ABSTRACT
The society which evolved in the Gulf in the second half of the third millennium BC and which survived into the early centuries of the second was highly sophisticated and complex. Whilst it clearly possessed many of the characteristics of its great contemporaries, such as the riverine cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia, a highly structured society, monumental public buildings, far-ranging contacts, extensive and rich burial fields, it was distinct in many of its attributes. For this there were two basic reasons: the particularly mercantile nature of the society, and the fact that it was sea-based with a considerable, and virtually unparalleled, reliance upon islands as its main centres of population and activity.
