“Red Sea V –- Navigated Spaces, Connected Places,” which is being staged at Exeter University in the UK from Sept. 16 through 19, is part of the MARES (Maritime Ethnography of the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea) project run by Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS) at the university.

Alongside the conference, the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities’ (SCTA) Vice President for Antiquities and Museums Ali Al-Ghabban is scheduled to open the exhibition “The Dhow: Mastery of the Monsoon” to which the Kingdom has supplied several exhibits.

The exhibition and conference will continue the development of knowledge of the history of the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula and the importance of the Red Sea and trade on the development of social, spiritual and mercantile cultures.

“The dhow exhibition will be a revelation to many,” says David Goddard. “The history and importance of dhows — from the hand-sewn plank dhows to the modern motor dhows that still ply the Indian Ocean — extends over 3,000 years. It was and still is a significant contributor to the development of the region.”

Goddard, founder of Exeter’s Maritime Museum, collected many dhows from the 1960s, including a Pearling dhow presented by the ruler of Bahrain, Shaikh Isa bin Salman Al-Khalifa, and a 120-ton 2-masted trading dhow given by the Kuwait government. His collection of ethnographic boats is now at Eyemouth Museum. Two of the boats he collected will be on loan to the exhibition.

Also in the exhibition will be a selection of Goddard’s remarkable historical photographs of dhows, some of which he sailed himself, and some dhow artifacts from his personal collection.

The exhibition space was designed by Anthony Harrison, designer of the ethnographic galleries at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum at Exeter.

He had the idea to create suspended models of dhows that will be “flying” in the show. Over several months he painstakingly made highly detailed models in his home workshop.

As well as the physical presence of the dhows forming part of the Kingdom’s presence at the event, Sadig Al-Malki and Fahad Alsharif will deliver lectures during the second day’s proceedings on Sept. 18.

Papers presented during the three-day event will focus on subjects such as: maritime networks, seafaring, navigation and ports; boat-building traditions and technologies; marine ecology and their human exploitation and pilgrimage and the spiritual landscape.

Previous conferences have been held at the British Museum and the University of Southampton. After a focus at the 2008 conference on the Red Sea’s terrestrial hinterlands, Red Sea V brings the conference back to the sea itself, and to the theme of life lived on and from the marine environment in all periods.

The MARES project is a three-year, multi-disciplinary, multi-period project focusing on the maritime traditions of the peoples of the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. Drawing on ethnography, archaeology, history and linguistics, it seeks to understand how people have inhabited and navigated these seascapes in late antiquity and the medieval period, and how they do so today.

The MARES Project team is based at the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in southwest England. The project is led by Dionisius Agius, Al-Qasimi professor of Arabic studies and Islamic material culture and author of several books on the Arabian Dhow.