Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c11.154

c11.154

This evidence of Sumerian trade with the Makran and Baluchistan and the presence of Indian merchants in the great cities of Elam and Sumer in Early Dynastic times is, of course, of first-rate importance. That the connexions were with South Baluchistan and not with the Indus Valley or the Harappā Culture seems clear enough, and we shall see that it was not until five hundred years later that the trade between the Indus and the Twin Rivers was established. Again, it seems likely that trade was by sea and not overland, for there is no trace of Kulli contacts landwards farther west than Bampur, just over the border into Persian Makran, and the Fars province of Persia, though explored by Stein, has produced no evidence of Kulli colonization or trade, but only cultures characterized by a long-persisting painted pottery style, based on that of Tal-i-Bakun, but surviving for many centuries. An ancient Indian legend which found its way into the *Jātakas*, or reincarnation stories of Buddha, was of the merchants who went by sea from India to the land of Babylon, bringing with them among other rarities a peacock trained ‘to scream at the snapping of the fingers and to dance at the clapping of the hands’, which ‘stood in the forepart of the vessel and, flapping its wings, uttered a sweet sound and danced’. In such stories may be enshrined the vague traditions of prehistoric trade, and of the merchants coming with ivory, apes and peacocks, precious ointments in strange stone pots, an alien tongue and religious customs, from the Makran to the wharves of Sumer early in the third millennium B.C.