The Sumerian connection

At the material high tide of the Harappan culture, Mesopotamia had trade contacts with Magan, the Makran coast west of the Indus delta, with Bad Imin, “the seven cities”, and with Meluhha, the Indus valley. The name Meluhha is probably of Dravidian origin: Asko Parpola derives Meluhha, “to be read in the early documents with the alternative value as Me-lah-ha”, from Dravidian Met-akam, “high abode/ country” (with mel/melu, “high”, being the etymon of Sanskrit Meru, the cosmic mountain).38 Meluhha is the origin of Sanskrit Mleccha, Pali Milakkhu, “barbarian”39: because of the unrefined sounds of their Prakrit and because of their cultural impurity (whether by borrowing foreign elements or simply by an indigenous decay of existing cultural standards), the people of Sindh/Meluhha were considered barbarian by the elites of Madhyadesh (the Ganga-Yamuna doab) during the Sutra period, which non- invasionists date to the late 3rd millennium BC, precisely the period when Mesopotamia had a flourishing trade with Meluhha.

The search is on for common cultural motifs between the Harappan culture and Sumer. One element in literature which strikes the observer as meaningful, is this: according to the account given by the Babylonian priest Berosus, the Sumerians believed their civilization (writing and astronomy) had been brought to the Mesopotamian coast by s sages, the first of whom was one Uana-Adapa, better known through his Greek name Oannes. He was a messenger of Enki, god of the Abyss, who was worshipped at the oldest Mesopotamian city of Eridu. Like the Vedic “seven sages”, meaning both the seven clans of Vedic seers as well as the seven major stars of Ursa Maior, these seven sages are associated with the starry sky; like the Matsya incarnation of Vishnu, Oannes’s body is that of a fish. The myth of the Flood, wherein divine guidance helps the leader of mankind (Sumerian Ziusudra, Sanskrit Manu, Akkadian Utnapishtim, Hebrew Noah) to survive, is another well-known common cultural motif.

The antediluvian kings in Sumer are said by Berosus to have ruled for 120 periods of 3,600 years, or 432,000 years; epochs of 3600 years were in use among Indian astronomers, and the mega-era of 432,000 is equally familiar in India as the scripturally estimated (inexact) number of syllables in the Rg Veda, and as the “high” interpretation of the length of the Kali-Yuga .40 Rather than being a late borrowing, this number 432,000 may well be part of the common IE heritage. At least implicitly, it was present in Germanic mythology, which developed separately from Hindu mythology for several millennia before Berosus (ca. 300 BC): 800 men at each of the 540 gates of Wodan’s palace makes for a total of 432,000. This does not prove any far-fetched claim that “the gods were cosmonauts” or so, but it does show that early Indo-European had a world view involving advanced arithmetic (Sanskrit being the first and for many centuries the only language with terms for “astronomical” numbers), and that they shared some of it with neighbouring cultures.

We may be confident that a deeper search, more alert to specifically Indian contributions than is now common among sumerologists, will reveal more connections. Through the Hittites, Philistines (i.e. the “Sea Peoples” originating on the Aegean coasts and settling on the Egyptian and Gaza coasts in ca. 1200 BC), Mitannians and Kassites, elements of IE culture were known throughout West Asia. Even ancient Israelite culture was culturally much more Indo-European than certain race theorists would like to believe.

Footnotes:

37S.S. Misra: The Aryan Problem, p.10. Of course, the data are to be handled with care, for the foreign script in which the Indo-Aryan words were rendered, may not have been phonologically accurate.

38Asko Parpola: “Interpreting the Indus Script”, in A.H. Dani: Indus Civilisation: New Perspectives, p.117-132, specifically p.121.

39V.S. Pathak (“Semantics of Arya”, in S.B. Deo & S. Kamath: The Aryan Problem, p.93) derives the modem ethnic term Baluch from Bloch (< Blukh < Mlukh) < Meluhha. This is very unlikely, if only because the Baluchis have immigrated into this area from Western Iran during the early Muslim period. Before that, in most of the areas where Pashtu and Baluchi are now spoken, the language was Indo-Aryan Prakrit.

40Discussed in Ivan Verheyden: “Het begon met Oannes”, Bres (Antwerp), May 1976. Strictly, Kali-Yuga is to last for 1,200 years, but since “a year among men is but a day among the gods”, scribes have magnified the number to 360 x 1,200 = 432,000.