The Forgotten History Of Kharg Island - BEFORE The Oil

So this little island, 15 miles or some 28 kilometers off the coast of Iran, that most people, or at least I, hadn't ever heard of before, has been in the news quite a lot lately. Kharg Island. I don't think I really have to go into why, especially because I don't want to be demonetized again. We're talking about overly sensitive issues, but suffice it to say that it's at the center of a very tense situation. As well as Iran's, and for that matter the entire planet's, oil industry. As skyrocketing oil prices have clearly demonstrated. Because some 90% of Iran's oil is exported from it. In fact, some 950 million barrels of oil are handled there each year. And up to 7 million can be loaded into its terminals in a single day. And that's mostly thanks to the deep waters surrounding the island, which allows supertankers, mostly bound for Asia, to dock there without issue. Which isn't happening right now because it's been attacked repeatedly, and because the Strait of Hormuz is closed, so what's the point? But anyways, when I first heard about the island, I thought, hmm, I wonder how deep this place's history actually goes. Maybe it has some archaeology on it. Because, uh, there's certainly no shortage of that in the Middle East. Just like another thing everyone needs. But regardless, just by skimming the island's Wikipedia page, it became abundantly clear that despite all the intense development it's undergone in modern times, this island is actually chock full of ancient relics, and surprisingly unique and substantial archaeological sites. Its early modern history is also pretty interesting. A lot of different European powers stuck their fingers in this pie. So, having been heavily inspired by the excellent videos GeoMargin makes, I'm going to be sharing a bit more of my research process than usual. So without further ado, let's explore the forgotten history and archaeology of Karg Island. Because this is so close to where the Sumerians were, the age of this stuff could go way back. So I just so happened to be looking for mentions of Karg Island on JSTOR, a fantastic website for finding scholarly articles, and I found this mention of a Sumerian statue purportedly being found on Karg. And then, looking in the footnotes, I was led to this other report, hidden all the way in chapter 12 of this collection of essays, and here it is! This incredibly impressive statue. It's only a head, a torso, and the upper part of the biceps. Very similar to the one from Tel Asmar that everyone uses to represent Ian Nasir I discussed a while back. And weirdly, like really weirdly, where it was sawed in half, it was deliberately smoothened out, maybe so it could stand upright again. It's said to have been found on the island sometime around the end of the Iran-Iraq War in the late 80s, and it seems to be somewhere in Tehran now, but other than that, its provenance is pretty murky. But given that it's already 27 centimeters high, it might have been upwards of 80 centimeters high. That's taller than the largest statue from the famous Tel Asmar fort, which might represent the god those other statues are meant to worship. But despite how impressive this thing clearly is, there just aren't any other known traces of an early dynastic Sumerian presence on Kargien, so maybe they're still waiting under the sands. Or maybe this was an heirloom that was brought to the island centuries after its original creation as a curiosity or something. But like with some other things from Karg, as we'll see, some have cast doubt on its authenticity altogether, especially because of that unusual flattened base, which is completely unprecedented, and the fact that the hair and beard are styled in seemingly unconventional ways. But hey, if it is a forgery, it's pretty impressive. Why would someone even go to the lengths of trying to plant this on Karg anyways? I mean, wouldn't it show undue Iraqi influence on Iranian-held territory during a war between the two countries? Like, I don't get it. Something just as extraordinary was found pretty recently in mid-November of 2007 during the construction of this road. In fact, it was so important that the road's planned trajectory was actually altered to save it, and it's this old Persian cuneiform inscription measuring 85 by 116 centimeters, inscribed onto this coral-encrusted limestone boulder. Shortly after being discovered, the inscription was reportedly deciphered by one expert who claimed that it read, This land was a dry area with no water. I brought happiness and welfare. Bahana. Water wells. This bahana is an unattested word anywhere else, so maybe it's just someone's name. But it seems to have caused a bit of controversy at the time, because it got wrapped up in the whole naming dispute over the Gulf, with Arab countries obviously wanting to call it the Arabian Gulf, and Iran wanting to call it the Persian Gulf. So the Iranian media seems to have claimed that it backs up their side, and they also claimed that this drew the ire of Arabs, and that they dismissed its authenticity. But scholars didn't have much time left