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PEARLS IN THE PERSIAN GULF
Pearl diving is believed to have been practiced in Bahrain for 4,000 years. The first reference to Bahrain pearling is a an Assyrian inscription from 200 B.C. that described "a parcel of fish eyes from Dilmun." In 100 A.D. the Roman chronicler Pliny described Tylos as being "famous for its vast numbers of pearls." Tylos and Dilmun were ancient names for Bahrain.
For centuries the Persian Gulf was the main gathering place of gem-quality pearls and Bombay was the home of one of the main pearl market. Arab sheiks in the 19th century amassed huge fortunes not from oil but from royalties on pearl gathering boats. In 1838, a British officer reported that Persian Gulf pearling industry was of comprised of 4,300 boats (3,500 of them in Bahrain) and 30,000 sailors, rope attendants and divers.
Around the turn of the century, there were about 900 Bahrain-based vessels engaged in the pearl fishing. In 1932, the ruler Rhaikh Hamad was appalled by the deplorable working conditions endured by pearl divers and he introduced financial reforms to give the industry sounder footing.
Until the early 1930s the pearl collecting trade was dealt two crippling blows: 1) the mass production of cultured pearls in Japan and 2) world-wide depression. Although the pearl trade is a shadow of its former self it counties to endure. Manama Bahrain was still the center of the natural pearl industry in the 1970s. Specialized pearl traders still work in the souks in Manama and Muharaq.
See Separate Article: PEARLS: HISTORY, TYPES AND CHARACTERISTICS factsanddetails.com
Pearl Diving
Pearl diving is dangerous, seasonal work. The main pearl diving season is from June to October. The is also a "cold diving season" before and after the five-month diving season and their length varies according to the weather. During the pearling season, pearl divers live in seasonal pearling villages.
In the old days, great fanfare was made when the pearlers left their home villages for the seasonal pearling villages. Many worked from "sambouqs" and "jalibuts", boats specially designed for pearl fishing and worked by 15 divers and 15 haulers who worked in teams. The ship has a single deck and the crew slept cramped together.
The Persian Gulf pearl industry relied on the labor of Indian and Arab divers, who worked under slavelike conditions and often had their lives cut short by their trade.
Pearl Divers
The pearling methods changed little over the centuries. The methods described by chronicler Abu Zayd Hassan in the 10th century were virtually identical to those used in early 20th century. Looped ropes with stone metal anchors wee tied to the boats. The diver used these ropes to descend quickly to the seabed. Their only equipment was a nose clip, finger-protecting-leather guards, a knife to cut open the shells and bag for the pearls.
The divers usually took two or three deep breath and leapt off the boat and descended to the oyster beds with a rope tied around a stone. Underwater they cut open as many shells as possible or placed as many oyster as they could in a basket and then tugged on a rope to be pulled up. When the divers needed air they tugged on the ropes and were pulled. After a few minutes rest they descended again.
On average each divers brought up between 200 and 400 oysters a day. The divers were often harassed by sharks (Marco Polo reported men who were paid to "charm the great fishes to prevent them from injuring the divers") and some reportedly kept diving even after limbs were bitten off.
One pearler told National Geographic in the 1960s, “When I was ready to dive I roped a heavy stone around one foot, slung a rope basket around my neck, and clipped shut my nostrils. I dived, and when felt my breath giving out, I tugged on th rope and my hauler pulled me up. I divided about 40 times a day. Some diver stayed down for four minutes and some only a minute and a half. An experienced diver would plunger 50 feet.”
