The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c21.3

c21.3

Between the two civilizations ensued a sufficiently active interrelationship to carry seals and other knick-knacks westwards to Sumer and, more rarely, Sumerian or Iranian objects eastwards to the Indus. At the back of this trifling interchange was presumably a more ample trade in perishable commodities such as incense, cotton, perhaps slaves and timber; the unsuitability of both climates for the preservation of organic material prevents certainty. But the surviving evidence of this interchange is not impressive in bulk, and it is likely enough that many of the inter-regional resemblances, particularly in matters of religion (pp. 80 and 84), owe more to community of inheritance than to trade. It is improbable that Gilgamesh, for example, was carried from Sumer to Mohenjo-daro like so much merchandise and there equipped, as we seem to find him, with adopted tigers instead of lions; certainly it is easier to postulate an ancestral Gilgamesh native to both civilizations and absorbed independently into the two environments. For there is on the whole a notable absence of intellectual borrowing between the material cultures of the two regions. In a vague sense the artificial mountain of the ziggurat and the artificial mountain of the Indus citadel may be thought to reflect a comparable hierarchical polity. The regimented cantonment of Harappā may suggest the priest-controlled industries of Sumer. It may even be permissible to propose a priest-king for Mohenjo-daro. But all these points of resemblance, real or imagined, may be ascribed rather to the inherent cousinship of a social phase than to literal, local interchange. They are common generalities, the product of stray seeds readily fertilized in similar historical and geographical settings. The particularities, on the other hand, show abundant and significant local variation. In such sculptural art as the Indus has produced there is no real affinity with the sculpture of Sumer. No one would mistake a stone carving from Mohenjo-daro for one from Tell Asmar. The Indus terra-cottas are in a different world from those of Mesopotamia. The art of the Harappan seals has no close parallel in the whole history of glyptic. And the Indus language, in so far as its features may be dimly determined through the veil of its unread script, differed as its script differed from that of Sumer and owed no more to this than the basic *idea*, perhaps, of written record. The integrity of the Indus civilization stands unchallenged.