Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.125

c7.125

Inscribed clay tablets from the city of Ur, which served as the principal port-of-entry into Mesopotamia in the time of the Dynasty of Larsa (c. 1950 B.C.), show that sailors returning at that time from Telmun or Dilmun—that is, with little doubt, the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf—offered a share of their cargoes at the temple of the goddess Ningal. Gold, silver, much copper, lapis lazuli in lumps, stone beads, ivory combs and ornaments and inlays, eye-paint, certain kinds of wood, and perhaps pearls ('fish-eyes') are mentioned.⁵⁵ But in this period Telmun was merely an intermediate market at which the Ur shippers bartered their stocks for goods brought to the island from 'Makkan' and 'Meluhha', two places of which the identity is conjectural. This practice had not always prevailed. In the time of Sargon of Akkad (c. 2350 B.C.) we hear of ships from or destined for Meluhha, Makkan and Telmun as moored in the harbour outside the capital. Some at least of the trade with these places was then direct, using Telmun doubtless for revictualling purposes rather than as a commercial intermediary. Later, under the 3rd Dynasty of Ur (c. 2100 B.C.), we find that trade was still sustained with Makkan and Telmun, but that Meluhha was now out of direct reach, although copper, stone, wood, ivory objects and certain breeds of animals were still somehow obtained from there. Later again, under the Dynasty of Larsa, Telmun monopolizes the role of middleman; and sometime between the fall of the Larsa Dynasty and the decline of the Hammurabi Dynasty (c. 1700 B.C.) Telmun lost contact with the mining centres of Makkan and its ancillary sources. The implication of this record of dwindling trade is that Telmun, Makkan and Meluhha lay at successively greater distances from Mesopotamia; and if to this inference be added the association of the ultimate Meluhha with ivory, wood and copper, its identification with the Indus Civilization (with its forests and elephants and its sources of copper in Rājasthān) becomes probable. It matches, too, with the archaeological evidence. Ivory-working was an Indus craft; one of the victims of the last massacre at Mohenjo-daro, for instance, was attempting to carry away an elephant's tusk when he was cut down. And the main stream of Indus relics recovered from identified strata in the Mesopotamian cities dates from the Sargonid period of direct contact with Meluhha, with a diminishing trickle into the Larsa period of indirect contact. With that maritime enterprise which characterized ancient Indian trade in many ages, we may imagine cargoes of woods and metals and ivory—and why not also apes and peacocks, both familiar to the Indus artist—setting sail from the Indus ports in the heyday of the Civilization; and in the sequel, with the long-drawn-out decline which, as will be seen, is evident in later civic standards, it is easy to visualize a corresponding decline in the scope and volume of overseas traffic. Inference from the records and the material evidence are at one.