Concept · Sumerian trade toponym
Meluḫḫa
Also known as Meluḫḫa — the Mesopotamian name for the Indus
The name Sumerian and Akkadian tablets give to a distant trading partner, and the earliest written reference to the Indian subcontinent by anyone outside it. The texts are administrative rather than descriptive — they record what arrived and what it cost — and what arrived was carnelian, ivory, shell, timber, gold and copper, with Meluḫḫan interpreters and a Meluḫḫan village attested at Lagash. Most scholars identify it with the Indus civilisation, which makes these the oldest documents about India that exist.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Qualified / contested
Worth knowing
An Akkadian seal belongs to a man described as “interpreter of the Meluḫḫan language”, which is the only direct evidence anyone has that Harappan speech needed translating and that someone in Mesopotamia could do it.
The identification with the Indus is the majority view but not settled, and the etymology is disputed — Asko Parpola derives it from Dravidian mel-akam, high country, while Michael Witzel proposes a para-Munda origin.
Connections (4)
- Maritime routeDilmun / Qalʿat al-Bahrain
This is the oldest documented long-distance sea trade anywhere, and Dilmun is the middle of it. Sumerian and Akkadian tablets name three partners beyond the Gulf — Dilmun, Magan and Meluḫḫa — and Dilmun, at Bahrain, is where Meluḫḫan goods were transhipped for Mesopotamia. Indus weights, Indus-standard seals and etched carnelian beads all turn up on Bahrain, and the Dilmun seal standard is a compromise between the Mesopotamian and the Harappan. The route is attested in writing at one end and in objects at the other, which is why it can be argued about at all.
- Imperial inscription atMohenjo-daro
If Meluḫḫa is the Indus, this is what the tablets are describing. Mohenjo-daro and the other Harappan cities produced exactly the goods the Mesopotamian records list arriving from Meluḫḫa — carnelian, worked shell, ivory, hardwoods, gold — and the etched carnelian beads found at Ur and Kish are made by a technique that is Harappan and not Mesopotamian. Indus seals and weights appear in Mesopotamian contexts. The identification rests on this match of commodity lists to manufacturing evidence rather than on any statement in either script.
- Route adjacencySutkagan Dor
Sutkagan Dor on the Makran coast is the westernmost Harappan site known, and it is the kind of place the Meluḫḫa trade needed: a walled settlement on a barren shore with an anchorage, two-thirds of the way to the Gulf. Aurel Stein read it as a staging post on the coastal route and nothing since has improved on that. With Miri Qalat inland it marks the land and sea arms of the same movement of goods west, which is how carnelian and lapis reached Ur.
- AnalogueSuvarṇabhūmi (the Golden Land)
Two trade-names for a country nobody writing them had seen. Meluḫḫa is what Sumerian tablets called the place the carnelian and the shell came from, and Suvarṇabhūmi is what Indian texts called the place east of the bay. Both are directions attached to a commodity rather than borders, both were argued over for a century afterwards, and both show a coast naming its trading partner by what arrived in the hold.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Meluhha”. Asko Parpola, Deciphering the Indus Script (1994); Simo Parpola et al. on the Meluḫḫan village at Lagash; Shereen Ratnagar, Trading Encounters (2004).
Open Meluḫḫa in the repository →