How it began
The remains come from H3, an archaeological site at As-Sabiyah in the Subiya region of present-day Kuwait, occupied in the second half of the sixth millennium BCE. The site lay on a cultural border between Ubaid Mesopotamia and the Arabian Neolithic. The British Archaeological Expedition to Kuwait excavated it between 1998 and 2004 and recovered more than 50 pieces of bituminous coating from boats, which Robert Carter published as the oldest known seagoing boat remains. The boats belong to an ancient culture on the territory of modern Kuwait.
Before it existed
From the 1960s and 1970s, archaeologists had found Mesopotamian pottery of the sixth and fifth millennia BCE at scores of coastal sites in eastern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Qatar. This implied transport by sea, but there was no direct evidence of boats, and some scholars doubted that a real trading relationship existed.
How it works
The boats were made of bundles of reeds. Their hulls were coated with an amalgam of bitumen, chopped reed or chaff, and mineral additives, applied as a liquid to give a waterproof and protective skin. Many of the recovered slabs carry reed impressions on one face, and 18 of them have barnacles on the outer face, which shows that the boats were used at sea. A 15 cm ceramic model of a reed-bundle boat was also found.
What lasted
The finds show that boat building and sailing were already in use in the Gulf in the sixth millennium BCE. A painted ceramic disc from the site depicts a crescent-shaped hull with two lines that resemble a two-footed mast. Carter argued that the evidence proves a maritime exchange between southern Mesopotamia and Arabian Neolithic groups.
