The world's first great cities, built in the lands of Mesopotamia, grew rich on trade. The great rivers which flowed down into the Gulf were navigable up to Babylon and beyond, into Syria. Ships carried goods from these cities to present-day Pakistan and probably to Egypt, thousands of miles away.

Dotted along the western shore of the Gulf were many small trading communities which also grew rich on international trade in the third millennium BC. On the island of Bahrain, an important city developed, the centre of the Dilmun culture. Large burial grounds were created for those who ended their days in the 'Holy Land'. Other ports also grew up in the area, where ships carried their goods to the cities of the known world.

The culture of Dilmun was a culture of islands and its people were intrepid seamen and traders.

The Archaeology of the Arabian Gulf provides a comprehensive, accessible and up-to-date review of the current status of archaeology in the region which now comprises Kuwait, eastern Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Emirates and northern Oman. Through a detailed examination of the archaeology of the Gulf, Michael Rice, already well known as an Egyptologist and for his work on Dilmun, reveals the extraordinary nature of the region's past.

He shows that the Gulf has been a major channel of commerce for millennia. No similarly wide-ranging book is currently available which deals with the antiquity of this area. It will be of great interest to students of archaeology, as well as to the more general reader who seeks to read of the past of the last unknown region of the ancient world.