Jemdet Nasr at Oman

As we're talking preUruk in the coastal Iraq: here's Magan - as Sumer and Akkad will call it. Only here the focus isn't Uruk.

The specific preUruk culture which Magan imported was جمدة نصر. That's the culture just upriver to those Uruk marshes 3100-2900 BC. So the Iraq's navigators knew of Oman centuries before they stuck the "Magan" label upon it, usually dated 2300 BC.

Some of what they traded was shells, which seems more Uruk than Jemdet-Nasr. I take it that Jemdet-Nasr could farm crops simply impossible in the briny marshes. If the middlemen were Sumerian, this can explain how Uruk/Sumer was able to supplant the up-river.

BACKDATE 8/29 h/t Archaeology.org.