Ancient Pearling in the Persian Gulf
Andrew Lawler wrote in Archaeology magazine: “Archaeologists excavating on the shores of the Persian Gulf search for what may prove to be the source of the world’s longest-lived economy years, people have settled along the shores of the Persian Gulf, in what one scholar calls “one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet.” Despite its lack of natural resources, such as water or fertile soil, what the Gulf region did have was the world’s most reliable source of pearls, until they began to be grown artificially a century ago. The long history of pearls and pearling in the Persian Gulf was, as a result, largely forgotten due to the collapse of the natural pearl industry in the early1900s. [Source: Andrew Lawler, Archaeology, March/April 2012 ^]
“Soon, the region came to be known only for exporting oil, despite the fact that some of the cities lining the Gulf’s coast actually owe their early origins to pearls. The luminescent gems have been prized as a symbol of luxury since antiquity. The ever-increasing demand for the tiny spheres not only attracted people to the Gulf’s Arabian shores, but also provided the raw material for an economy that may have been one of the most enduring in the world. Nearly all that was known about the ancient pearling industry came from scattered mentions in texts that date only as far back as the fourth century B.C. However, archaeologists working at sites from Kuwait to Oman are now discovering evidence of ancient pearls, pearling, and the pearl trade. Because of this, they are beginning to understand the role the gem played in the region at Neolithic villages, Bronze Age centers, and wealthy cities of the eighteenth century. Says Robert Carter, an archaeologist at the University College London’s new campus in Doha, Qatar,“The societies of the Gulf were shaped by the pearl oyster and trade from the earliest days. ^
“The pearls were probably gathered locally from the oysters that were part of the inhabitants’ diet,” says Hans-Peter. Like Carter, Uerpmann suspects that pearling may already have started to become a sophisticated venture at this early time, when the first proto-cities in Mesopotamia were forming. “The tech-nologies for diving, such as [seaworthy] boats and the use of diving weights, were certainly known,”he says. Reed and wood degrade quickly in this climate, however, and dating the few ancient stone weights found along the Gulf is difficult since they were often reused and typically are not found in dateable contexts. Both Uerpmann and Carter say that there are not yet enough data to prove a thriving pearl trade existed, although intriguing evidence to support their claims is being discovered. Fishhooks begin to appear in trenches from this period, as do objects made of mother-of-pearl. Tübingen’s Philip Drechsler, who is digging at a Neolithic site on the Saudi Arabian coast, says that 90 percent of the shells his team finds are from pearl oysters. If pearls were, in fact, being systematically gathered atthis time, as Carter and Uerpmann both suspect, the gems may be associated with the oldest long-distance maritime trading network in the ancient world. ^
Oldest Evidence of Pearling in the Persian Gulf
Andrew Lawler wrote in Archaeology magazine: “Ancient pearls predating the Roman Empire are nearly as rare as early references. In addition, as archaeological artifacts, pearls present great challenges. Their small size makes them easy for excavators to miss without careful sieving. They are also fragile and can degrade rapidly in the ground. Like many gems, pearls are often passed down in jewelry, and the stones are sometimes reused over generations, making them difficult to date. Unlike mining or pottery mak-ing, pearling leaves behind relatively few artifacts. As to the historical record, the difficult job of gathering oysters from the depths of the sea usually took place well out of sight of scribes and all but the most adventurous ancient travelers. Apart from a few tiny pearls found during excavations in Bahrain in the 1990s, there was almost no archaeological evidence of ancient pearling in the area until recently. That began to change a decade ago. [Source: Andrew Lawler, Archaeology, March/April 2012 ^]
Persian Gulf waters
“Just north of Kuwait City, on an uninviting stretch of coast called As-Sabiyah, 30 miles from the Iraqi border, a team co-led by Carter was exploring the remains of a shell jewelry workshop in a Neo-lithic village. Taking extra care to pick out all the beads and worked stone, excavators uncovered a tiny pearl only one-fifth of an inch wide, with a delicate incision. “It probably would have been missed in a normal excavation,” Carter recalls. Radiocarbon dating of organic material found with the pearl placed the workshop at 5300 B.C., making the gem the oldest one yet found in a dated archaeological context. ^
