REPORT OF OLDEST BOAT HINTS AT EARLY TRADE ROUTES
Section: NEWS FOCUS

A Kuwaiti site yields 7000-year-old bitumen slabs thought to be from a
seafaring vessel; a second team reconstructs a younger ship found in Oman

LONDON— As-Sabiyah, an isolated piece of Kuwaiti desert surrounded by
mud flats, seems an unlikely place to store boats, much less sail
them. But a team of British and Kuwaiti archaeologists working there
believes that more than 7000 years ago, when the Persian Gulf lapped
nearby, workers in a small village took apart a seagoing craft made of
reeds and tar, its underside still coated with barnacles, and stored
it carefully in a stone building. Last year they uncovered those
undisturbed remains, which they say represent the world's oldest known
boat.

If their interpretation of the material is correct, the discovery
pushes back physical evidence of boats by more than 2000 years and
sheds light on what later became trading mutes linking two ancient
civilizations: those of the Indus River valley and Mesopotamia. In
particular, it offers concrete evidence to explain how pottery made in
the first cities of ancient Mesopotamia ended up at sites hundreds of
kilometers to the south on the Persian Gulf's western shores.

Next month Italian and French archaeologists hope to add another piece
to the emerging picture of how sailing developed when they finish a
controversial reconstruction of a similar vessel, found in Oman and
dating from 2400 B.C. They intend to build another version in Oman
next year and sail it to Pakistan and India. But the puzzle is
complex, warns Harvard University archaeologist Carl
Lamberg-Karlovsky. The Omani boat provides little data on how ancient
mariners mastered the Indian Ocean, he says, and the Kuwaiti boat was
built before true sea-trading networks emerged.

The highlight of the As-Sabiyah find consists of 22 slabs of bitumen,
a tarry substance used for a variety of purposes in that region. "I
got quite excited and started jumping up and down," says Robert
Carter, an archaeologist at University College London and field
director for the expedition. "The barnacles on the bitumen give us
confidence it's a seagoing craft." Rope, string, and reed-bundle
impressions left on the bitumen are thought to be materials used to
build the boat.

The age of the site is not in dispute. It was abandoned after the
Ubaid period, and calibrated carbon-14 tests put the date at 5511 B.C.
to 5324 B.C. Archaeologists working along the Euphrates River in Syria
have found similar bitumen slabs dating to 3800 B.C., along with
impressions of long-decayed reed bundles, but the slabs lack the
barnacles unique to boats used in seas and oceans.

Preliminary analyses show surprisingly advanced planning in the
gathering of the materials needed to build the Kuwaiti boat. The
bitumen came from a site nearly 100 kilometers distant. And the tarry
substance is not pure but mixed with a variety of ingredients—such as
fish oil and crushed coral—that match those used in the Oman bitumen
3000 years later. "It's a very sophisticated mixture," says Serge
Cleuziou, an archaeologist at the University of Nanterre who has
closely studied the Omani amalgam.

Few researchers have looked closely at the As-Sabiyah finds, now at
the National Museum in Kuwait City. Joan Oates, an archaeologist at
Cambridge University, U.K., who has not seen the materials, says that
the prevalence of Ubaid pottery at shore sites makes it clear "there
were boats at this time." Textual evidence is absent in this
prehistoric era, but boat models from the fifth millennium B.C. have
been found at Eridu, a site near the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers. Even so, some scholars believe that they might have been bowls
used for spinning.

Sean McGrail, a maritime archaeologist at Southampton University,
U.K., who has seen pictures of the Kuwalti material, notes that the
bitumen "is very fragmentary" and that "it's not necessarily a boat."
Then he adds, "but if it is, it will be the earliest around." The
earliest undisputed boat is from an Egyptian tomb dated around 3000
B.C., although log canoes built around 8000 B.C.-considered to be more
rafts than boats—have been found in the Netherlands and France.

