potamia when the Indus valley cities themselves were
then, if not before, the Oman peninsula may have been being abandoned.
operating as a unified state and perhaps even attempting
to impose some form of control over the Gulf. Mesopota- All suggestions of this kind need assessment within a very
mian texts after 2000 B.C. mention objects from Meluḫḫa wide context, and it is perilous to base the reconstruction
or of Meluḫḫa types, but the trading partner recorded is of historical events on sporadic textual and archaeologi-
Magan, not Meluḫḫa itself. Several early Gulf seals were cal evidence. Potts (1993: 328) has noted the complicated
found at Mohenjo-daro and one at Chanhu-daro. One patterns of trade attested in recent times, with the early
such seal was found at Ur in an ‘early Ur III’ grave, i.e. ca. 20th century use of Indian weights in central Arabia, and
2000 B.C.; it is unclear when their production started, the surviving Mesopotamian texts may place too much
perhaps within the Agade period, and it probably stopped emphasis on large-scale enterprise, at the expense of
before the end of Ur III. small-scale initiative. Fig. 3 is offered as one possible
model for the development and evolution of trading
10. In the phase after 1900 B.C., when Mesopotamia’s Gulf patterns between the Indus, Mesopotamia, and interven-
trade is nominally only with Dilmun, there are still ing areas of Magan and Dilmun. What would be most
occasional references to goods such as precious stones informative at this stage, as long anticipated (Rao 1988), is
and ivory which are likely to have originated in India. further excavation of harbour areas, and underwater
Within Oman there was the transition from the Umm an- survey to locate some of the hundreds of sunken cargoes
Nar to the less cohesive Wadi Suq cultures; as remarked which surely lie offshore.
by Vogt (1996: 127), “It is quite possible that societal,
demographic and economic changes were so drastic that References
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