to actually analyze the inscription, because by June of the following year, some unknown asshat climbed the fence set up around the inscription, and defaced at least 70% of it. It went from looking pretty pristine, to looking like some random scratches in a rock. Though based on the pictures of it from Google Maps, it still seems to be under a pane of thick weathered glass or acrylic, in a little dedicated area to itself, with a stone-paved courtyard. And surprisingly, it's actually visible underfoot, not on any vertical surface. Like, from the first pictures I saw of it, I assumed it was on some sort of cave wall or something, but I guess not. Recent scholarship has dismissed it as an outright forgery, with one author saying the inept rendering of the signs, and the meaninglessness of the resultant text, betray this as an outright fake. Though more in-depth analyses from more recently, like this one from 2025, have a more nuanced take, with the author stating that it stands outside the canonical corpus of Achaemenid royal texts, yet it self-consciously imitates their formal idiom, and it's unusual in several different ways. It has inconsistent wedge execution, non-standard sign forms, and lexical items not attested in the canonical Old Persian corpus of inscriptions, which he also calls anomalies. It also generally seems to be in a rather crude and hurried writing style, and there's also this strange Sassanid-like crown motif, shown flipped on its side, which is weird, since Old Persian cuneiform was used by the Achaemenid Empire of the 6th to 4th centuries BC, whereas the Sassanids started ruling in the 3rd century AD. And there's also just the fact that it's on this rough, random, coral-encrusted boulder, because usually important Persian inscriptions like this were put on specially prepared cliff faces, like the Behistun inscription, or specially prepared blocks, so if this thing is real, maybe it was a bit unofficial, like the sort of thing you'd find on a provincial island, which I guess makes sense. But I think the weirdest thing here is that five of the six words carved aren't even seen anywhere else. So the author of this latest study concluded, the inscription is best read as a provincial archaizing text, and the carver deliberately employed Old Persian cuneiform as a prestige device long after it went out of use, and the object should be understood as a localized act of commemoration, instead of a state-level proclamation of any sort. And so its anomalies aren't necessarily evidence that it's just a forgery. Though keep in mind that this guy's reading of the text is completely different from the first reading I mentioned. It goes, Here is slash it was the stony foundation crowned Zaspi Behnam of kingship. And this Zaspi character could be referring to a Sassanid shah named Zamasp who ruled at the tail end of the 5th century. But who knows. And this leads me to a very interesting report by a guy named Edward Ives, a British ship surgeon who happened to be in Karg Island in 1758, which he talks about in his giant account of his travels across Asia. And he saw something on the island that might connect to the first translation of this inscription. He says, We entered and surveyed with great attention a long subterraneous passage made for the conveyance of water from the opposite side of a hill, which, according to the Persian custom, has, at proper distance, holes cut through the surface of it for the admission of light and air. So he's describing a typical sort of Persian aqueduct called a qanat. So maybe that's what the inscription is referring to by this? I don't know. But he mentions something even more interesting and says, We observed also, with the highest part of the island, some caverns hewn out of the solid rock, which seem to have been the dwelling places of the first inhabitants. There were also two or three structures here, which appeared to have been once appropriated for religious uses. Perhaps they were Portuguese churches, because the Portuguese might have occupied the island. And he notes something pretty interesting. What serves to confirm this opinion is But the thing is, these weren't churches or homes. These were tombs. And based on the presence of these crosses, many of them probably once belonged to the island's long-gone early Christian community, also represented by the sizable remains of a whole monastery. But before we get to that, we gotta talk about these tombs. There are some 83 of them, dating from the 1st to 7th centuries AD, across Carth. Seemingly mainly in its rocky interior, and in all different shapes and sizes. Some are apparently so small and shallow that they couldn't actually fit whole bodies. So they were probably used by Zoroastrians as astidines, receptacles for the cleaned bones of people whose flesh had already been exposed to the elements and had already rotten. And many of the tombs are also right above carvings of supposedly Nestorian-style crosses and Syriac inscriptions. These crosses could potentially belong to literally any sect, though, so there's no hard proof these guys had to be Nestorian. And we'll get to what