Aside from pushing back the start of modern boatmaking, the Kuwaiti
find would help explain how Mesopotamian pottery reached so far south
at such an early date. The painted shards date from the Ubaid
period—6000 B.C. to 3800 B.C.—that immediately preceded the urban
explosion at Sumerian sites such as Ur and Eridu. Researchers have
assumed that the pottery came via seagoing craft owned by early
Mesopotamian merchants eager to exploit marine resources.

Carter speculates that As-Sabiyah was a peninsula to ancient times and
an obvious first port of call for boats from the Tigris-Euphrates
river system. The site likely began as a campsite and grew into a
small village of stone houses whose residents might have built or
repaired boats. Stone tools, coupled with the Ubaid pottery and
Mesopotamian-made jewelry, hint at a mixed population of Mesopotamians
and Arab Neolithic peoples, says Carter. The Arab peoples might have
been nomads—similar to the Bedouin in the region today—whereas the
Mesopotamians were farmers and town dwellers.

Oates maintains that Mesopotamian visitors to the Gulf region traded
pottery for fish and perhaps pearls on their way south as far as Qatar
and Bahrain. By the middle of the third millennium B.C., their
ancestors were exchanging copper from Oman and goods from the distant
Indus River valley.

The Omani find offers clues about the transport of goods back and
forth across the Arabian Sea, trade that began some 3000 years after
the Kuwaiti boat was built. The work, by a French-Italian team, is
based on hundreds of pieces of bitumen slabs uncovered from 1985 to
1994. Led by University of Bologna archaeologist Maurizio Tosi, the
team is also putting the finishing touches on a 14-meter-long vessel
built of bitumen and reeds that could carry nearly 8 tons of cargo.
Tosi says the boat will be ready next month, but it won't be tested in
water.

The reconstruction venture earns the ire of scholars such as McGrail.
McGrail says that there is not nearly enough evidence to justify such
an effort. He notes that a recent reconstruction of a Viking vessel
required 75% to 80% of its remains and decades of research before a
realistic replica could be made. He scoffs at the Omani attempt,
noting that it is not even certain the remains are from a boat "It's
crazy," he says. "It's almost wishful thinking." The boat remains
provide little data on the mast, keel, rudder, and sails, adds
Lamberg-Karlovsky, and the site shows no evidence of warehousing or
other obvious signs of international trade. "It's a teaser," he says.

Cleuziou, who hopes to collect enough funding for a second boat to be
built next year in Oman that would sail across the Arabian Sea to an
area near the mouth of the Indus River in Pakistan, acknowledges that
critics such as McGrail "are right to some extent." But he says that
ethnographic and textual material is available to supplement the
sparse archaeological evidence. For example, Sumerian writings refer
to ships capable of hauling 18 tons of cargo to and from Oman. And
other texts from around 2100 B.C. list specific amounts of reed
bundles, rope, mats, fish oil, and bitumen to build Oman-bound ships.
"Of course, this is not a proper reconstructed boat," he says, "since
there are many hypotheticals."

In the absence of textual evidence for sails, for instance, the team
has chosen to use reed mats instead of wool or cloth. It's also not
known what types of bitumen the Sumerians used for boatbuilding. To
fill the gaps, Franco D'Agostino, an archaeologist at the University
of Rome, earlier this year visited a small village near Basra in
southern Iraq, where bitumen is still used in boatbuilding. These
methods—dying out with the draining of the marshes by the Iraqi
government—have not been extensively studied.

Carter says he is also interested in trying to recreate the boat found
by the British and Kuwaiti team, and he hopes to do further work next
spring at As-Sabiyah. In the meantime, researchers are grateful for
what appears to be the first solid evidence that boats plied the
Persian Gulf as the great cities of Mesopotamia took shape, setting
the stage for an international trading network. "It's damn good to
have the archaeological data," ways Lamberg-Karlovsky.

 

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By Andrew Lawler