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.
Etymology
Asko Parpola identifies Proto-Dravidians with the Harappan Culture and the Meluhhan people mentioned in Sumerian records. In his book Deciphering the Indus Script. Parpola states that the Brahui people of Pakistan are remnants of the Harappan culture. According to him, the word "Meluhha" derives from the Dravidian words mel ("elevated") and akam ("place"). Parpola also relates Meluhha with Balochistan, which he calls the "Proto-Dravidian homeland". He also relates Meluhha with the transient word Mleccha, a Vedic word used to mean "barbarian" and used by the incoming Aryan speaking population for the native Harappan population.
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). However, Michael Witzel, who associates IVC with the ancestors of Munda speakers, suggests an alternative etymology from the para-Munda word for wild sesame: jar-tila. Munda is an Austroasiatic language.
Trade with Sumer
Sumerian texts repeatedly refer to three important centers with which they traded: Magan, Dilmun, and Meluhha. The Sumerian location of Magan is now accepted to be the area currently encompassing the United Arab Emirates and Oman. Dilmun was a Persian Gulf civilization which traded with Mesopotamian civilizations. The current scholarly consensus is that Dilmun encompassed Bahrain, Failaka Island and the adjacent coast of Eastern Arabia in the Persian Gulf.
Inscriptions
thumb|[[Gudea cylinders inscription A IX:19, Gudea mentions of the devotions to his Temple: "Magan and Meluhha will come down from their mountains to attend". The words Magan () and Meluhha () appear vertically in the first column on the right.]]
In an inscription, Sargon of Akkad (2334–2279 BCE) referred to ships coming from Meluhha, Magan and Dilmun.
In cylinder B, 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.
Meluhhan trading colony in Sumer
Towards the end of the Sumerian period, there are numerous mentions in inscriptions of a Meluhha settlement in southern Sumer near the city-state of Girsu. The location of the settlement has been tentatively identified with the city of Gu'abba. "Meluhha" (<small></small>) actually appears on the beginning of the other side (column II, 1) in the sentence "The granary of the village of Meluhha".
Several Indus seals with Harappan script have been found in Mesopotamia, particularly in Ur, Babylon and Kish. Still, the archeological record for the existence of the trade with the Indus civilization in Mesopotamia is meager. According to Andrew Robinson:
Animal figurines
Various figurines of exotic animals in gold or carnelian are thought to have been imported from Meluhha. Many such statuettes have been found in Mesopotamian excavations.
Maritime materials trade
thumb|upright=1.2|Model of a [[Mohenjo-daro tablet, 2500–1750 BCE (National Museum, New Delhi), depicting a boat with a central cabin, possibly carrying land-seeking birds for navigation. Flat-bottomed river row-boats appear in two Indus seals, but their seaworthiness is debatable.]]
Specific items of high volume trade are timber and specialty wood such as ebony, for which large ships were used. Luxury items also appear, such as lapis lazuli mined at a Harappan colony at Shortugai (modern Badakhshan in northern Afghanistan). In the 1980s, important archaeological discoveries were made at Ras al-Jinz (Oman), located at the easternmost point of the Arabian Peninsula, demonstrating maritime Indus Valley connections with Oman, and the Middle East in general.
Conflict with the Akkadians and Neo-Sumerians
thumb|Account of the victories of [[Rimush, ruler of the Akkadian Empire, over Abalgamash, king of Marhashi. In his inscriptions, Rimush mentioned the army led by Abalgamash included troops from Meluhha. Louvre Museum AO5476.]]
According to some accounts of the Akkadian king Rimush, he fought against the troops of Meluhha, in the area of Elam:
Gudea too, in one of his inscriptions, mentioned his victory over the territories of Magan, Meluhha, Elam and Amurru.
Identification with the Indus Valley
Most scholars suggest that Meluhha was the Sumerian name for the Indus Valley Civilisation. Finnish scholars Asko and Simo Parpola identify Meluhha (earlier variant Me-lah-ha) from earlier Sumerian documents with Dravidian mel akam "high abode" or "high country". Many items of trade such as wood, minerals, and gemstones were indeed extracted from the hilly regions near the Indus settlements. They further claim that Meluhha is the origin of the Sanskrit word mleccha, meaning "foreigner or person who's outside of the Vedic realm".
thumb|left|The [[etched carnelian beads in this necklace from the Royal Cemetery of Ur dating to the First Dynasty of Ur (2600-2500 BCE) were probably imported from the Indus Valley.]]
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.
The Persian-Gulf style of circular stamped 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". 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, pearls 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.
"Meluhha" as Meroe, in the 14th–2nd centuries BCE
Meluhha appears in EL-AMARNA letters, as a place at Kush/Nubia, near Egypt (EA70, EA95, EA108 ,EA112, EA117, EA132, EA133).
thumb|A modern satellite view of the region of [[Meroe.]]
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 Magan and Meluhha, and Taharqa, king of Musur (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." In this context, "Magan" has been interpreted as "Muṣur" (ancient name of Egypt) and "Meluhha" as "Meroe" (capital of Nubia).
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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.