Anyone who investigates an artefact from ancient Egypt will soon discover a human dimension; the fingerprint of a potter impressed on a bowl, or a correction made by an accountant on a sheet of papyrus. It is exciting to discover that people who lived millennia ago seem to have been like ‘us’. Yet the funerary beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, the gigantic pyramids of Giza, and the god-like pharaohs remain enigmatic, and it is the recognition that people imagined the world differently in the past that fascinates most people today. This book explores the gulf between pots and pyramids, between shared human experience and what sets Egypt apart from other societies.

In 1946, the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy (1900–1989) designed a new village for the inhabitants of Qurna, just a few kilometres to the west of their old village on the West Bank at Thebes. New Qurna, later renamed Fathy Village, was a state initiative for the protection of ancient Egyptian rock tombs, upon which the villagers had built their homes. Most of the villagers resisted having to leave, and the project came to an end uncompleted in 1952. Fifty years later, after violent conflicts including about landholding rights, the villagers were eventually resettled. New Qurna was an innovative project insofar as it employed traditional building technology. For instance, Fathy built the houses from sun-dried mud bricks instead of fired bricks or concrete. The bricks were locally available, comparatively cheap, and were proven to maintain a good climate in a house throughout the year. Fathy became known worldwide for his ‛architecture for the poor’.

The Portuguese came to power in the Gulf in part by exploiting the rivalries within the politics of Hormuz, particularly those between Arabs and Persians and kings and their viziers. They made Hormuz’s ruler into their vassal, and then gradually took more and more direct control of Hormuz’s government operations, though they seldom became involved further up the Gulf. Their presence reoriented the trade of some products towards Western Europe. The society and culture of the Gulf changed little, however, nor did most of the economic activity. The Gulf traders would even rally behind the Portuguese when their management of commercial life was seen as better than that of the Safavids, a dynasty which began ruling Iran at the same time. In this way, despite this book ending at a conventional delineation of what is “medieval,” that delineation is itself in many respects artificial.

The medieval history of the Gulf is important to the history of the medieval Middle East more generally. Particularly during the earlier centuries, its ports were among the largest cities in the region, a fact that is obscured by the fact they usually lasted for only short periods and so did not produce the sorts of texts produced for local pride that exist as pri mary source material for other areas. Yet Baghdad, Aleppo, and other centres would not have the culture they did if not for the Gulf. Many goods traded through the Indian Ocean network came to play an important role in elite and even non-elite culture throughout the region. The web of people, places, and practices through which they entered the region matters to understanding the formation of the whole culture.

Furthermore, while the medieval Middle East in general is more diverse than generally recognized, the Gulf region stands out for its direct connections to multiple regions of non-Middle Eastern cultures with a regular population of people voyaging to them and maintaining their livelihoods by those connections. The Gulf was a region of interconnection and mobility, seen archaeologically in the distribution of artifacts and historically in the movement of trading communities to new settlements when conditions merited. Although the landed empires occasionally sought to control it, the region consistently reasserted its autonomy. The Seljuq Qavurd Khan established authority by making the Gulf of Oman the centre of his domains, prefiguring Hormuz.

In 2003, the American animation studio Dreamworks released as an intended summer blockbuster Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. One movie preview described it as “fortuitously set in the Mediterranean,” although the title character’s name was that of The Arabian Nights’ seafaring merchant who lived in Baghdad and set out on journeys from Basra. Although voice actor Brad Pitt was concerned that his Missouri accent was inappropriate for a Middle Eastern character, the filmmakers embraced it as a “mood lightener.” Sinbad’s heritage was thus obscured behind a story involving the Greek city-state of Syracuse on Sicily and Eris, Greek goddess of discord.

It is no accident, however, that even in the contemporary United States the paradigmatic legendary seafarer would come from the Persian Gulf. It is, after all, the oldest body of water for which we have clear evidence of human sailing, as it connected the southern reaches of Mesopotamia with Bahrain, then known as Dilmun, which figured in myth as a paradise. Also connected by sea was Oman, a source of copper, and ultimately the valley of the Indus River in modern Pakistan, itself a land of great seafarers and important trading partners of the Gulf. Just as today over one third of the world’s crude oil passes through the Gulf, throughout ancient and medieval times the waterway was a crucial conduit for Indian Ocean luxury products.

The purpose of this book is to acquaint readers with the history of the Gulf as it relates to themes of cultural and religious diversity and that often hemispheric long-distance maritime trade which is the precursor to globalization. It will show that the Gulf has had people of diverse ethnic backgrounds since long before the age of oil, and that people adhering to different religious traditions have sometimes been in conflict in the region, but also easily coexisted, especially at the level of common believers. It will also show the importance of the region’s long-distance trade to its culture and economy, as well as its significance for the Middle East more broadly.

Those whose image of Gulf history is focused on Bedouin and fisherfolk with small settlements along deserted coasts will, in fact, find those within.