those are soon. But we do actually know some of the names of some of the ancient people buried here, based on these inscriptions. Like, for example, some inscriptions read as Tomb of Thomas and Thecla and Tomb of Thomas and for his son. Though I don't know which specifically these are referring to. There could also be another one referencing Christ, made up of Akai and Sigma in Greek, so the initials for Christos in Greek. There's an interesting theory that these and some of the other Iranian tombs with crosses carved around them, like at Istikr, which I didn't know about, but which looks like a pretty cool ancient site, might actually belong to Zoroastrians, who lived at the time of the Islamic conquest and didn't want their tombs rotten. But personally, I think this alternative theory is more likely, that they belong to a local group of Iranian Mesopotamian Nestorians who were maybe trying to syncretize or reconcile Zoroastrian and Christian customs, to a degree. And there are also a bunch of pit graves cut into the surface of the rock that might belong to a resident Jewish community, which might fit with the graffito depicting a menorah carved onto one of the walls of one of the biggest tombs on the island, known as the Eastern Tomb, which also contains an inscription in Aramaic Syriac. I wasn't able to find out what that reads, but there is one Judeo-Aramaic graffito, which seems to date to around 50 AD, and ominously reads, Is the world bright in the tomb? And not what it was? Our world here is darkness. There's a large tomb, almost identical to the Eastern Tomb, creatively named the Southern Tomb, which is a few meters deeper, 13 meters. The other one is around 9 meters deep. And this Southern Tomb is a bit more ornately decorated. They both have mock colonnades built into their rock-cut facades, and the Eastern Tomb has little niches representing windows and doors, vestibules after that, and a bigger main chamber beyond that. Branching off of those are 19 to 20 little decorated loculi, for what else but bodies. I mean, they're tombs. What did you expect? Puppies and rainbows? The Southern Tomb's standout feature is a relief facing the entrance, depicting someone reclining on a couch and holding a cup in their left hand, paralleling similar imagery from the Persian frontier, like at Palmyra, Edessa, Hatra, and Dura-Europos, and might represent whoever the tomb owner was. Though it was also a popular pose to depict Hercules in at the time, in Iran specifically. There's also another relief of Nike or Taiki or some guardian spirit on top of a globe, which seems to have been one of two flanking the tomb's main loculus, or burial chamber. But it's not very well preserved. There's actually quite a lot of debate over who made these big tombs, and what they say about Karg Island's connections to the rest of the world in the first few centuries AD, when they probably date to. The most popular theory is that they were built by merchants from the great commercial hub of Palmyra, in what's now Syria, and that's what their entry on Google Maps seems to suggest. There's even speculation that the Palmyrenes established a whole colony, or fonduc, on the island, maybe to better facilitate the trade of goods from India. This theory is further reinforced by other evidence suggesting Palmyrenes were pretty active in the Gulf, specifically in conjunction with a kingdom based in southern Mesopotamia known as Cherusene. Cherusene broke off from the crumbling Greek Seleucid Empire under a former satrap named Hispausenes, or Aspasene, in the late 2nd century BC. A Greek inscription from Bahrain, then known as Tylos, that honors him, also names a certain Kepsidorus, as Stratagos of Tylos and of the island, which might have included Kark. And we know that in the ensuing centuries, at least one Palmyrene was used to fill this role, because of a bilingual Greek Palmyrene inscription from Palmyra itself, dating to 131 AD. It also mentions Tylos in conjunction with a Palmyrene guy named Yarhai, who served as satrapes diluanon, i.e. a satrap of the Diluanoi, or inhabitants of Tylos, i.e. Bahrain, under the king of Cherusene at the time, Meridades, or Mithridates. So maybe these tombs were built for Palmyrenes serving in some capacity under the kings of Cherusene. Oh, and by the way, there's a theory that Kark gets its name from the nearby capital of Cherusene, which had a pretty awesome name, Charak Spazinu, a major emporium at the mouth of the Tigris and head of the Gulf around where Basra is today. And even more interestingly, Charak Spazinu was originally founded by Alexander the Great himself as Alexandria on the Tigris, and it's actually recently been rediscovered. But there is also another competing theory that the tombs were instead built by Nabataean merchants, you know, the guys who became so rich off of controlling Arabian incense caravans that they were able to build Petra. This was suggested in the early 2000s by archaeologist Mary Joseph Steed, who extensively excavated the island. And it's possible that both merchant cities were involved with the island at different times. Maybe it was