Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.116

c12.116

To the foreign trade and the relations between the Harappā civilization and other powers we shall return later in this chapter. It must always be remembered that archaeology may give us a misleading impression of trade relationships, since its evidence is confined almost entirely to non-perishable materials. How much cotton was exported from prehistoric India is unknown, and, while it is probable that colonies of Indian merchants were settled in Sumerian towns, there is strangely little evidence of what was brought back to India. In the absence of a written record that can be understood we can hardly hope to know whether spices and pepper, for instance, were already in the third millennium a staple of trade with the West, or whether incense was such a marketable commodity then as in later times. Slave-traffic, too, is an archaeological imponderable to a very large extent, except where skull types may give an ambiguous clue. But the bronze of the Dancing-Girl from Mohenjo-daro, so closely representing the type of hairdressing and adornment of the Kulli Culture of South Baluchistan, does at least suggest that the merchants returning along the southerly caravan routes may have brought with them girls whose exotic dancing and unsophisticated charms might be thought to tickle the fancy of the tired business men of Harappā or Mohenjo-daro.