At the conference ‘Urbanization and Cultural Development in the Ancient Near East’, held in 1958, John Wilson provocatively claimed that ‘Egypt through the New Kingdom’ was ‘a civilization without cities’.1 More than six decades later, most archaeologists would reject his statement, given the evidence for Egyptian cities and other larger settlements in the New Kingdom, but is the same true of the Old and Middle Kingdoms? The question would be simple to answer if the task was simply to compare the excavated remains reviewed in Chapter 4 with settlements unequivocally defined as cities. But such an approach risks treating settlements as discrete units of analysis, dissociated from broader social and cultural patterns.

The landscape of north-east Africa is spectacular. Inhospitable deserts abruptly meet the lush, pulsatile floodplain of the Nile River (Figure 3.1). To the west of the Nile Valley and Delta, wide sand dunes extend into the Sahara, interrupted by scattered rock formations. Five large and a series of smaller oases offer opportunities for life in the Western Desert, while the Fayum depression has been connected to the Nile Valley since the early second millennium. To the east of the Nile Valley lie the Eastern Desert and the Sinai Peninsula, which are rocky. Each of these habitats was occupied by a variety of groups, each with their distinctive lifestyles.

In a beautifully written cultural history of mortal remains, Thomas Laqueur enquires into ‘how and why the dead make civilization’. Death for him is the fundamental ‘other’, in the face of which humans constitute their lives and civilise their behaviour. Unlike Philippe Ariès in his outline of a history of death in Europe, Laqueur sees more continuities than ruptures across periods and cultures. For Egyptologists who study such extraordinary expressions as pyramids, mummies, and Coffin Texts, it can be helpful to be reminded that Egyptian funerary culture is but one of humankind’s attempts at coping with death. Yet Laqueur moves blithely from the Upper Palaeolithic to Greek philosophy. His neglect of Egypt is a tacit rebuttal of the commonly held opinion that Egyptian funerary culture, with its wealth of splendid tombs, is unique. In fact, tombs and burials constitute a huge amount of archaeological evidence for the Old and Middle Kingdoms (Figure 7.1). They provide rich information on society and culture, and despite many blind spots and biases in the record they are an extremely dense source of evidence for the study of the pyramid age.

During the fifteenth century, Hormuz was the hegemon of the Persian Gulf. Located on the island of Jarun in what today is called the Strait of Hormuz, it controlled all traffic in and out of this body of water, much as today the strait represents a major choke point in global oil shipping. When in the early 1400s one of China’s Ming rulers sent admiral Zheng He with treasure fleets to display his empire’s greatness around the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, they stopped at Hormuz, and a Chinese Muslim writer who accompanied the fleets wrote of it glowingly. In the early 1500s, the Portuguese would capture the city and make vassals of its rulers as part of attempting to establish their own dominance, not only in the Gulf, but around the Indian Ocean.

As we have seen in previous chapters, the Hormuz visited and written about by these travellers from opposite ends of Eurasia was but the latest power to control the Gulf’s waters. The Hormuzi era, however, is convenient as a window to show the persistence of many of the themes discussed previously in this book, as we have ample testimony to the polity having a society where different religious and ethnic groups mingled together, sometimes with tensions, at other times with conviviality, all while participating in the long-standing livelihoods of the region.

Rise of Hormuz

The original city of Hormuz was not on the island which bears its name today. It was instead a port on the mainland near Minab oasis around 100 km east of modern Bandar Abbas. It first appears as noteworthy in the tenth century as the sea outlet of Kirman and the site of a leading indigo market. Its population grew with an influx of Omani refugees fleeing the conflicts of that country’s tenth century, and those ties would crucially shape its later history. Like most of the Iranian shore it had a backdrop of high mountains, and a three-kilometre canal linked it to the sea. During the eleventh and early twelfth centuries, it blossomed under the Seljuq administration described in chapter four.

The first major figure in building Hormuz to its place of supremacy was Mahmud al-Qalhati. A prominent trader, he came to the throne in 1242 via his wife, the daughter of the ruler of Hormuz who had allied with the Salghurids against Kish.

Sinbad the Sailor is often presented as a ship captain, and in the 2003 Dreamworks film was even a pirate. However, in classical Arabic the term bahri was used of anyone who trav-elled by sea, and The Arabian Nights character was actually a merchant who booked passage for himself and his goods for trading voyages. The framing of the tales is that a poor por-ter, also named Sinbad, discovers his namesake’s luxurious home and muses that some continually struggle to get by when others live lives of such ease. Sinbad the Sailor hears the porter and summons him in to talk, and the tales are thus framed as a story of how the seafaring merchant earned his wealth through entrepreneurship and ingenuity amidst chal-lenges earlier in life.

Even though their present didactic form took shape later, the Sinbad stories come from a tradition of Indian Ocean tales that goes all the way back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. We have a collection of such tales in the Book of the Wonders of India, attributed in later medieval times to an otherwise unknown Buzurg b. Shahriyar al-Ramhurmuzi, but compiled from Gulf informants by a Basran religious scholar named Abu ˁImran al-Sirafi and presented in 968 to a vizier for the ruling dynasty of Egypt. A similar book, though written more as an organized guide, is the Accounts of China and India which consists of updates and supplements made by one Abu Zayd al-Sirafi to an incorporated earlier text.

