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2nd mill. to 1st mill. BC
By about 1750 BC the local societies of the Gulf had entered a period of apparent decline. Southern Mesopotamia, which had previously acquired most of its foreign materials from the east and south-east, was now reoriented towards the north and west. Kassites from the Zagros mountains had assumed power in the middle of the 2nd millennium, and Dilmun became absorbed into Kassite Babylonia. The only archaeological site in Qatar dating from
| Related heritage sites |
| Al-Wsel Sheikh Faisal bin Qassim Al-Thani Museum Qatar National Museum |
this period lies on the southern shores of the small island in the bay of Khor Shaqiq. Here, crimson and scarlet dyes were being produced from a species of murex, a marine snail. Elsewhere, the dye is known as 'Tyrian purple' owing to its large-scale production at the great city of Tyre in the Levant, and Khor Island is the first such site to have been discovered in the Gulf. The middens of crushed shells contain the remains of 3,000,000 snails. Quantities of coarse Kassite pottery was found, the remains of large vats used in the dye production. Scarlet and purple-dyed cloth was much in use in Kassite and post-Kassite Babylonia, its use was controlled directly by the ruler and was confined to immediate members of the royal family and to powerful religious figures. Khor Island provides the first evidence that this dye did not come exclusively from the west.
No evidence of Iron Age settlement has yet been found in Qatar, although elsewhere in eastern Arabia Iron Age villages have been uncovered, whose inhabitants were cultivating dates and cereals. Camels had been domesticated, first as milk animals and some time later as beasts of burden, as early as the 3rd millennium, and it may be that some of the inhabitants of Qatar had by this time become nomadic pastoralists, herding not only camels but also sheep and goats.
The climate was now much drier than in the Neolithic period.
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