A section from the journey

Trade with Meluhha

The people of the river-cities were great traders. Their boats and caravans carried beads, ivory, and cotton across the sea to the land we now call Iraq. The clay records of Mesopotamia even name a distant trading land called Meluhha, which most scholars think was the Indus world. So the cities were not alone. They were joined to the wider world.

Picture a flat-bottomed boat, low and heavy with cargo, slipping out of a river-mouth into the open sea. On board are beads, bundles of cotton cloth, and tusks of ivory. The crew keeps the coast in sight on their right hand. They are bound for a far country.

The people of the river-cities were traders, and not only with their neighbours. Their goods travelled a very long way — all the way to , the land of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, where the cities of Sumer stood. That is in the country we now call Iraq.

Now here is a small wonder. The Mesopotamians wrote on clay, and a great deal of their writing has survived. In it they speak of distant lands they traded with. One of these they call . Most scholars today believe that Meluhha was the Indus world — these very cities we are walking through.

So while the river-people left us no name for themselves that we can read, a neighbour far away wrote one down. To the merchants of Sumer, the people of the Indus were "the men of Meluhha" — the ones who brought rare and beautiful things from the east.

What did they send? Carnelian, a warm red stone, cut into long beads. Ivory from elephants. Fine hard wood. Shell, and very likely cotton cloth, which was rare and prized. In return came metals the cities needed, such as tin, along with silver and wool.

The sea road was long, so it was broken into stages. Boats stopped to rest and trade at a small island in the Gulf called — today we call it Bahrain. From there the goods passed up into Mesopotamia. Trade like this needs trust, and patience, and a shared way of counting. The river-people had all three.

How can we be sure any of this happened, so long ago? Because the things themselves were found. Diggers working in the old Mesopotamian city of Ur turned up Indus seals and the long carnelian beads of the river-cities, far from home. The objects crossed the sea, and there they stayed, waiting for us to find them.

This matters for our story. It tells us these cities were not a hidden, lonely place. They were a busy corner of a wide and connected world, joined by sea and road to the other great peoples of their age. They gave, and they received, and they were known by name in lands a thousand miles away.

Somewhere far away, a stranger once held a red bead made by hands beside the Indus, and wondered at the land it came from. When you hold something made far from where you live, do you ever pause to picture the people who made it, and the long road it travelled to reach you?