“At thes same site, the team also uncovered the remains of a reed boat covered in barnacles. The two discoveries—the oldest-known seafaring vessel and the oldest-known pierced pearl—offered preliminary evidence that the people of the Persian Gulf had found a way of life that formed the basis of the region’seconomy until the early twentieth century. Since the discovery at As-Sabiyah, archaeologists have dis-covered a number of pearls at other ongoing excavations fromKuwait to Oman. A Danish team uncovered two unpierced pearls while working on the Kuwaiti island of Failaka, just off-shore from As-Sabiyah, which likely date to around the second millennium B.C. A pearl dating to about 5000 B.C. was found in a grave in Umm al-Quwain in the United Arab Emirates, at the eastern end of the Gulf. Farther east along the coast of Oman, near the capital city of Muscat, three perforated pearls were discovered still clasped in the hands of a recently excavated fourth-millennium B.C. skeleton. At Al-Buhais in Sharjah, a United Arab Emirate near Dubai, Hans-Peter and Margarete Uerpmann, from Germany’s Tübingen University, found a remarkable tomb, dating to around 4500 B.C. in which a woman’s pearls were found strung on a necklace. She also had a single pierced pearl on her chin bone. ^
Ancient Pearling Trade in the Persian Gulf
Andrew Lawler wrote in Archaeology magazine: “As part of that network, in exchange for pearls, Mesopotamian merchants may have traded a type of pottery, first found at the site of Al-Ubaid in modern Iraq. Colorful Ubaid pottery is found at sites dotted along the Arabian shores of the Gulf, includ-type of shellfish that produces a stone “which is very expensive throughout Asia and is sold in Persia and other inland regions for its weight in gold.” Isidorus of Charax, a geographer, who lived around the beginning of the first century A.D. .,described men on rafts bringing up shells from the deep that produced large pearls.[Source: Andrew Lawler, Archaeology, March/April 2012 ^]
“Pearls were very popular in the ancient Roman world. A second-century A.D. funerary portrait from the Egyptian city of Antinopolis shows a woman wearing impressive pearl earrings and a gem and pearl necklace. Most of the pearl trade took place on boats and in small villages and encampments. In Bahrain, evidence has been swallowed up by rapid urban development. Thus, filling in the later years of pearling is difficult. ^ “Several Mesopotamian tablets dating to the third and second millennia B.C. refer to a coveted stone called “fish eyes,” which may be a reference to pearls, although scholars do not agree on the translation of this phrase. What is certain is that by the Roman and Byzantine peri-ods, the Persian Gulf was famous for providing pearls to the rich and powerful in Rome and Constantinople, and then, later, to Islamic courts in Damascus, Baghdad, and Isfahan. Though texts throughout this long era indicate that Arabians practiced pearling, a dearth of Roman-era burials in the area, coupled with the Muslim tradition of burying the dead without jewelry, leave a gap in the archaeological history of pearling. ^
pearl divers at work
“According to some brief texts, the Sassanian Empire, which collapsed with the coming of Islam in the seventh century A.D. ., sought to control the pearling trade and its profits from its heartland in Iran. They also mention that pirates made occasional raids on ships carrying the precious cargo. By the eleventh century A.D.., texts claim sultans from eastern Saudi Arabia took half the pearls found by divers in Bahrain. A century later, travel-ers of the time say Julfar, at the far eastern end of the Gulf, was a major pearling center and that 300 pearl fisheries were scattered across the region. By the time Columbus sailed to America, Bahrain had emerged, perhaps not for the first time,as the preeminent pearling center, with 1,000 boats at its wharves and beaches. One of the nine courtyards (left) that surrounds Zubarah’s large main palace, whose size and grandeur are an indication of the city’s power and wealth during its heyday.” ^
Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons
Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Mesopotamia sourcebooks.fordham.edu , National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, especially Merle Severy, National Geographic, May 1991 and Marion Steinmann, Smithsonian, December 1988, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
Last updated March 2024