Page 145 - The Tigris Expedition

The Tigris Expedition
There was a quotation from an essay entitled ‘The Seafaring
Merchants of Ur’ published in a scientific journal1 by a noted
authority on Sumerian culture, A. L. Oppenheim. He was of the
opinion that the most interesting information contained in some of
the inscribed tablets from Ur

has to do with the role of the town of Ur as the ‘port of entry’ for
copper into Mesopotamia at the time of the Dynasty of Larsa.
The copper was imported by boat from Tclmun [i.c. Dilmun],
today the island of Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf. This ‘Telmun-
tradc’ was in the hands of a group of seafaring merchants —called
alik Telmun - who worked hand in hand with enterprising
capitalists in Ur to take garments to the island in order to buy
large quantities of copper there. Since the island hardly yielded
any ore - not to speak of the fuel needed for smelting - we are
faced here with a situation which is typical for international trade
on a primitive level: Telmun served as ‘market place’, a neutral
territory, in which the parties coming from various regions of the
coastal area of the gulf exchange or sell the products of their
countries. . . .
Since Telmun was only a market place, two possibilities have
to be envisaged: the ivory obtained there by the traders of Ur
could have come either from Egypt — through some unknown
commercial channel - or from India brought across the Indian
Ocean on boats sailing with the monsoon. In favor of the second
alternative speak the well established links between southern
Mesopotamia - especially Ur itself - and the civilization of the
Indus Valley. The discovery of Indian seals . . . and of specially
treated carnelian beads ... in Mesopotamian excavations has
proven beyond any doubt the existence of such trade relations.
We now may very well add ivory to the list as an item based
exclusively in Mesopotamian sources on philological evidence,
while we have from Mohenjo-Daro actual ivory combs . . .

Thanks to the deciphering of the inscribed tablets, scholars like
Oppenheim can give us a good idea of what life had been like in the
gulf ports of Mesopotamia in Sumerian times. Shipbuilding, navig­
ation and maritime commerce was the second largest occupation in
ancient Ur, surpassed only by agriculture. Maritime activities were
extremely well organised and formed the basis on which Ur
founded its economy. From Ur river boats carried the gulf trade up
the two rivers to other peoples as far north as present-day Turkey,
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