Page 319 - The Tigris Expedition

in Search of Mcluhha
In the Indus Valley f seals
Persian Gulf took an active part. The use °fsP ' rchant middle-
in different regions suggests the existence' d contracts and
men who maintained accounts, docu rcntres were
despatched sealed packages of goods;T^elr , , t coast 0f
southern Mesopotamia, the Persian Gulf and far as
India extending into the Indus valley on the one hand and as tar as
the Gulf of Cambay on the other.

A few model boats were also excavated at Lothal, crudely made
from terracotta, some flat-bottomed and others with keel, all
possibly votive or good-luck objects such as the small terracotta,
asphalt or silver boats common in Mesopotamian excavations.
Commonly crude and symbolic, there is nothing in these small
pottery boats to indicate dimensions or details of a true sea-going
merchant ship. Since the real ships were not of clay but of perish­
able, buoyant material, we can only judge from the magnificent
port facilities and the finds of a seal of distant island type that
merchant mariners of Lothal had proper, long-range watercraft.
Since we ourselves had come to the former territory of the Indus
people in a berdi ship of Sumerian type and had found bundle-boats
surviving en route both in Dilmun and Makan, we were probably
more curious than anyone who had come here before as to what
kind of sea-going ship the Indus people had possessed. As if
intending to help posterity with a hint, a citizen of Mohenjo-Daro
had left behind another seal, another tiny chip of durable stone,
which happened to be just what we most needed. Tiny as it was, it
filled a huge gap in the puzzle we were trying to disentangle with
the Tigris experiment. I had seen objects excavated from the Indus
civilisation in major museums in Asia, Europe and America, but it
was m a small field exhibit at the foot of the Mohenjo-Daro ruins
that I was to get the greatest surprise.
Here is a ship!’ said Toru as he pulled me by the sleeve while I
was admiring a stone image with shell-inlaid eyes, just as in
Mesopotamia. He dragged me over to the next showcase, where we
had to stoop down and press our noses against the glass to see what
was there: a tiny yellowish steatite seal, a rectangular piece of

48. With lines built for ocean voyages and not for river travel, Tigris
might disappear from sight between the waves when we went out to
take pictures from the rubber dinghy; sometimes the waves rose
higher than the top of the mast, but the reed-bundles always
reappeared over the swells.
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