Ritually important musical practices resounded across Bronze Age cultures from Arabia to South Asia, a pair of unusual discoveries suggest.
Excavations at a roughly 4,000-year-old settlement near the modern village of Dahwa in Oman have uncovered two copper cymbals with far-reaching cultural implications, say archaeologist Khaled Douglas of Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat, Oman, and colleagues.
Despite looking much like previously unearthed copper cymbals from a Bronze Age civilization in what’s now Pakistan’s Indus Valley, chemical analyses peg the Dahwa cymbals as products of copper sources in Oman, the scientists report April 7 in Antiquity. That suggests residents of the Dahwa settlement used local metals to make regionally distinctive