Trade between the Indus and Mesopotamia

The story

An interpreter at Akkad?

In the Louvre in Paris there is a small stone cylinder with a carved design, a seal from the time of Akkad. A line of writing says, according to the most widespread interpretation, that it belongs to a certain Shu-ilishu, “interpreter of the language of Meluhha”. Some scholars dispute the reading, but the idea is fascinating: already more than four thousand years ago, in Mesopotamia, there was someone whose job was to translate from the language of a distant country. That country, Meluhha, was probably the Indus valley.

For the Sumerians and Akkadians, the world was divided into three great regions overseas, mentioned in the texts of that period. Dilmun was the island of Bahrain and the nearby coast; Magan was the Oman peninsula; Meluhha was the far east, the land of the Indus. An inscription of King Sargon says that at his quay at Akkad ships from all three docked. Mesopotamian merchants, it seems, did not have a real empire across the sea, but a very dense network of exchanges.

What was sold and what was bought

Mesopotamia was rich in grain, wool and textiles, but poor in metals, stone and wood. That is why it imported almost everything that craftsmen and temples needed. From Magan came copper, which was mined in large mines, and diorite, a dark and extremely hard stone from which statues of kings were carved. From Meluhha came fine wood, ivory, gold, red carnelian beads, lapis lazuli and, according to the texts, exotic animals. Almost everything passed through Dilmun, a centre of trade, and there one found pearls, dates and goods in transit. In exchange Mesopotamia sent barley, wool, clothing and oil.

From Afghanistan, then, lapis lazuli set out, the most precious blue stone. The people of the Indus valley had founded a trading centre of their own right near the mines, at Shortugai, and from there the lapis lazuli travelled down to the cities of the Indus and, by sea and by land, to Ur and even to Egypt. The famous necklace of Queen Puabi, at Ur, and the decorations of the Standard of Ur contain lapis lazuli that had come from thousands of kilometres away.

The material evidence

We do not have only texts. In many Mesopotamian cities, including Ur, Kish and Susa, archaeologists have found square Indus seals, with the “unicorn” and the still undeciphered script. In the tombs of Ur there are carnelian necklaces with white designs made by a chemical process typical of the Indus valley. In the Gulf countries, such as Failaka in Kuwait and Bahrain, stone weights appear with the same measures as the Indus cities. On the other side, at Lothal in India, objects that came from the Gulf have been found. They are traces that two worlds so far apart knew each other.

At Lothal, in Gujarat, there is also a large brick structure, more than two hundred metres long, which some archaeologists have considered an artificial harbour, a basin for ships. Other scholars think it was a water tank or one for irrigation. The debate goes on.

How people travelled

The ships were boats of wood and reeds, with a sail and a rudder, able to hug the coast for days. Some Indus seals and clay models show boats, even with a mast. From the Indus valley to Mesopotamia people sailed along the coast of what is now Pakistan, Iran and Oman, stopping in ports, following the seasons of the winds. The journey could last weeks, but it brought enormous profits. Other goods took the land route, with caravans of donkeys across the plateaus of Iran.

A market with its quarrels

Trade was carried out with contracts written on tablets. A later example, but a very lively one, comes from Ur, around 1750 BC: a customer named Nanni writes to the copper merchant Ea-nasir a furious letter because he delivered ingots of poor quality. “Who are you, that you treat me like this?”, he writes, in essence. The tablet is now in the British Museum and has been called, half jokingly, the oldest complaint letter in the world.

What became of it

Trade between the Indus and Mesopotamia lasted for a few centuries. Between about 2000 and 1800 BC, with the crisis of the Indus cities (see the card on the Indus civilisation), the ships of Meluhha became ever rarer. Dilmun and Magan carried on their exchanges with Mesopotamia for a long time. The name Meluhha, in later texts, came to mean other distant lands, such as Ethiopia: a sign that the memory of the Indus valley had been lost.