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4th mill. to 2nd mill. BC
Contact between the people of southern Mesopotamia and those of the eastern Arabian coast, including Qatar, continued over centuries. During the middle of the 4th millennium the world's first walled towns were built in the fertile plain surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
By the end of the 3rd millennium Sumerian scribes began to make written records: pressing the triangular ends of reeds into clay tablets to make cuneiform letters. Around the same time lived Menes, the
| Related heritage sites |
| Al-Wsel Sheikh Faisal bin Qassim Al-Thani Museum Qatar National Museum |
Egyptian ruler who united Upper and Lower Egypt and so opened the way for the great civilisation that was to flourish for many centuries along the banks of the Nile. The link between Sumer and Egypt was almost certainly via the Gulf.
In the early 3rd millennium Sumerians settled on Tarut Island, off the Saudi coast some 100 kilometres north-west of Qatar. The earliest inscriptions mentioning 'the land of Dilmun' are understood to refer to the eastern coast including Tarut. Later, from 2450-1700 BC, Dilmun, a peaceful trading civilisation, was centred in Bahrain. Sumerian city states traded silver, textiles, oil and precious resins for building timber, stone and copper. The trade was channelled through the Gulf, and Bronze Age cultures sprang up and flourished along both coasts. Third millennium cuneiform tablets refer to Magan, centred in what is now Oman, and Meluhha in the Indo-Pakistan region.
That Qatar played its part in this complex trading network is evident from the presence of Barbar pottery, a product of the Dilmun civilisation, at two sites: a depression on Ras Abaruk peninsula, and a small island in the bay of Khor Shaqiq, near Al Dakhirah, where excavations by the Qatar Archaeology Project took place in 2000.
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