Article table of contents: P
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Oasis in the Syrian desert to the northeast of Damascus, Palmyra shelters the ruins of a caravan centre which prospered in the early centuries of the Christian era, where Semitic traditions were strongly influenced by the Greco-Roman and Persian civilizations.
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Resurgent East Arabian pearl fishing and trade is apparent by the mid-1st mill. BCE. Strong intercontinental demand for pearls from the 1st cent. BCE prompted a transition to large-scale operations. Pearl diving probably experienced a gradual decline from the late 3rd cent. CE, re-emerging as a flourishing enterprise in the Early Islamic period.
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Periplus of the Erythraean Sea
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea is a Greek text written around the middle of the 1st century CE, probably by a merchant from Alexandria. It contains a description of the trading places (emporia) of the western Indian Ocean, and lists various commodities that were imported and exported there.
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Pliny the Elder [Arabia in ...]
Gaius Plinius Secundus (23–79 CE) (Pliny the Elder) was a Roman scholar, military commander and governor whose only extant work is a 37-volume encyclopaedia of the known world called 'Historia Naturalis' or 'Natural History' (abbreviated here as NH, although HN is also used) which includes numerous references to Arabia and Arabian products that were available in the Roman Empire.
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From the 12th century BCE onwards, northwest Arabian pottery exhibits marked localism, as each oasis produced unique pottery repertoires, intermittently displaying shared traits with regional and distant counterparts. This dynamic may result from the strongly autochthonous nature of the oases and their role as trading hubs within a broader network. Furthermore, it might be influenced by a historical archaeological research bias, as the oases or temporal periods in this region have not been uniformly studied.
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After a short period of transition between 1300 and 1100 BCE (beginning of the Early Iron Age in Central Oman, Late Bronze Age/Iron Age I in the U.A.E.), during which several assemblages co-existed, pottery traditions from Southeast Arabia became more and more homogeneous in style and technology. Meanwhile, the production of pottery increased greatly during the first half of the first millennium BCE (Early Iron Age in Central Oman, Iron Age II in the U.A.E.). Between 250 BCE and the advent of Islam, a new cultural divergence between the two regions arose, with the development in the north of the late pre-Islamic culture of Mleiha and ed-Dur, largely influenced by inter-regional exchanges with Central Arabia and Mesopotamia, and then with Iran, and in the south, the rise of the Samad assemblage, best known in the al-Maysar-Samad sites.