Contacts Between the Cuneiform Cultures and India
July 2021 | Vol. 9.7
By Claus Ambos
In two periods during their long history, the cuneiform cultures of the Near East had direct mutual contact with parts of the Indian subcontinent: in the last third of the third millennium BCE, and during the Achaemenid and Hellenistic period in the second half of the first millennium BCE. What did they export to, and learn from, each other?
By cuneiform cultures of the Near East I mean Mesopotamia and its residents, Sumerians, the Akkadians, and later the Assyrians and Babylonians, but also Elam in southwest Iran, the eastern neighbor for more than three millennia. And by “India,” I do not mean the territory of the modern republic, of course, but rather regions in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent, including areas that today are occupied by Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Written and archaeological evidence points to direct and indirect contacts between Mesopotamian realms and the Indus or Harappa civilization. In cuneiform texts, the area of the Indus or Harappa civilization is designated with the toponym Meluḫḫa. This civilization existed in the third and second millennium BCE in the northwest of the Indian subcontinent.
The Ancient Near East and North-West India. By the author, based on the map by Виктор В – File: Outline map of Middle East.svg, ETOPO1, CC BY-SA 2.0
Goods were traded via intermediate points in the Persian Gulf. An important trade center was the land of Dilmun, today Bahrain. Trade goods from the land of Meluḫḫa included luxury goods such as precious woods, stones, and metals, as well as ivory and exotic animals.
In the last third of the third millennium, contacts between east and west were not only facilitated by middlemen in the Gulf region; persons from the land of Meluḫḫa traveled directly to Mesopotamia and also to the Elamite metropolis Susa. Communication between inhabitants of the Near East and travelers from Meluḫḫa was aided by translators—we know the seal of a certain Šu-ilīśu, who is identified as a translator of the Meluḫḫa-language.
The Indus civilization was situated at the furthest edge of the geographical horizon of the Mesopotamians. After the decline of the Indus civilization, the toponym Meluḫḫa was preserved in the cuneiform tradition as the designation for a distant exotic country. The knowledge of its location, however, was permanently lost. In the first half of the first millennium BCE, the kings of the Neo-Assyrian empire identified far-away Nubia, situated in Africa, as Meluḫḫa.
Indian etched bead found in Nippur. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Accession Number: 59.41.42
During the first millennium BCE, when the cuneiform cultures of the Near East and India finally came in contact again, the Mesopotamians were no longer aware of the fact that these regions in the far east had once been the land of Meluḫḫa.
Beyond some indications of long-distance trade between the cuneiform cultures and India during the first half of the first millennium BCE, there is no evidence for closer contact. In 539 BCE, Babylon was conquered by the Achaemenid Cyrus and thus became part of an empire that stretched from the Mediterranean to Central Asia. Elam, too, had become a province of the Persian empire. Under its first rulers, the empire kept expanding; Darius I enlarged it in the east by subjugating the Indus Valley. By order of the Persian ruler, the Carian navigator Scylax made a journey down the Indus, as we learn from Herodotus (IV.44). Thus, compared to earlier periods, the opportunities for contact between the Near East and northwest India had changed fundamentally: for the first time ever these distant regions were united under one Great King in one empire.
Seal of Šu-ilīšu, translator of the Meluḫḫa language. Louvre AO 22310. © 2000 RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Franck Raux.
Population groups from the Indian provinces of the Achaemenid empire were deported to Babylonia. Persons designated as Indians (lúIndūmaja or lúIndumāja) are attested in the fifth century BCE in the Nippur area. These Indians were, in the context of an elusive acculturation process, integrated into the local social, cultural, and economic environment. The Indians are mentioned in documents from the archive of a family of businessmen from Nippur, named Murašû. The pertinent texts are from the fifth century BCE. The Indians are attested as contract partners of the Murašû or as witnesses in business transactions. Many individuals designated as Indians, however, bear good Babylonian or West Semitic names. One had the Babylonian name Nidinti-Enlil, whereas his father (Bagaina) and grandfather (Zimakkaʾ) still bore Indo-Iranian names. This implies that Nidinti-Enlil himself was born in Babylonia and that the Indians had been resettled a generation earlier. The name of Nidinti-Enlil holds other information as well: it shows that the acculturation process included also the veneration of local Babylonian gods, as indicated by the name’s so-called theophoric element. Nidinti-Enlil means “Gift of the god Enlil.” Enlil is the god of Nippur. The parents of this man ascribed the fortunate birth of their son to the intervention of a Babylonian god, and expressed this fact in his name.
