When you think about the deserts of Kuwait, you don’t usually think about boating on the high seas. You’re more likely to think of, well, let’s face it, sand. Or maybe the oil that resides underneath the sand. You wouldn’t expect the Kuwaiti desert to be the home of the oldest known boat.

Yet, that’s exactly what scientists uncovered a few years back. This boat is older than the United States. It’s older than ancient Greece. Heck, by most estimates, it predates the Bible. This bolt is even older than Dick Clark.

The boat, which is estimated to be around 7,000 years old, is made of tarry, bitumen-covered slabs. Bitumen is still used today in the Middle East to build boats. It’s crushed with coral and fish oil, and it’s used to create a waterproof seal for boats made from reed bundles. While such technology probably isn’t sufficient to get you boat insurance today, it may have been enough to get the ancient residents of the site where it was found from one end of the known world to the other.

When it was discovered, the side was covered with barnacles. The other side of the boat had impressions of reeds on it. The boat was held and discovered in a stone building at a dig site known as As-Sabiyah.

Prior to this discovery, the oldest boat on record was one found in an Egyptian tomb. That boat was built around 3,000 B.C. There is evidence that other water-going vessels made of logs, much like a log canoe or raft, were built as long as 8,000 years B.C.

The speculation is that these kinds of boats like the one in As-Sabiyah were used to transport both goods and passengers between Mesopotamia, the Central Gulf area, and the dig site itself, which may have been a peninsula on the Tigris and Euphrates at the time.

This theory also explains why pottery made by the ancient Mesopotamians shows up on the western shores of the Persian Gulf. The residents of As-Sabiyah may have been a mixed race of peoples from both Mesopotamia and the Arabian Peninsula.

The kinds of good traded and transported on those boats would have included things like pierced pearls that were used to make jewelry, as well as pottery, bead necklaces, and flint and obsidian stones, as well as livestock and probably fish.

Photo via Dale Gillard