Page 272 - The Tigris Expedition

Tigris and the Superships: the Voyage to Pakistan

sites of Ur, Uruk, Lagash and Susa up to Kish, Tell Asmar and
Brak, the latter site inside the borders of present-day Syria. Contact
must have been quite considerable for so many and such far-flung
fingerprints to be left even to our day. I have never seen a more
beautiful Indus Valley seal than one ornamented with rows of
Indian elephants and rhinoceros, found by archaeologists at Tell
Asmar in Iraq and on exhibit in Baghdad Museum.
Like Makan, some archaeologists have suspected that Meluhha
was in Africa, and for the same reason: that the late Assyrian kings,
returning from overland campaigns on Mediterranean shores, left
inscriptions that Makan and Meluhha were both located some­
where south of Egypt. Thus the scholar Kramer, who placed
Makan in upper Egypt, suspected that Meluhha was Ethiopia.2
Bibby on the other hand, after his excavations disclosing extensive
Sumerian contacts with Bahrain, wrote:

But it is difficult to fit an African location to the text of the Ur
tablets or to the facts of archaeology. Distance alone was a factor,
and though I had never been conservative in my estimation of the
distances which trading vessels could cover I could not ignore the
fact that the sailing distance from Bahrain to Africa was twice
that from Bahrain to India. Ivory and gold, which were products
of Meluhha, could come equally well from Africa and from India,
but the carnelian of Meluhha could only come from Rajputana in
India.3

Indeed, when he showed us his excavations of the prehistoric city
port on Bahrain, half the size of mighty Ur, Bibby emphasised that
he had found an Indus Valley seal just inside the harbour gate. He
had also found an Indus Valley flint weight that made him suspect
closer trade relations between Bahrain and the Indus Valley than
between Bahrain and Mesopotamia, which was only a third of the
distance away. Even before he saw the strength and buoyancy of
our reed-ship in the harbour of Bahrain, Bibby had expressed his
confidence in the early sailors of the Dilmun runs:

These merchants who were raising capital and assembling cargo
for the voyages to Dilmun were not investing in some wild
argosy to a mythical land of immortality beyond the horizon of
the known world. This was routine business; it was the way they
made their living. Nor should we imagine that the trading was
carried on exclusively by Mesopotamians. Two of the people

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