The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Babylonian sources of exotic raw materials —
2 Sumerian Magan, Akkadian Makkan, Old Persian Maka, and Elamite Makkash all refer to the
same place. The trilingual Achaemenid royal inscriptions give Qade as the Akkadian equivalent
for Old Persian Maka. In the Neo-Assyrian period, Assurbanipal received tribute from Pade,
king of Qade, who is said to have lived in Iskie. Iskie is without question the town of Izki,
in central Oman, reputed in local oral tradition to be the oldest town in Oman. Moreover,
the accounts of the Akkadian king Manishtusu’s campaign against Magan, which he reached
by sailing across the Persian Gulf from Sherikhum in southern Iran (perhaps near the head of
the Gulf, above Bushire), in which he is said to have advanced as far as the ‘metal mines’, like
that of his son Naram-Sin, who quarried large blocks of diorite in the mountains of Magan,
certainly remind one of the Oman mountains. Finally, while there is copper in Kerman province,
the Makran region is not noted as a copper-rich area (Ladame 1945: 248, refers to a few small
areas of copper mineralization in the country ‘behind’ Minab), whereas the ophiolite (ancient
sea crust) of Oman is one of the world’s most important copper-bearing deposits.
3 A trail of evidence of Harappan contact can be followed from Ras al-Jinz, the easternmost
point on the Oman peninsula, where Harappan ceramics and seals have been found, to Tell
Abraq and Shimal on the Gulf coast of the United Arab Emirates, where Indus weights and
ceramics occur, to Bahrain, where weights and ceramics have been found, and on to Failaka
island, off the coast of Kuwait, where a seal with characters in the Harappan script (as yet
undeciphered), has been found.
4 A chlorite bowl fragment (Klengel and Klengel 1980; Steinkeller 1982) inscribed by Rimush
‘booty of Marhashi (Barahshum in Sumerian)’ belongs to a style which is now known to have
been produced in south-eastern Iran. Tepe Yahya was one such production centre and clandestine
excavations at a cemetery near Jiroft have yielded hundreds of further examples. This evidence
makes it extremely likely that the area of eastern Kerman, including the sites of Tepe Yahya,
Shahdad (?) and those near Jiroft constituted the land known in cuneiform sources as Marhashi.
5 There is evidence from the late fourth millennium BC of contact between Mesopotamia and
Susa in south-western Iran and pre-Dynastic Egypt, probably overland via the Euphrates and
Syria. In the Kassite period (c. seventeenth to twelfth centuries BC), the royal houses of Kassite
Babylonia and Egypt were in more regular contact, as evidenced by the well-known Amarna
letters. In the Neo-Assyrian period, when Assyrian armies pushed westward into what is today
Lebanon, southern Syria, Palestine, Israel and even Egypt itself, African ivory undoubtedly
entered Mesopotamia, but this does not seem very likely during the third millennium.
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