initially a stop on the Nabataean caravan routes, but then after Rome annexed the Nabataean kingdom in 106 AD, they were replaced in that role by Palmyrenes. But this 2014 article is careful to point out that the Palmyrene and Nabataean theories are only based on stylistic analysis and are ultimately just tentative. So in other words, who knows? However, one paper from 2023, written by Ahmad Haidari and Lucia Novikova, even goes so far as to attribute individual owners to the two tombs. It's pretty interesting. They identify the eastern tomb as the resting place of a Jewish merchant active in Cherak Spasinu called Ananias, who eventually wound up basically ruling a little kingdom in the Armenian highlands called Adiabene and is said to have converted it to Judaism in the 30s AD, which is pretty wild. They also tried to spread it in Cherak Spasinu. I guess that would certainly explain the menorah. The tombs are also reportedly similar in design to tombs from Kerbet Shema near Jerusalem, though it's also pretty similar to local Elamayan tombs, and the carvings of the menorah and the other decorative elements are of such low quality that it's been theorized they might just be later additions. They identified the southern tomb as the tomb of a specific king of Cherasim, the Mithridates mentioned in the inscription from Palmyra. One coin of his from around 130 AD calls him King of Omana, which might be a reference to him capturing the ancient port of Eddur in what's now the UAE. And the merchants of Cherak Spasinu erected this fancy bronze statue of Hercules now in the Iraq Museum in his honor. So clearly he was active to some extent in the Gulf. The authors don't mention this, but the reason why he might have built his tomb on this little island instead of on the mainland is because Mithridates was eventually ousted by the Parthian Shah Vologases IV around 150 AD because he belonged to another rival branch of the Arsacid dynasty they both belonged to. That's actually recorded by this same statue, which was brought to Seleucia around modern Baghdad by Vologases as a trophy. But again, these tombs don't have any names on them, so I doubt we'll ever truly know who they actually belonged to. Regardless, and rather strangely, nothing is known about the community that provided the people who actually made and used the burials or the harbor that must have been on the island at the time. Though it's possible that they lie under the modern settlement on the northeast end of the island. The identity of the people behind Karg's other main ancient site, this Christian monastery around the middle of the island's west coast is also a bit of a mystery. It's usually attributed to a sect known as the Nestorians, who split off from Orthodox Christianity under a defrocked patriarch of Constantinople named Nestorius in the early 5th century AD, and then managed to push pretty deep into Asia. Like, for example, Kublai Khan's mother was a Nestorian Christian, and it made its way to China well before that. It also had a strong presence in Persia. But there's also a possibility that its builders were Monophysites, followers of another doctrine that split off from the rest of the church a bit later in the 5th century. But regardless, despite how important this large complex must have been in its time, and the fact that it's been called the largest single document of Christian archaeology in the Persian Gulf region, no contemporary references to it have survived. And this was a pretty substantial set of buildings whose plastered stone walls still stand upwards of two meters tall. It was made up of a large enclosure, 96 by 85 meters, contained within a walled precinct featuring two entrances, a library comprised of two large rooms with its bookcases made up of a double row of niches along its walls still surviving. So this place probably hosted a pretty hefty book collection for its time, a reflectory for gatherings with a little bench along the walls. There also seems to have been an infirmary and a walled garden with its own well. And it contains 19 or 20 almost identical 5 by 4 cells for the monks. And there are three rooms to a cell, so there might have been like 60 of them. And all these cells opened into a shared courtyard, bringing them. And of course, there was a church measuring some 30 by 15 meters that could probably fit some 100 people. And it was covered in beautiful stucco decoration, some of which was photographed when the site was excavated by French archaeologists Roman and Tanya Gershman at the close of the 50s. A grave was also uncovered in the southeastern corner of the northern gallery of the church, which contains the skulls of four people. It can be presumed that these are probably the relics of saints, possibly martyrs. A faint bit of Arabic text written in charcoal on the slab covering the tomb reads, this was the tomb which was restored by Halil. So ultimately, this whole compound covers some 8,000 square meters. It's possible that the Christian community moved there because it was a refuge during the brutal persecutions spearheaded by Shapur II, the Sassanid shah in the 4th