Pramod Subbaraman 🦷 🇮🇳 🇬🇧 🇮🇱

Four thousand years ago, Indian merchants were living in Mesopotamia in large enough numbers to have a village of their own and a professional interpreter to deal with them. Texts from Lagash written towards the end of the third millennium BC, record a village of Meluhha inside Sumerian territory. Meluhha is the Sumerian name for Indus-Sarasvati lands. The Louvre holds the cylinder seal of a man called Shu-ilishu, whose inscription describes him as an interpreter of the Meluhhan language. Around 2300 BC, Sargon of Akkad boasted that ships from Meluhha, Magan and Dilmun were moored at the quay of his capital, Agade. Indus seals have been found at Ur, Kish and Nippur, while hardly any Mesopotamian seals or objects have been found in the subcontinent, suggesting the pro-active merchants were Indian. The monsoon blows one way across the Arabian Sea for half the year and back for the other half, so a merchant who sailed west could spend months in a foreign port waiting for the wind to turn. This goes a long way to explaining both the village and the interpreter. The Sumerians knew perfectly well whose ships were tied up at their quays, and they wrote the name down. Episode 3 of my graphic novel, Maritime World: The True Cradle, is called The River That Fed the World and follows one of those merchants from Lothal to a Sumerian market and home again. Link in the reply.