Bronze Age cymbals of Indus Valley style found in Oman

A pair of 4,000-year-old copper cymbals found at the ancient Dahwa site in northern Oman are very similar to examples found in the Indus Valley of what is now Pakistan. Metallurgic analysis has revealed that the Dahwa cymbals were made with copper sourced in Oman, so they weren’t imported, but their closest comparable parallels in style and date are found at Mohenjo Daro in Pakistan. They attest to cultural links, perhaps even of religious interchange, between the peoples of the Indus Valley and those of southeastern Arabia.

The instruments were made by the Umm an-Nar (meaning “Mother of Fire” in Arabic) culture which occupied the modern-day countries of United Arab Emirates and northern Oman in the Bronze Age (ca. 2600-2000 B.C.). Excavated since 2014, the ancient site near the village of Dahwa includes domestic structures, a monumental structure, ritual buildings and one tomb from the Umm an-Nar culture.

The cymbals were discovered in 2018 in a building believed from its architecture and location at the highest elevation of the settlement to have had a ritual function. Two copper alloy plates were unearthed from a fill layer in the northwestern corner of the building. They were nested perfectly on top of each other and deliberately placed in the fill before a new floor of flat stone slabs was installed over them. This suggests they were a votive deposit.

The copper plates are circular have a circular and 5.4 inches in diameter with an embossed center three inches in diameter. They are both perforated in the center of the raised boss. Together they weigh nine ounces. Because they were found in their original context together as a pair, they could be identified as cymbals without ambiguity, unlike the Mohenjo Daro examples which as individual finds, could plausibly be interpreted as pot lids. The Dahwa cymbals therefore served to confirm the Indus Valley finds of matching design were also cymbals.

Other objects manufactured locally but in the style of the Indus Valley, including ceramic cookware, terracotta toys and metalwork like seals, axes and spearheads, have been found at ancient sites in southeastern Arabia. There are also imports, including storage jars. This points to direct trade links as well as possible migration of Indus craftspeople to the Umm an-Nar culture areas. Lead isotope analysis of copper objects in the Indus Valley has found ores originating in Oman, so the migrants may have been extracting the ores and smelting the copper in Oman and sending the metal back home.

Our understanding of the nature of cultural relations between various groups in Bronze Age Oman is still in its infancy, but the archaeological record reflects a rich mixture of cultural traditions that found common ground in the collective practices of the time. […] The intermingling of communities with various backgrounds, as is likely the case at Dahwa, can expose social tensions; in such an environment, shared acts of making music, dancing and perhaps performing cultic activities could have helped to build stable communities. In this light, the dancing scenes that become a common decorative feature in south-east Arabia in the early second millennium BC with the transition to the Wadi Suq period, as visible on painted spouted jars connected with communal consumption (de Vreeze 2016), reveal more than just an appreciation of dancing. The sound of cymbals in the highest building of the settlement at Dahwa might have resonated against the sides of the hills and been heard by most inhabitants, perhaps even further along the valley. The discovery of the Dahwa cymbals encourages the view that already during the late third millennium BC, music, chanting and communal dancing set the tone for mediating contact between various communities in this region for the millennia to follow.

[…] From their inception, cymbals appear to have been tied to ritual activity and temple settings and the discovery of the pair at Dahwa, where Umm an-Nar and Indus artefacts coexist, suggests that music and musical instruments were important cultural components of inter-regional contact and co-operation around the Arabian Gulf.

* This article was originally published here