century. But all the ceramics found there were from the 9th century, and they're pretty similar to what's been found elsewhere in Iran from the time period, so probably not. It's also very similar to another seemingly contemporary complex on Bylaka Island, on the opposite side of the Gulf at a place called Al-Qusur, to the point where one Japanese scholar said that they have the same exact architectural concept. These were possibly founded by a disciple or someone connected to a guy named Abraham of Kashgar, a 6th century guy from southern Iraq who introduced a new, more orderly kind of monastery to his homeland after visiting some in Egypt. After being persecuted, Nestorians became an important minority in the Sassanid empire that occasionally filled positions in government and acted on behalf of the shah. For example, Yazdegerd I sent the Nestorian Catholicos Ahai to investigate pirate attacks on the ships returning from India and Sri Lanka. And they had even more connections to Indian trade routes because there was a Nestorian metropolitan based at Rev Ardashir, the main Sassanid port on the Gulf, near modern Bashar, very close to Kharg, who was reportedly responsible for the churches as far away as India. And it's even possible that there were Sassanid merchant colonies and missionaries east of Sri Lanka as far away as Malaya. So you know what that means? There's a non-zero chance that some ancient Persians shipwrecked on North Sentinel Island on their way across the Indian Ocean. Or maybe they just sighted the silhouettes and bonfires of the Sentinelese from afar. I don't know. Fun hat canon. This monastery was also hooked up to cisterns and subterranean channels that brought water to create farmland in the adjacent wadis. And there were some artificial stone dams nearby meant to irrigate new arable land. There's also this giant circular water tank next to it. And this big, deep earthenware oven for baking holy bread. And it's possible that this community survived even after the Islamic conquest. A local Manchi, working for the British in 1838, don't ask why they were there, we'll get to that, informed them that the island had been conquered by the forces of the Caliph Omar in 650. And that he then killed any of the fire-worshipping Hindus there who refused to convert. Ibn Khordadbeh, in his book of Roads and Kingdoms, written in the 9th century, seems to be the first person to mention Karg by something approximating its modern name. And throughout the medieval Islamic period, it's briefly mentioned in various books, though only because it produced things like dates and grapes and palms, and was engaged in trade. And like many places in the Gulf, pearly. In a book known as the Hudud Al-Alam of 982, the island is dubbed a superior source of pearls. And Karg's role as a source of fine pearls might also be reflected in even older classical texts that seem to maybe possibly be alluding to Karg. Strabo might mention it as an island known for its valuable pearls, and Isidorus of Charox seems to mention it again when he talks about how reed rafts were floated all around a certain island in the Gulf, so divers could use them to dive 20 fathoms, or 36 meters deep, to obtain precious double-shelled oysters. The island also became known as the best place to pick up pilots to navigate the Shat al-Araf leading to Basra. But beyond that, some of the island's most impressive relics are actually from this medieval Islamic period. And the most standout of these is this giant pyramidal mausoleum dedicated to a sheikh named Mir Muhammad ibn Hanafiyeh, which is thought to date to the year 738 in the Islamic calendar, or the year 1337. I really like the pyramid made out of cubes on the top of it. Very unique. It was possibly commissioned by a guy named Khutb al-Din Tahamtan II, who apparently ruled Hormuz between 1318 and 1347, and supposedly conquered Karg sometime around this point. But that's literally all he's known for, so who knows. Later European occupants of the island pointed to the cross-shaped decoration here as evidence that this was actually a repurposed Portuguese church, but that's probably not the case. I don't know many Portuguese churches that look like this. And speaking of the Portuguese, they were in the area in the 16th and 17th centuries, and they even established big castles on other islands further south in the Persian Gulf, like Hormuz Island and Qeshm Island. But there don't seem to be any definitive traces of them on Karg. But another European power that occupied the island was the Dutch East India Company. From at least 1754 to 1766, Karg Island, then known as Karak or Karik, acted as a free port under the Dutch flag and hosted a pretty substantial but now lost VOC fort, garrisoned by some a hundred European soldiers known as Fort Mosselstein. Here's how Edward Ives, who saw it in person in 1758, describes it. The fort is a square built of stone with four bastions, each of which hath eight guns mounted upon it. Before the gate, facing the sea, was a battery of ravelin with twelve guns mounted from six to eighteen pounders. There were also thirty or forty more of