The early civilizations situated along the Arabian Gulf created an integrated world in which not only did commodities, goods, religious and social ideas, and languages circulate, but there also emerged a vast network of visual culture, scientific knowledge about monsoon and navigation, and technical knowledge about ship building and commerce, that cultures all across the ocean shared in common.
In this short paper, I aim to study the Arabian Gulf’s first signs of dhow culture within the framework of visual maritime culture and artifacts. By doing so, it offers new perspectives to study the maritime culture of Indian Ocean world both as a commercial exchange and concomitant cultural interactions that support an early ‘artistic’ development. Essentially, I am trying to answer the following question: Does dhow culture exist? And if it does, what are the earliest visual traces of it?
Although the paper is based almost entirely on published sources well-known to scholars, it questions some of the major interpretations and established views on some of the artefacts presented in the books. The paper consists of three parts: the first part delivers the context in which I examine the visual maritime culture of the Bronze Age (3200-1200 BCE) and the Iron Age (1200-300 BCE). The second part outlines a selection of key artefacts, with their interpretations involved in the study of the visual maritime culture. The third part presents, based on the previous selection of artefacts, a debate between the notion of work of art or craftsmanship and how they reflect an early dhow culture.
FIG 1 . Clay model from a grave at Eridu; early fifth millennium BC.
Context
The Indian Ocean Trade has been a key factor in cultural exchanges throughout history. Ships, boats and other vessels, and the travelling facilitated by them, made it a vibrant zone of interaction between civilizations, cultures, and people, stretching from the Tigris and Eufrates and Arabian Gulf all the way to South-East Asia. The Arabian Peninsula is strategically placed at the very center of this network every conceivable route along the Indian Ocean region has seen it as a destination inevitably linked to sailors from the Iron Age (McGrail).
The Indian Ocean has a much longer antiquity of sustained seafaring compared to Atlantic and Pacific Oceans the beginnings of which go back over 5,000 years to the earliest civilizations of mankind the Mesopotamian and the Indus Valley thriving along the river Indus and its tributaries. None of the littoral polities or large continental empires ever exerted any degree of control over the sea or tried to monopolize the maritime trade. Therefore, the visual culture that developed preserved its diversity (Kearney). According to historians, there was an extensive maritime trade network operating between the Harappan and Mesopotamian civilizations as early as the middle Harappan Phase (2600-1900 BCE), with much commerce being handled by "middlemen merchants from Dilmun", which is modern Bahrain and Failaka (Neyland).
Representations of vessels are the only evidence available in earliest times. Furthermore, sailing and rigging rarely survive to be excavated, but they are sometimes depicted on stone carvings, engravings on seals, and pottery decorations. Such representations can therefore be valuable.
In Sean’s McGrail Boats of the World, there is an extensive collection of vessels, from as early as the fifth millennium BC. Different types of vessels were used for different activities, such as fishing, trading, raiding. However, I will be focusing on their symbolic and aesthetic characteristics. The earliest depictions of boats might be the clay models of the Ubaid period, dated to early fifth millennium BC. These models certainly represent some form of water transport. In the same book, we can find a clay model of a boat from Eridu (figure 1). However, the model raises issues about modern-day interpretation. The bow and stern need to be identified, as well as the scale of the ship. These earlier models are stylized and more difficult to interpret. They are usually a representation created by someone from a distinct culture, working through specific artistic conventions, who may have a limited knowledge of nautical and technical matters.
FIG 2. Decorated Ubaid pottery from the fifth millennium BCE was used domestically as
drinking and serving vessels in Mesopotamia. Similar pottery was traded from
Mesopotamia into the western Gulf . Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY, ART203237
A second eloquent artefact is the Ubaid pottery that was used to contain the goods on the vessels, depicted in figure 2 (McGrail). The simple designs and richly resonant shapes raise questions about the way visual culture and craftsmanship was transported along the Gulf. If, say, a culture encountered the Ubaid pottery during trade, there are high chances there would be a cultural exchange in which the culture borrows either the technique, decorations or shape of the pottery.
FIG 3. Set of standardized graduated weights, each cut from a different stone, comes
from Harappa. Copyright 1996–2008, J. M. Kenoyer/Harappa.com , courtesy Department of Archaeology and Museums, Government of Pakistan
Often, maritime material culture without context can be seen as art. Looking at figure 3, the following range of cubes sculpted from precious stone are a great example. The origin and use of these smooth, minimalist sculptures change their whole interpretation. It is a set of standardized graduated weights, each cut from a different stone, coming from Harappa, one of the core regions of the Indus Valley Civilization (Kerney). They were used in trade and might have been at the board of the vessels heading to the Ocean, on the Indus river. Such weights were also adopted for trade in the ancient Gulf. (McGrail)
FIG 4 . Engraving on a cylinder seal from Tell Billa near Nineveh, 3200 BC. (Staatliche Museum Berlin)
From c. 3200 BC, there are accurate depictions of the maritime trade in Nineveh, an Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia. The capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, it was located on the eastern bank of the Tigris river. In figure 4, the engraving of a dhow on a cylinder seal from Tell Billa near Nineveh, dating from this period, marks the existence of a visual culture among the maritime trade (McGrail). Stunning, compelling and interesting, the artifact has an astonishing beauty. Despite the boat’s and sailors’ unpretentious depiction, they reveal, within their limits, no little imagination.
FIG 5. A float raft under oars being guided by a man using a hide float. From the palace of Sennacherib, c 700 BC.
Probably the most impressive 2D representation of the early dhow culture is the reliefs from the palace of Sennacherib, 2500 years later. The palace is adorned with reliefs depicting both land and water transport (McGrail). In figure 5, the float raft is being guided by a man. It is a luscious composition with linear geometric figures, and what appear to be stylized fish. There is also an extraordinary pile of colossal bull statues on-board, showing the efficiency of water transport - most of the reliefs in the palace have the transport of the bull statues as a central theme; the piece is luxuriant in its subject.
From an esthetic point of view, all these artefacts excel as compositions, color schemes and formal considerations and structures. They give clues about an emerging Indian Ocean community which goes far back, a few millennia before. However, I selected these particular objects because they raise questions about the nature of an artifact. The product of skill and craftsmanship, an artifact is different from a work of art, which is invested with an emotional, philosophical, spiritual or esthetic quality that reaches beyond (Wieand.) Perhaps it holds a special element that elevates it from the realm of workmanship to a more-significant level.
However, at the time they were made, especially the palace reliefs, the Ubaid boat model, and the dhow visual representation, a deeper understanding of craftsmanship was necessary to execute these pieces. They were not out of practical use, like the beautiful weight set or the Ubaid pottery. They serve no purpose, other than to represent the human accomplishments at that time, the innovation of water transport, and the maritime culture which was rapidly developing. Regarding all the artefacts I discussed, they cannot be judged for the philosophical or spiritual importance they had for the peoples who created them; in fact, although the representations are highly symbolic, today we know little of the symbols and therefore cannot attest their true value. They may be culturally specific and, in all cases,, they reflect human agency and an emerging cultural exchange embedded in the sea trade, and therefore, a ‘dhow culture’.
Highlighting material culture as artefact helps to maintain a connection with its original archaeological context and in turn should contribute to a wider understanding of the issues of illicit antiquities, as seen in all the cases discussed earlier. Oceans and rivers are the underlying fabric that bind all our lands. They are our conveyor belts connecting civilizations and charting the course of human progress since ancient times, especially the Arabian Gulf. Therefore, the Gulf holds some of the most intriguing tales of wars and voyages and conquests that have defined our world in the Iron and Bronze Age, and, nevertheless, might be the origin of a dhow culture.