Viewed from above, the monastery on Siniyah Island’s floor plan suggests early Christian worshippers prayed within a single-aisle church at the monastery. Rooms within appear to hold a baptismal font, as well as an oven for baking bread or wafers for communion rites. A nave also likely held an altar and an installation for communion wine.

Next to the monastery sits a second building with four rooms, likely around a courtyard – possibly the home of an abbot or even a bishop in the early church.

The find was announced on Thursday, when Noura bint Mohammed al-Kaabi, the country’s culture and youth minister, and Sheikh Majid bin Saud al-Mualla, the chairman of the Umm al-Quwain’s Tourism and Archaeology Department and a son of the emirate’s ruler visited the site. The island remains part of the ruling family’s holdings.

The Culture Ministry has sponsored part of the dig which continues. Nearby archaeologists found a collection of buildings they believe belongs to a pre-Islamic village.

Elsewhere on the island, piles of tossed-aside clams from pearl hunting form massive hills. Not far away sits the remains of a village that the British blew up in 1820 before the region became part of what was known as the Trucial States, the precursor of the UAE. That village’s destruction brought about the creation of the modern-day settlement of Umm al-Quwain on the mainland.

Historians say early churches and monasteries spread along the Persian Gulf to the coasts of present-day Oman and all the way to India. Archaeologists have made similar finds in Bahrain, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

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The first Christian monastery in the UAE was found on Sir Bani Yas Island, off the coast of Abu Dhabi in the early 1990s. Today a nature reserve and site of luxury hotels. It dates to the same period as the new find in Umm al-Quwain.

Evidence of early life along the Khor al-Beida marshlands in Umm al-Quwain dates as far back as the Neolithic period – suggesting continuous human habitation in the area for at least 10,000 years, Power said.

Today, the area is better known for the low-cost liquor store at the emirate’s Barracuda Beach Resort. A further $US675 million ($1 billion) real estate development is planned for the island.

Power said that development spurred the archaeological work that discovered the monastery. That site and others will be fenced off and protected, he said.

“It’s a really fascinating discovery.”

AP