ORIGINAL ARTICLE A late pre-Islamic bowl with Levantine-inspired decoration from ed-Dur (UAE) Bruno Overlaet 1 | Paul Alan Yule 2 1 Royal Museums of Art and History, Art & History Museum, Brussels, Belgium 2 Sprachen und Kulturen des Vorderen Orients — Semitistik, Ruprecht-Karls- Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany Correspondence B. Overlaet Email: Bruno.Overlaet@gmail.com Abstract Around 1977 the British engineer Peter Hudson found a corroded copper alloy bowl during a walk c.100–150 m south-east of the ed-Dur fort in Umm al-Qai- wain. Ed-Dur is one of the largest and most extensively explored sites along the UAE Gulf coast. Its main occupation dates from the late first century BCE to the early second century CE (PIR, Période préislamique récente, C). After cleaning, the bowl showed profuse engraved and repoussé decoration. It is compared with Levantine bowls from Nimrud, with several unprovenanced “South Arabian” bowls and with excavated bowls from the UAE and Oman. Although the bowl’s iconography copies familiar themes from Early Iron Age Levantine bowls, the data suggest a much later, local production. The bowl is attributed to the late pre-Isla- mic period (PIR), phases A to C (third century BCE–early second century CE). KEYWORDS bronze bowl, ed-Dur, Levantine bowl, Mleiha, Nimrud bowl BM.11878, Oman, PIR, UAE 1 | INTRODUCTION Ed-Dur came to the attention of archaeologists during the construction of the coastal highway and was first visited in 1973–74 by an Iraqi team who excavated its fort (Salman, 1974: m–n, pl. 12a; al-Qaisy, 1975) (Fig. 1). In 1980 and 1981, Jean-François Salles (CNRS, Lyon, France) con- ducted surface surveys and published the site’s pottery (Salles, 1984). Like many local and expatriate enthusiasts for the archaeology of the UAE, Peter Hudson regularly walked the site in the late 1970s and early 1980s and col- lected surface finds such as pottery, metal artefacts, glass and coins. Together with Shirley Kay, the wife of the Bri- tish Consul-General at Dubai, Peter Hudson sent a selec- tion of these finds to the British Museum for evaluation in 1984 to try and raise interest in the site. In 1986 Shirley Kay also alerted Rémy Boucharlat to the fact that the plan- ning of a new airport threatened the preservation of the site. As director of the French archaeological team working at the time at Mleiha in the neighbouring Emirate of Shar- jah, he contacted his colleagues at Ghent University (Ernie Haerinck), Aarhus University (Dan Potts) and University College London (Carl Phillips). It was the start of a joint international project at ed-Dur. The very same year they visited the site and, based on an agreement brokered by the British Consul-General Jolyan Kay with the ruler of Umm al-Qaiwain, H.H. Shaikh Rashid bin Ahmad al-Mualla, excavations began in the spring of 1987. By then, Peter Hudson had acquired a good knowledge of the site and had assembled a representative collection of surface finds. He halted his own surveys and, together with Shirley Kay, supported the teams in their endeavours. On one of his many walks on the site, Peter Hudson had picked up the bronze bowl discussed in the present paper, some 100–150 m south-east of the ed-Dur fort (25°31'20.61''N 55°37'42.18''E). Whereas it seemed at first glance to be an unprepossessing corroded copper alloy bowl, he later noticed that what looked like random dents seemed to have a pattern. He arranged for the bowl to be X-rayed in Sharjah, which revealed that the “dents” were part of an extensive figurative decoration (Figs. 2–4). When he showed the bowl and X-rays to Carl Phillips, one of the four excavation directors at ed-Dur, Phillips offered to take the bowl to University College London (UCL) for DOI: 10.1111/aae.12116 172 | © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/aae Arab Arch Epig. 2018;29:172–184.