NDA (II) 2017 General Ability Test · Question 150 of 150

Correct — B, Meluha. The Sumerian records of Mesopotamia name three trading partners reached by sea down the Persian Gulf, and Meluhha — printed here in the shorter transliteration Meluha — is the farthest and richest of them. It was a prominent trading partner of Sumer during the Middle Bronze Age, and although its identification is not formally settled, most scholars place it in the Indus Valley Civilisation. The cuneiform texts speak of ships of Meluhha, of carnelian, ivory, timber and copper coming from there, and even of a village of Meluhhan settlers and an interpreter of the Meluhhan tongue at Lagash — a picture that fits a long-distance maritime trade with the Harappan ports.

• (a)Dilmun — Dilmun was the nearest of the three, a Persian Gulf civilisation that scholars place in Bahrain, Failaka Island and the adjacent coast of eastern Arabia. It was the entrepot through which goods passed rather than their source, and in Sumerian myth it appears as a pure, blessed land.
• (c)Magan — Magan lay between the other two, in the area now covered by the United Arab Emirates and Oman. It is remembered in the texts above all as a source of copper and diorite, and it is the middle stage on the Gulf route, not its far end.
• (d)Failaka — Failaka is an island off the coast of Kuwait, and it falls inside the Dilmun sphere rather than standing as a separate name for a distant land. Offering it here works as a trap because it sounds like a fourth place name from the same records.

Sumerian cuneiform tablets record a chain of maritime trade running down the Persian Gulf — Dilmun nearest, then Magan, then Meluhha at the far end. Read outward from Mesopotamia they correspond to Bahrain and eastern Arabia, to Oman and the United Arab Emirates, and most probably to the Indus region. The archaeology matches the texts: Harappan-style weights, carnelian beads and seals turn up at Mesopotamian and Gulf sites, and the Harappans had the coastal towns and the dockyard at Lothal to support such traffic.

The clean way to hold this is as a sequence rather than as three separate names, because the examiner will always offer all three together. Going outward from Mesopotamia the order is Dilmun, Magan, Meluhha, and the farthest is the Indus. It is also worth being honest about the level of certainty: the equation of Meluhha with the Harappan world is the majority scholarly view supported by trade goods and geography, not a decipherment of the Indus script, which remains unread. The spelling in this paper, Meluha, is simply a shorter transliteration of the same cuneiform name.

• Meluhha is the Sumerian name of a major trading partner of the Middle Bronze Age, associated by most scholars with the Indus Valley Civilisation.
• Magan corresponds to the area of the modern United Arab Emirates and Oman, and was known for copper.
• Dilmun covered Bahrain, Failaka Island and the neighbouring coast of eastern Arabia.
• Going outward from Mesopotamia the trade chain runs Dilmun, then Magan, then Meluhha.
• Harappan carnelian beads, weights and seals have been recovered from Gulf and Mesopotamian contexts, and Lothal in Gujarat has a structure identified as a dockyard.

• Swapping Magan and Meluhha; Magan is Oman and the UAE, Meluhha the far end of the route.
• Treating Failaka as a separate distant land rather than part of the Dilmun sphere.
• Stating the Meluhha identification as proved; it is the majority scholarly view, and the Indus script is still unread.

Harappan trade is asked as a term-identification item like this one, as a site-to-find matching question, or as a statement set on what the civilisation did and did not have.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  In Mesopotamian records, Magan is generally identified with the region of

  • (a)Bahrain
  • (b)Oman and the United Arab Emirates
  • (c)the Indus Valley
  • (d)the Nile Delta

  Answer(b) Oman and the United Arab Emirates — the middle stage of the Gulf trade route, known for copper.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Harappan site generally identified as having a dockyard is

  • (a)Kalibangan
  • (b)Lothal
  • (c)Banawali
  • (d)Rakhigarhi

  Answer(b) Lothal — in Gujarat, the site most often linked to Harappan maritime trade.