There is no indication of mutual influence involving Indians and native Babylonians. We cannot, however, make further reliable statements on Indians in Babylonia because of the skewed distribution of our sources. In fact, the attestations in the documents of the Babylonian “firm” Murašû are the only evidence of these Indians at all. They left no specifically Indian traces in Babylonia.
Babylon is mentioned only once in an Indian text, the Bāveru Jātaka. The jātakas form part of Buddhist literature; they are allegorical stories about episodes from previous lives of the Buddha.
Clay tablet from the archives of the Murašû family mentioning Indians in the Nippur area. Object CBS5422. Courtesy of the Penn Museum.
The Bāveru Jātaka describes how some Indian merchants travel by sea to a place called Bāveru, where birds are unknown. The Indians use a pilot bird for navigation: they have a crow on their ship that they release from time to time to determine the way toward the shore. This crow creates a sensation in Bāveru and is sold by the Indians for much money to the locals. On their next voyage the Indian merchants bring a peacock. The crow had been admired by the indigenous people of Bāveru only because birds had been unknown to them. The magnificent peacock consequently puts the unprepossessing crow in the shade at once and is sold by the Indians for ten times the price of the crow.
The toponym Bāveru is in fact Babylon, whose name the Indians encountered in its Old Persian form, Bābiru-. The text reflects trade relations between India and Mesopotamia via the Persian Gulf in Achaemenid times. The aim of the jātaka, however, is religious: the peacock is a metaphor for the Buddha in one of his earlier existences. The message of the text is that people, as long as they do not know the truth, will follow bogus prophets and founders of religions. These false leaders are symbolized by the crow. But people will follow the truth when it is revealed to them, namely in the form of the Buddha, symbolized by the peacock.
Scene from the Bāveru Jātaka: The veneration of the peacock in Babylon (Shwezigon Pagoda, Pagan, Burma). From: Duroiselle, Chas. 1916. Pictorial Representations of Jātakas in Burma. Pp. 87–119 in: Archaeological Survey of India, Annual Report 1912–13, ed. John Marshall. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India: Fig. 21.
Representations of the jātakas were very popular in Buddhist art, and in fact representations of the Bāveru Jātaka from South and Southeast Asia are extant. For example, two reliefs featuring scenes from the Bāveru Jātaka are known from medieval Burma. On one relief we see a woman offering food to the peacock, who stays under an umbrella that serves as a symbol of esteem; the crow, depicted beneath the peacock, has fallen into disregard. The veneration of the peacock is also shown on the other relief; an inscription associates this scene with the pāveru-jac, i.e., Bāveru Jātaka. This is presumably the only attestation of Babylon in any Burmese text. It is certainly remarkable that at least the name of Babylon was transmitted through a Buddhist source as far away as Burma, although the jātaka’s assertion that no birds were to be found in the exotic country of Bāveru hardly reflects any knowledge of the cultural achievements and the long history of Babylon.
Whereas the presence of Babylonians in western Iran is quite well attested, they are difficult to document in eastern Iran and northwest India. In Achaemenid times, Babylonian officials and businessmen stayed in several places in western Iran and formed organized communities there. Babylonian entrepreneurs, among them members of the famous “firm” Egibi, frequented several cities in western Iran, such as Ekbatana or Persepolis. This can be deduced from documents that were either issued at these places and kept there or drafted in western Iran but kept in Babylonia.
The cuneiform tablets excavated furthest east of Western Asia are from Kandahar in Afghanistan. This cuneiform evidence consists of two fragments of Elamite administrative tablets. The fragments were discovered in the area of the citadel. The existence of these texts makes clear that administrative structures that employed Elamite scribes writing in cuneiform stretched far to the east.
