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' or ' ( ) is the Sumerian name of a prominent trading partner of Sumer during the Middle Bronze Age. Its identification remains an open question, but most scholars associate it with the Indus Valley Civilisation.
Another piece of possible evidence that points to the people of Meluhha as being Proto-Dravidian is the fact that sesame oil believed to be exported to Mesopotamia by the Harappans, was known as ilu in Sumerian and eḷḷu in Akkadian. One theory is that these words derive from the Dravidian word for sesame ( eḷḷ or eḷḷu). (See Appendix C.) However, Michael Witzel, who associates IVC with the ancestors of Munda languages speakers, suggests an alternative etymology from the Munda languages word for wild sesame: jar-tila. Munda is an Austroasiatic language.
In Gudea cylinders, XIV, he mentions his procurement of "blocks of lapis lazuli and bright carnelian from Meluhha".
Meluhha is also mentioned in mythological legends such as Enki and Ninhursag:
There are no known mentions of Meluhha after 1760 BCE.
The qualifier used to describe the dog is , which can be read either "red" as an adjective, or "speckled" as an intransitive verb, and interpretations vary based on these two possible meanings.
It is thought that this "red dog" could be a dhole, also called "Asiatic red dog", a type of red-colored dog native to southern and eastern Asia.
It seems that direct trade with Meluhha subsided during the Ur III period, and was replaced by trade with Dilmun, possibly corresponding to the end of urban systems in the Indus Valley around that time.
Gudea too, in one of his inscriptions, mentioned his victory over the territories of Magan, Meluhha, Elam and Amurru kingdom.
Early texts, such as the Rimush inscription describing combat against Meluhha troops in the area of Elam circa 2200 BC, seem to indicate that Meluhha is to the east, suggesting either the Indus valley or India. However, much later texts, such as the Rassam cylinder documenting the military exploits of King Assurbanipal of Assyria (668–627 BC), long after the Indus Valley civilization had ceased to exist, seem to imply that Meluhha is to be found in Africa, in the area of Egypt.
There is sufficient archaeological evidence for the trade between Mesopotamia and the Indian subcontinent. Impressions of clay seals from the Indus Valley city of Harappa were evidently used to seal bundles of merchandise, as clay seal impressions with cord or sack marks on the reverse side testify. A number of these Indian seals have been found at Ur and other Mesopotamian sites.
The Persian-Gulf style of stamp seal rather than rolled seals, also known from Dilmun, that appear at Lothal in Gujarat, India, and Failaka Island (Kuwait), as well as in Mesopotamia, are convincing corroboration of the long-distance sea trade network, which G.L. Possehl has called a "Middle Asian Interaction Sphere".Possehl, G.L. (2007), “The Middle Asian Interaction Sphere”, Expedition 49/1 What the commerce consisted of is less sure: timber and precious woods, ivory, lapis lazuli, gold, and luxury goods such as carnelian and glazed stone beads, from the Persian Gulf, and shell and bone inlays, were among the goods sent to Mesopotamia in exchange for silver, tin, woolen textiles, perhaps oil and grains and other foods. Copper ingots, certainly, bitumen, which occurred naturally in Mesopotamia, may have been exchanged for cotton textiles and chickens, major products of the Indus region that are not native to Mesopotamia—all these have been instanced.
In the Assyrian and Hellenistic eras, cuneiform texts continued to use (or revive) old place names, giving a perhaps artificial sense of continuity between contemporary events and events of the distant past. For example, Median kingdom is referred to as "the land of the Gutians", a people who had been prominent around 2000 BC.
Meluhha also appears in these texts, in contexts suggesting that "Meluhha" and "Magan" were kingdoms adjacent to Egypt. In the Rassam cylinder, Ashurbanipal writes about his first march against Egypt: "In my first campaign I marched against Magan and Meluhha, and Taharqa, king of Ancient Egypt (Egypt) and Kûsu ("Kingdom of Kush", ie Nubia), whom Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, the father who begot me, had defeated, and whose land he brought under his sway."Original text and translation: lines 51 and 52 of the Rassam cylinder In this context, "Magan" has been interpreted as "Muṣur" (ancient name of Egypt) and "Meluhha" as "Meroe" (capital of Nubia).
In the Hellenistic period, the term was used archaically to refer to Ptolemaic Egypt, as in an account of a festival celebrating the conclusion of the Sixth Syrian War, or in reference to the campaigns of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in Egypt ( "Antiochus the King marched triumphantly through the cities of Meluhha").
These references do not necessarily mean that early references to Meluhha also referred to Egypt. Direct contacts between Sumer and the Indus Valley had ceased even during the Mature Harappan phase when Oman and Bahrain (Magan and Dilmun) became intermediaries. After the sack of Ur by the Elamites and subsequent invasions in Sumer, its trade and contacts shifted west and Meluhha passed almost into mythological memory. The resurfacing of the name could simply reflect cultural memory of a rich and distant land, its use in records of Achaemenid and Seleucid military expeditions serving to aggrandize those kings. This kind of re-attribution of archaic geographical terms was a regular occurrence during the 1st millennium BCE.
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