Page 313 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
The high degree of engineering skill achieved by the Lothal
folk can be understood from the ingenious way in which they
could regulate the flow of water into the dock at high and low
tides. They could ensure flotation of ships in the basin by sliding a
door in the vertical grooves of the flanking walls of the spillway
at low water. Excess water was allowed to escape by keeping the
spillway open at high water. In no other port of the Bronze Age,
1 early or late, has an artificial dock with water-locking arrange­
i ments been found. In fact, in India itself, hydraulic engineering
made no further progress in post-Harappan times.
1
What did the Indus empire have at Lothal? Rao shows that this
\ was the warehouse of a rich rice, cotton and wheat-growing
: hinterland. Besides, the port had its own bead factories and was also
an important centre for ivory-working. Carnelian was imported
? from inland, but finds of tusks and elephant bones indicate that
I elephants were reared on the spot. The principal exports of Lothal,
says Rao, were ivory, beads of carnelian and steatite, shell inlays
and, perhaps, cotton and cotton goods. With Lothal as a major port,
the Indus civilisation qualifies well as Meluhha from where the
carnelian beads, ivory and steatite reached ancient Mesopotamia,
directly or indirectly by way of Bahrain. Rao also uncovered a
terracotta head of‘a bearded man with Sumerian features’ which to
him indicated contacts to the west, and in a merchant’s house in
Lothal’s bazaar street he excavated ‘eight gold pendants similar to
those found in the Royal Cemetery at Ur’. All this, he says, adds
i weight to the eighteen seals of Indian origin already found at Ur,
besides those found at Susa, Kish, Asmar, Hama, Lagash and Tepe
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Gawra. At Lothal he even found a circular steatite seal neither
wholly Indian nor Sumerian in workmanship, but almost identical
with those excavated by the Danes from the Dilmun level on
Bahrain. Dealing with this ‘Persian Gulf’ seal in a special report,4
Rao concludes:

Indus seals and other knick-knacks could not have travelled to
Ur, Kish, Lagash, Tell Asmar, Brak, Diyala and further beyond
but for a flourishing trade in which merchants from India and the

45. Ocean pollution; a red belt with no visible beginning or end ran
from horizon to horizon in mid-ocean.
46-47. The sun rose and the sun set as months passed by, and Tigris
was still floating high.

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