various sizes lying upon the ground for want of carriages. The irregularity in the weight of cannon was owing to the barons being obliged to get them as he could from different ships, and at several times. And this baron Ives mentions, who basically ruled the island for the VOC, has to be, hands down, the most interesting person in Karg Island's history. Despite how scattered the info on him is, he was baron Tito Frederik van Nippausen, who hailed from the small lordship of Gordens in Prussian-controlled East Frisia. Even though that's pretty close to the Netherlands, the baron first worked for the Prussians, since his father was apparently one of their ambassadors. And then, he served the French for a while, before finally winding up with the VOC. Originally, he'd been based in the VOC factory in Ottoman-ruled Basra, but that came to an end in 1751, after the local ruler held him hostage and extorted some fifty thousand rupees out of him in exchange for his release, under the pretenses that he'd been illegally sleeping with local Muslim women, which was a big no-no. It's possible that this was a result of the scheming of the English East India Company, also in the city, though apparently Baron Nippausen did have a penchant for love affairs. So, in revenge, he came back in 1753 with three ships to blockade Basra, successfully extorting a hundred thousand rupees out of his former captors. So, you know what goes around, comes around, I guess. At around the same time, he paid Mir Nasr al-Zabi, or Wakai, the Arab ruler of the nearby city of Bandar Rig on the Iranian coast, two thousand rupees to obtain Karg Island. Of course, he did come with a bunch of well-armed ships, so I'm not sure if he would have accepted a no. In conjunction with this, he also closed down the VOC factories in other Iranian port cities, like Bushehr and Bandar Abbas, because his pitch to the governor-general of the VOC in Batavia, modern Jakarta, was that with exclusive control over Karg Island, they'd be free from having to deal with troublesome local officials. On his new island, Baron Niphausen apparently spent the rest of his time acting like royalty while being surrounded by a loyal guard of African soldiers and experimenting with a newfangled diving bell because of all the pearls in the deep waters around the island. Lately, the divers there weren't having much success in getting to them, so the VOC's governor-general sent him a diving bell. Unfortunately, it didn't come with any instructions, so they never got it to work. Baron Niphausen was also keen for the VOC to take over Bahrain, because Ghekhalin is there, obviously. He also seems to have been fond of gentlemanly French literature. When he hosted Edward Ives in 1758, he gave him a huge list of books to send back to him from England, including Voltaire, Don Quixote, and a bunch of histories and works on science. Otherwise, Baron Niphausen is best known for being the first person to ever mention the Al-Sabah family in a report of his from 1756. And from around that point until now, that family has ruled Kuwait as its emirs. A Catholic church was also built in 1757, and it became the focus of what was then the largest Catholic community in Persia, which included the Catholic German mercenaries and the garrison. But even the Bishop of Isfahan moved his seat to the island. But in 1759, Baron Niphausen left Karg and was replaced there by his deputy, a guy named Jan van der Hoelst. Amidst what seems to have been a lot of turmoil, the various kinglets and tribes and the empires backing them across the Gulf got to raiding each other, of course, set behind the backdrop of them all either being Arab, Turk, or Persian. In 1765, the Dutch on Karg also hosted a slightly better known figure, German mathematician, cartographer, and travel writer Karsten Niebuhr, who was part of something called And apparently, like cosplaying as an Arab, if this engraving says anything, but at the very beginning of the following year, the Dutch were expelled from the island, though they'd already decided to close down the fort themselves because it just wasn't as profitable as they'd hoped. In January of 1766, another ruler of Bandar Rig, the piratical Mir Muhanna, the son of the one who'd sold Karg to the Dutch initially, successfully captured the fort and expelled the Dutch. After they'd tried assisting this guy, the ruler of Iran, against him, Mir Muhanna had been forced to relocate from the mainland to the little island of Karko, which is this one, just north of Karg. So the Dutch tried their luck at assaulting it, but they failed. After sustaining significant losses, Mir Muhanna in turn assaulted Karg and took it from the defenders on January 3rd of 1766, so right at the beginning of the year. Even though he compounded their stuff as booty, because remember, pirate, he did let them go and even gave them some shifts to get them to the mainland. And thus the VOC's territorial ambitions in the Gulf were forever put to an end. Eventually, Karim Khan won out against Mir Muhanna three years later, in January of 1769, after an angry mob overthrew him. Following that, both the