Who were the Meluhha?

 𒈨𒈛𒄩𒆠

[me-luh-ha country]

Cuneiform scripts on Sumerian and Akkadian cylinder seals and clay tablets mention Meluhha traders, who are generally assumed to belong to the Indus Valley region. Linguists have looked at the etymology of the Meluhha toponym, focusing on its purported Dravidian linkages. This line of thought is based on the premise that the proto-Dravidian speakers of Indus Valley called their region, or themselves, by that name or its derivatives. It has to be understood that the vastly spread Indus Civilisation was not a centrally controlled polity but a confederacy of city-states, and hence likely to have been identified by more than one appellation, as yet unknown, or undeciphered. There is also an interesting likelihood that the Indus region was named Meluhha by their Sumerian and Akkadian trading partners. Here, I present a hypothesis that is founded on the latter possibility, and argue for a novel semantic and phonetic construct of the word Meluhha.

It would be instructive to note that the Sumerian word malah, and its loan words in ancient Semitic languages – including Akkadian (malahum), Arabic (malaah), Aramaic (melahha) and Hebrew (melakh) – all mean ‘sailor’ or ‘seafarer,’ which is what maritime traders of the Indus Valley were to the Sumerians and Akkadians. Meluhha is, thus, most likely a colloquial derivative of malah. Meluhha Country, as written in Akkadian cuneiform in the title of this note would, therefore, mean Seafarers’ Country, more in the sense of a geographical region than a political entity. Malah also continues as an ancient loan word in Urdu, an Indo-Iranian language spoken in Pakistan and Northern India, and retains its meaning of a sailor.

It may be noted that long after maritime trade from Indus Valley declined, the Meluhha epithet was re-attributed by the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal to a region around Egypt that he had campaigned against. The reappearance of the name after more than a millennium might seem contrary and confusing, but probably it harked back to the historic memory of a distant land, in all its glory. 

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[The Akkadian Empire (2334-2154 BC) was the first ancient empire of Mesopotamia after the long-lived Sumerian civilisation that consisted of several city-states. The Akkadian Empire exercised considerable influence across Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Anatolia. Alluding to the trade relations, an inscription attributed to its founder, Sargon of Akkad, proudly proclaimed, “Ships from Meluhha, ships from Magan, (and) ships from Dilmun tie up alongside the quay of Agade.”]