Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.194

c12.194

Unfortunately evidence of the complementary aspect of this trade, Sumerian goods in the Indus Valley or the Punjab, is scanty. There are three cylinder-seals from Mohenjo-daro - a purely Sumerian type, here probably made by a Harappā lapidary for clients who seem to have acquired outlandish tastes in such matters: can they have been retired cotton-merchants home from Sumer? There is a little bronze toilet-set which could be called Sumerian; there may be the reed shroud in the R 37 cemetery - really there is very little else that can definitely be attributed to Sumerian contacts. Whatever the nature of the Harappā-Sumer trade agreement, the Sumerian contribution must have consisted largely of invisible exports! The etched carnelian beads to which reference has already been made may be imports from Sumer to India, although the fact that they were apparently manufactured at Chanhu-daro, and that their curious technique of manufacture survives in Sind to the present day, rather suggests that they were an Indian invention of the third millennium B.C. Nevertheless, they appear in greater numbers in Sumer, from Early Dynastic to Akkadian times, and a little beyond, than in Harappā sites, and they occur as far afield as Ras Shamra in Syria and Trialeti in the Caucasus in a probably third-millennium grave. As there is a possibility, however, that the technique was re-discovered independently in later times, they could represent a Sumerian import to India.