Lecture Access

This lecture will be available to view until 4 January 2027

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OVERVIEW

Watch on Demand | Online Lecture


Few countries sit at so many crossroads as Oman. Guarding the Strait of Hormuz, with Persia, India, and Africa all within reach, it has drawn traders and travellers for millennia. 

Stone tools in the Dhofar region attest to over a million years of human habitation, marking Oman as a waypoint in humanity's earliest dispersals out of Africa.

By the Bronze Age, Oman had stepped onto the world stage. Known to the Akkadians as Magan, its people mined copper and built ships that linked Mesopotamia to the Indus Valley, leaving behind the monumental towers and necropolises of Bat, Al-Khutm, and Al-Ayn. Later still came frankincense—the rare, fragrant resin so prized in antiquity that it perfumed temples, tombs, and triumphs from Egypt to Rome, and built ports such as Sumhuram on the wealth it carried.

In the first of two lectures, Dr Eireann Marshall traces Oman's deep past, revealing how copper and incense bound this remarkable land to the wider ancient world.

LECTURER

Biography

Eireann is an Honorary Research Associate and Associate Lecturer with The Open University. Raised in the Veneto and educated at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the Universities of Birmingham and Exeter, she brings a rich international perspective to classical civilisation. With extensive experience as a lecturer and tour leader across Italy, Tunisia, Sicily and beyond including Venice, Pompeii and Ravenna – Eireann is bilingual in English and Italian, and combines scholarly rigour with engaging storytelling. Her lectures for Academy Travel invite listeners to explore the ancient world not just as history but as a living dialogue between past and present – bringing monuments, art and ideas vividly to life.

Dr Eireann Marshall

Classicist & Historian