Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c11.153

c11.153

What form did this trade take? Did Sumerian ships (perhaps taking advantage of the monsoon winds) put in at the mouth of the Dasht River and barter lapis-lazuli or gold for the fashionable grey-green stone pots with their sweet-smelling contents? Or did there come to the quays of Ur foreign ships of merchants speaking an uncouth tongue and worshipping strange gods? There is some evidence that this did indeed happen, and that Baluchi traders settled in Sumer, a little closed society with its own rights and customs. On a scarlet-ware pot there is a scene of bull-worship, a religious rite not illustrated elsewhere in Sumer; there is a steatite cup from Tell Agrab in the Diyala region carved in the true Sumerian manner, but with a great humped bull who looks uncompromisingly Indian despite the fact that he was carved by a Sumerian artist. Then there is a cylinder-seal from Ur – there could be nothing so distinctively Sumerian as a cylinder-seal – which has on it a bull whose great round eye betrays his kinship with the bulls on Kulli ware and the hand of an Indian gem-cutter. Again, at Susa are clay figurines of humped bulls: the humped bull, *Bos indicus*, so essentially a symbol of Indian religion then as in contemporary Hindustan; from Susa, too, comes the scarlet-ware pot so similar in treatment to Kulli ware.