page_title: Meluhha
section_title: Later era
hierarchical_section_title: Meluhha / Later era
caption_attribution_description: English: Mesopotamian ship between circa 2700 and circa 2650 date QS:P,+2500-00-00T00:00:00Z/6,P1319,+2700-00-00T00:00:00Z/9,P1326,+2650-00-00T00:00:00Z/9,P1480,Q5727902 av. J.-C.
context_page_description: Meluḫḫa or Melukhkha 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 Civilization.
context_section_description: 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, Media 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 Egypt (Magan) and Ethiopia (Meluhha), and Taharqa, king of Egypt (Muṣur) and Nubia (Kûsu), whom Esarhaddon, king of Assyria, the father who begot me, had defeated, and whose land he brought under his sway." 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 current during the 1st millenium BCE.
caption: Sculpture of a Mesopotamian boat, 2700-2600 BC.
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