British East India Company and the French agent of the French Compagnie des Indes in Basra vied to get permission to annex the island, which didn't work out for the British, but apparently did work out for the French, and they were given permission to do it. They just never acted on it, for whatever reason. And they were even given permission to take it yet again in 1807, when the representatives of both Napoleon and the magnificently bearded Fatih Ali Shah, second Shah of the Qajar dynasty, brokered a treaty in a Polish palace called the Treaty of Finkenstein, which entailed that the French would be given Karg Island if they'd helped the Shah conquer Georgia. But Napoleon wound up never doing that, so it was shelved, and relations between the two broke down. But the British, as ever, would certainly be back. The first time the British occupied the island was either in 1837 or the summer of 1838, as part of a spat with Qajar Persia, known as the First Harat War, in order to put more pressure on the Qajar dynasty, themselves assisted by some Russian diplomats and advisors, to withdraw from a siege they were conducting against the rebellious city of Harat. In what's now Afghanistan, which in turn sought the protection of the British in India, who thought it was key to the defense of their frontier. This was during the Great Game between Britain and Russia, so they both had insane geopolitical mental gymnastics. After that, the British occupied Karg yet again in December of 1856, as part of the fully-fledged Anglo-Persian War, again stoked by the Qajars pursuing their claims to Harat. And this time, the British took the island so it could be used as a staging ground to capture the nearby port city of Bushehr. The Iranians later took the island back, of course, and apparently the Iranian garrison there reused the citadel of the old and otherwise crumbling Dutch port. Along with this gaggle of European powers, the Arab rulers of the nearby city of Bandar Rig also continuously exerted control over the island, on and off. Then, in the early 20th century, Karg was apparently converted into a prison for political exiles under the first Pahlavi Shah, Reza Shah, but after he was ousted by a joint British-Soviet invasion in 1941 and under his son, the last Shah, the island was made into the major crude export hub it is today. In 1956, oil reservoirs meant to hold oil piped from the Gach Saran petroleum fields were built on the island and it sent out the first major shipment of the stuff in August of 1960. And if you compare aerial images of the island from even just the 1960s to what it looks like today, you can see how insanely built up it's become since then, despite being heavily bombed in the 80s during the Iran-Iraq war. And unfortunately, it's entered yet another dark period in its history. But if that history says anything, I think most of all, it's a good reminder that regardless of whatever might be happening right now, everything eventually passes into the depths of history and the same physical location can witness what are basically completely different worlds. And hopefully, sooner rather than later, the island and the region as a whole witnesses a more peaceful version of that world yet again. Thank you guys so much for watching. I know that I said in my last video that my next video would be the Pyramids Iceberg and I'm still working on that. Don't worry, that will probably be the next video for real this time. But I just had to go with this idea because it got express approval from J.J. McCullough himself. I'm not kidding. So you know I had to go for it. And I also just released two polls about whether I should start an audio-only series and whether or not you'd ever want to see something like the forgotten archaeology of microstates, something like that. Which I'm only saying because I know only real faro-nerd aficionados are going to be watching this. Anyways, speaking of such great people, I'd like to thank Dhruv Singhal, Bhajan, Harrison Timperley, Doc Bossman, Kevin Ryan, Ayanami Amemami, Bomb Tombadil, Danny Banani, Little Bluebird, James Kirk, Booga420, Alyssa P, Mark Elliott Cullen, Chema Kwizbitzki, Jack Lester, Mithra Dades, Jake the Snake, Liv Buller, Havisagar, Alex Clark, Jess Sullivan, Akune, Mark Krupnik, Mihonido, Michael, DaisiesforGhosts, Prince of Men, Julie Lowes, The Spoofer, Emily Kujo, Stevon, Gryphon Frost, Hippolyta, Magnum the Broker, Julia Erickson, JP Van Splunder, Joseph Talley, Petra S, Generic Brand, Ryan Gregg, Glubberbob 20 Trillion, Skiku, Mason, Brad Brandonwood, Giovanna Lazzarini, Patrick Darius Gromodka, Artem, Chris J, Max S, The History Enjoyer, Daniel, Battery Stapler, Machado De Asis, Menda Pruska, Alex Palachichio, Lazy Ram, Weston Van Diver, Boardlord, It's Premium, Yog, Jane Geeky, Theodore, Ice, Kate Dalgleish, Cameron Llewellyn, Lori Weeks, Brent O, CJ Carrera, Trico, Kevin Chachowski, Alko, Nigel, Leland Swallow, Artill, Aspergirl, Dr. Kickass, Brandon Fint, DJ PandaBear52, and of course, the newest patrons, Nonprofit Prophet, Umar, YesAndNo, and finally, Rebecca Baker. Thank you all so very much, and see ya in the next video.