India: A History. Revised and Updated by John Keay

reluctant to yield to the Namazga culture it is the ‘dancing girl’.
    Happily her local credentials are not insignificant. For one thing her features, including full lips and broad nose, are distinctly proto-Australoid, a type not usually associated with the Central Asian culture of Namazga. Skeletons unearthed in the Indus valley, however, attest that the Harappan people were of several different racial types, amongst them that, related to Australia’s native people and still represented in parts of India, of proto-Australoid cast. Furthermore, although most of the surviving Harappan stone sculptures were found at Harappa itself, whence contacts with Namazga seem to have been closest, the ‘dancing girl’ was found at Mohenjodaro, whose external trade was more orientated to the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia. A better case will need to be made before the Harappans are robbed of their most celebrated representative.
    Trade, both within the sprawling Harappan world and without, was clearly essential to the development of its culture. Bronze or tin (for makingbronze), silver and certain precious stones like lapis lazuli and soapstone are not found within easy reach of the Indus valley, and must therefore have been imported from elsewhere. Likewise it is clear that the Mesopotamian cultures obtained numerous commodities from the Harappans, including copper, gold, timber, ivory and probably cotton textiles. Harappan sealings and seals have been found in Sumerian sites, and Sumerian documentation makes frequent reference to relations with the distant lands of ‘Dilmun’, ‘Magan’ and ‘Meluhha’. The first seems to have been in the Persian Gulf, possibly Bahrain, and to have been something of an entrepôt. ‘Magan’ is usually identified with the coastal regions of Iran and Baluchistan, the modern Makran coast. And ‘Meluhha’, by a process of deduction from the trade items associated with it, looks to have been the Harappan civilisation. There are objections to this hypothesis. The Mesopotamians claim to have once conquered ‘Meluhha’, for which there is no archaeological evidence. And a later ‘Meluhha’ was usually associated with the African coast. Not-withstanding, opinion still favours the idea that in Sumerian references to ‘the ships from Meluhha’ which King Sargon the Great ‘made tie up alongside the quay of Agade’ we have a positive identification of the Harappan world.
    The importance of Harappan, or ‘Meluhhan’, trade, and the recent speculation about it, rests heavily on the evidence provided by the Harappan seals. Usually of soapstone, or steatite, the face of each is carved intaglio and in reverse so as to leave a legible impression on soft clay. Most are rectangular and about the size of a postage stamp; and typically they include an average of five characters, or word symbols, in that unintelligible script, plus one or more images. The latter are often of animals and, in the famous examples of a humped bull with pendulous dewlap, the Harappan genius for vivid depiction from life in the minutest and most demanding of mediums has been universally acknowledged.
    Several thousand seals and sealings have now been found. The seals appear to have been distributed throughout the Harappan world, not simply in its major population centres, and to have been carried about or worn, each having a boss or hole by which they could be threaded on a string. The distribution of the sealings suggests that seals may have been used to facilitate the exchange of goods over long distances. Thus the stamped image, attached to a consignment of goods, might have identified their owner, provenance, destination or contents, and so have served somewhat the role of a waybill or even a bar-code. Clearly, if this was indeed their purpose, their multiplicity and far-flung distribution argues for a vast and buzzing commercial network. Perhaps, instead of conspicuous expenditureon monuments and memorials, the Harappans