The Persian Gulf was once the site for some of the world's first great cities and the region's archaeology remains largely unexplored. Renowned Egyptologist Michael Rice has compiled the first up-to-date work encompassing findings from recent studies of the area. He shows that the Gulf has in fact been a major channel of commerce for millennia, a tradition which continues to the present. Rice also suggests that archaeological evidence from the Gulf reveals how cultural cross-pollination occurred between trading societies.