COPENHAGEN, DENMARK—In the eighteenth century, Qatar’s historic city of Al Zubarah had a successful pearl fishery and was a center of commerce thought to have been founded by people from the Utub tribe in Kuwait. “The pearls from Al Zubarah were sent by sea to India. From there, they were sent on to the rest of the world. In Al Zubarah, we also found porcelain from China and Japan and coins from Germany, so it was a thriving global trading network, 250 years ago,” Moritz Kinzel of the Institute of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen told Science Nordic. Kinzel and his team have so far excavated a residential neighborhood, a market area, and a palace, and found pottery, decorated building fragments, wooden boxes, and stone weights used by pearl divers. “Al Zubarah was neither under the influence of the Ottoman Empire or the British. People could trade freely and build their own businesses. But it didn’t last,” Kinzel said. The city was destroyed by the Sultan of Oman in 1811. But as Al Zubarah was forgotten and reclaimed by sand, it was also protected from modern development. To read more about archaeology in the Persian Gulf, go to "Archaeology Island."
