The long, barrel-shaped carnelian beads from the Royal Cemetery of Ur might have originated from the Indus Valley.
The Harappans produced a peculiar style of bead, made from a translucent stone that belongs to the chalcedony or agate family of minerals. Large crystals of chalcedony are known to exist in the rivers of the Gujarat and Saurashtra provinces of India, south of the Indus Valley.1Possehl 1999, 235 When heated the stone turns orange or red, transforming the chalcedony into carnelian. Carnelian beads from the Indus Valley have been found as far afield as Egypt and Crete and many more in the neighboring regions of Iran and Mesopotamia. The beads are flat or biconical—barrel shaped. The biconical beads can get very long. Drilling a tiny hole precisely lengthwise through the center of these beads is something of a technical marvel.
Unique to the Indus Valley, etched beads were produced by painting lines on the beads with alkali paint and then heating the beads in a kiln. The reaction created a permanently etched white line on the surface of the bead. Such beads were highly prized in Mesopotamia where they appear among the lavish jewelry bestowed upon the kings and queens buried in the Royal Cemetery of Ur (Early Dynastic II-III).
Note especially the etched beads and the long biconical beads. The drilling of such long narrow beads made of hard stone represents a considerable technical challenge. The beads found at Hili (Abu Dhabi) pictured above were found in a round burial cairn belonging to the Umm an-Nar culture.
Dilmun or Meluhha?
The Sumerians clearly knew of the Harappan civilization and traded with it but we cannot be sure by what name they called it. Sargon of Akkad boasted that boats from Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha docked at his quay in Agade. It has been suggested that the latter term was derived from the Sanskrit word, Meluccah, and it refers to the Indus Valley. This identification is supported by the royal inscriptions of Gudea, ruler of Lagash, who claimed to import “blocks of lapis lazuli and bright carnelian from Meluhha.”
S. N. Kramer argues that Ethiopia is a better candidate for Meluhha, noting that Sumerian texts refer to Meluhha as the “black land,” a term which he understands as a reference to the color of the people who live there. Most notably, texts of the Late Bronze Age unambiguously use the name Meluhha to refer to those regions of Africa occupied today by Sudan and Ethiopia. Kramer considers it highly unlikely that a name used in one period for one region, would be used for an entirely different region in another.
There are good arguments to be made for identifying Meluhha with either Africa or the Indus Valley, but most scholars today favor the Indus Valley.
Magan is identified with Oman in the Persian Gulf and Meluhha with the Indus Valley during the Early Bronze period. Notice, however, that in the Amarna Letters (1350 BC) Magan and Meluhha refer to Egypt and Ethiopia respectively.
Kramer, S. N.
The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Link
Parpola, Asko.
The Roots of Hinduism: The Early Aryans and the Indus Civilization .
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Possehl, Gregory.
Indus Age: The Beginnings.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.