These stories focus on the dangers of the sea and distant lands, but also the wonders to be seen, and were a common folklore among the maritime classes. Their spread to other areas burnished the reputation of the great trading cities, much as did the wonders sometimes sent from them. In the early 900s, when the Abbasids ruled Sohar for a time, their governor there sent gifts of black gazelles, a golden statue of an Indian deity, and birds which spoke Sanskrit and Persian. To these were added more exotic legends such as an embalmed cat-sized ant from eastern Africa. Enabling the stories of such wonders, however, were everyday lives of labourers on ships and docks, in the making or collection of products, and producing the everyday essentials necessary for life.

Cities of Trade

In decades immediately before Islam, several annual market fairs were found along the Gulf coast.

By the early Old Kingdom, steep social hierarchies had developed in Egypt. A small group of individuals at the top seemed to hold the fate of the country in their hands, as only the ‛ruling classes’, to use Marxist-inspired terminology, commanded the resources to express their ideas and practices. In durable materials and at places favourable for preservation, the texts, inscriptions, paintings, sculpture, and monumental architecture commissioned by the elite shaped modern perceptions of ancient Egypt. Other types of evidence, such as the workmen’s huts, simple graves, and local community shrines discussed in this book seem merely to fill the gaps and are hardly ever used to develop alternative approaches to the traditional narrative.

The ancient Egyptians were part of a continuous web of people living on the African, Asian, and European continents and the islands between them (Figure 6.1). Lifestyles and habitats varied greatly across this region, but cities and palaces emerged in many areas during the third and early second millennia bc that functioned as regional collecting points and hubs of interregional exchange. Objects connected people over long distances. The circulation of foreign products and styles contributed to an awareness of identity and otherness. In a hymn of the New Kingdom, the god Aten is praised for having created all human beings in Syria, Nubia, and Egypt, distinguishing them by their spoken languages, skins, and characters. Egyptian visual display expressed ethnic differences explicitly by emphasising features of the body, such as hairstyles, skin colour, tattoos, and clothing, though how people behaved towards stereotypes is difficult to gauge. The integration of material remains in the analysis and a refined interpretation of written and visual sources show that practices of contact were multilayered.

In 2019, the municipal council of the island of Muharraq in Bahrain considered a petition to recognize a neighbourhood of a town called Dayr by its historic local name, an Arabic phrase meaning “Neighbourhood of the Monk.” “Dayr” itself is the Arabic word for monastery, and together the two names recall flourishing Christian communities along the shores of the Persian Gulf, one centred around monasteries and individual holy men often believed to have miraculous powers. These Christians lived in a multi-religious Gulf too little known today, such that when in 2021 Jewish communities of the six Arab Gulf states established the Beth Din of Arabia as a new religious court for civil disputes over personal status issues, inheritance law, and kosher certification, news outlets called it the region’s first communal organization, even though it might also have been cast as a rebirth of a once thriving Jewish religious life in the region.

The existence of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian communities in the medieval Persian Gulf is too often obscured even in scholarly overviews of the region’s history, which still often focus on a narrative of Islam sweeping quickly across the peninsula and beyond, even though for other regions of the Middle East the fact that it was centuries before Islam became the majority religion has long been recognized. One problem has been that the most complete sources, those in Arabic, exist only from the 800s and later, while the Gulf sources from earlier times are more restricted in scope and often treated only by their own specialists. Taken together, however, they reveal a tapestry of people seeking their way amidst life’s trials in a multi-confessional religious culture of both conflict and coexistence.

Religious Communities of the Sasanian Era

Prior to the rise of Islam, the dominant Persian Gulf power was the Sasanian Empire, which ruled Iran and Mesopotamia since the third century. The religion which formed the ideological basis of Sasanian rule was Zoroastrianism, though exactly what that consisted of during the period is uncertain, as our most systematic accounts are from ninth and tenth-century digests of Sasanian-era Zoroastrian texts. Called by its adherents simply the “Good Religion,” Zoroastrianism was grounded in a collection of texts collectively called the Avesta, which refer to the teachings of an ancient figure named Zarathushtra, or Zoroaster to the Greeks.

The pyramid age began after a centralised polity formed along the Lower Nile in the late fourth and early third millennia bc and ended before Egypt rose to empire in the second half of the second millennium. It saw the unfolding of the Egyptian state, which affected the lives of people across north-east Africa. Archaeologists equate the pyramid age with the Early and Middle Bronze Ages, so these terms are frequently found in discussions of synchronisms across the Mediterranean and the Near East, but they are uncommon in Egyptology when describing internal developments in Egypt and interactions with societies in north-east Africa. From the later nineteenth century ad, the pyramid age was subdivided into the Old and Middle Kingdoms. The term First Intermediate Period, a period portrayed retrospectively in ancient Egyptian texts as a time of chaos, only became widely used after the First World War, possibly in response to contemporary experiences following the breakdown of the European concert of powers.1