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One of the world's youngest nations, the United Arab Emirates was founded based on a handshake between two men meeting in a tent in the desert between Abu Dhabi and Dubai in 1968. Yet its human history stretches back to the emergence of anatomically modern humans from Africa, a story of 130,000 years of humankind's survival in one of the world's harshest environments.
Thanks to modern archaeological and historical research, we can now trace the Emirates' story back to the Garden of Eden, the mythical floods of the Old Testament and the very foundation of the Sumerian civilization. Known to the Sumerians as Magan, a key source of the copper that sparked the metallurgical revolution that swept Europe, the land of the Emirates was at the centre of humanity's first intercontinental trade network, linking Sumeria, Persia and the Indus Valley. This then transformed through the Iron Age into a locus for agricultural and social innovation, welcoming new religions and seeing great pre-Islamic cities blossom in the sands - from Mleiha in Sharjah's desert interior through to Ed-Dur on the coast of Umm Al Quwain.
The region's seafarers were to form the global network that dominated the fabulously wealthy monopoly of trade between Asia and Europe. Its people roamed the Seven Seas until the arrival of the Portuguese triggered a series of devastating clashes with the newly expansionist European empires. Eventually falling under British influence, the people of the Trucial States came together to form the United Arab Emirates in December 1971.