Scene from the Bāveru Jātaka: The veneration of the peacock in Babylon (Shwezigon Pagoda, Singaing, near Kyauksê, Burma). From: Duroiselle, Chas. 1916. Pictorial Representations of Jātakas in Burma. Pp. 87–119 in: Archaeological Survey of India, Annual Report 1912–13, ed. John Marshall. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, India: Fig. 50.
Living elephants certainly were the most impressive “export good” sent from India to the west. Around the turn from the fifth to the fourth century BCE, the Greek physician Ctesias stayed at the court of the Persian Great King. He reports that in Babylon he saw how Indian elephants were used as farm animals in agriculture and how they uprooted date palms under the guidance of their Indian masters.
One hundred years later, Indian elephants were put to work again in Babylon, this time to assist with the renovation of the time-honored temple of the god Marduk, Esaĝil. At that time, Mesopotamia was ruled by Seleucus I, a successor of Alexander the Great. The diadoch had, at the end of the fourth century BCE, ceded the eastern parts of his empire to the Indian ruler Candragupta Maurya, receiving in return five hundred elephants. Seleucus as well as his successors maintained the old cult centers of Babylonia. The crown prince, who later ruled as King Antiochus I, used several of the elephants of Candragupta to carry away the debris of the decayed temple of Marduk in Babylon during its renovation.
A considerable body of scholarship postulates a far-reaching and unilateral transfer of knowledge and ideas from Mesopotamia to India during the first millennium BCE. In this scholarly discourse, it is suggested that Babylonian astronomy and divination exerted a decisive influence on Indian astronomy and astrology. Furthermore, some researchers postulate Mesopotamian influences on India in the fields of literature and mythology. On the other hand, the assumption of a transfer of knowledge from Mesopotamia to India has also been vehemently denied. It is striking that, so far, most research has focused on the alleged influences of the cuneiform cultures of Mesopotamia on India. The Elamite culture and the evidence of Elamite cuneiform sources from present-day Iran have often remained unconsidered. This is surprising, because Elamite texts from Afghanistan are the cuneiform sources discovered nearest to the Indian subcontinent.
Alexander and the Indian gymnosophists. From: Le livre et la vraye hystoire du bon roy Alixandre (ca. 1420-1425), f.60r: British Library Royal 20 B XX. Courtesy of the British Library.
Despite the manifold contacts attested, it is difficult to trace any transfer of cultural goods and assets between the cuneiform cultures of the Near East and India. A clear example of the transfer of ideas and knowledge between the Near East and India remains elusive. Knowledge accumulated by the cuneiform cultures, for example in the field of astronomy, reached India indirectly via Greek transmission in the Hellenistic period. There is no evidence for any influence of Mesopotamian scholarship on India in Achaemenid or earlier times. The cuneiform tablets from Achaemenid-era Kandahar document the presence of Elamite scribes in the eastern extremities of the empire. If any of the cuneiform cultures exerted an influence on Indian culture, the most likely candidate is Elam. Nevertheless, it seems improbable that Achaemenid administrators exerted a profound intellectual influence on India.
Alexander the Great long ago experienced the difficulties of learning about the intellectual achievements of a foreign culture. After his arrival in India, he failed deplorably in his project to initiate a mutual exchange of philosophical concepts between Greeks and Indians. When his emissary Onesicritus tried to participate in a discussion with wise Indian men (labeled “sophists” by the Greeks), he encountered substantial difficulties in communication because he had to converse with them through a chain of three translators. When Onesicritus asked a question, it was translated by the first translator for the second translator, who then retranslated the question for the third translator, who finally translated the question to the Indian sages—whose reply was likewise distorted in transmission. Under these circumstances, a profound intellectual exchange could not be achieved. We may assume that Elamite scribes operating on the eastern edge of the Achaemenid empire encountered similar problems when communicating with Indian sages—if indeed they ever did so.
Claus Ambos is a member of the Institut für Altertumswissenschaften at the Universität Würzburg.
How to cite this article:
Ambos, Claus 2021. “Contacts Between the Cuneiform Cultures and India.” The Ancient Near East Today 9.7. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/contact-cuneiform-india/.
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