H3 on the edge of the persian gulf oasis

18th August 2024

North of the Bay of Kuwait on what is now low sand back lies H3 and the site of one of the oldest boats found. More than that, a boat coated with the bitumen from the nearby oil field. On flat lands that now may again be underwater, may still be above the sea level, that were once on the tributary of the great wetland and then within of a low flat desert, is the H3 site. The mapping is unclear and the documentation fragmentary, what I gather is this: Out in the desert was once a land of reeds and channels and on those waterways there was a settlement and in that settlement one of the oldest boats we know about was made of bundles of reeds and waterproofed with bitumen.

For the people the boats must have been central. They made clay models of them and kept them either as burial goods or totems - or perhaps toys. Either way they were found in the chambered structures they left. They made and painted pottery with geometric patterns and they left images of their reed boats, little crescents with pointed ends, with two masts. They were boat people, moving distance up and down through their reed beds and their shallow shores. Never going too far into the deep water - the boats wouldn’t have held against the currents and whatever goods they carried and traded along their shallow lanes would not have gone through the great desert of sea that kept them from the further shore across the bay.

Instead the boats, large enough for a few people, a few animals, some harvest and grain and pottery, travelled along the coast, thorough the network of reeds and up through the rivers of Mesopotamia, perhaps even to the shores of the distant unseen Mediterranean.They gathered the tall reeds of their wetlands, bound them into bundles leaving the ends free and made a vessel, tying the ends up together into crescent prows and bows. Set two masts and, crucially for our story, pasted bitumen over the base and sides to water proof it.

This oil coated boat, skirting over the shallow coast of modern Kuwait was made by people across the bay from Mina al Ahmadi where the great bustle of the oil tanker dock builds out onto the sea. The plant life liminal swamp of the Tethys sea compressed over millennia to the oil fields now visible from the coast, it’s oil gathered for the boats passing up and down the lost Persian oasis, there- and out beyond the water’s limits a thousand more lost sites of reed boats in the sunk lands