Black Land, May Your Trees Be Great Trees! The Forest Goods Trade from Meluhha to Mesopotamia in the Third Millennium BCE: A Multi-Perspective Approach

Trade between Mesopotamia and the Indus region in the third millennium BCE is documented primarily from the Mesopotamian perspective. Studies on the relations between these two distant lands often fail to integrate textual, archaeological, iconographic and archaeobotanical data simultaneously. Our contribution attempts to apply a multi-perspective approach by comparing and integrating different typologies of data from Mesopotamia, the Indus region and other sites along the Gulf. This will be shown by a case study on wood and plants imported into Mesopotamia from the Indus region.