The Pot's Residue and the Lexicon: What Sesame Loanwords Reveal About Harappan-Mesopotamian Trade Networks

Small, charred seeds unearthed in the alluvial plains of southern Iraq have reopened a long-standing debate among historical linguists and archaeologists studying Bronze Age trade across the Indian Ocean.

Botanical surveys confirm that Sesamum indicum (sesame) originated in South Asia, where wild populations like Sesamum mulayanum are native. While early excavations yielded little direct physical evidence of crop transfers between the Indus Valley civilization and ancient Mesopotamia, recent archaeobotanical work has filled that gap. Charred seed remains retrieved from House 6H at Abu Salabikh in modern Iraq establish the presence of sesame in lowland Mesopotamia during the Early Dynastic III period, around 2650–2500 BCE.

The physical arrival of South Asian oilseeds in third-millennium BCE Mesopotamian cities raises a corresponding linguistic question: when novel commodities arrived at ancient Persian Gulf ports, did their native names travel with them into the cuneiform record?

The Linguistic Footprint in Cuneiform

In cuneiform economic records, oilplants appear under two primary designations: the Sumerian compound še-giš-i (literally "grain-tree-oil") and the Akkadian noun šamaššammū. For decades, Assyriologists debated whether šamaššammū designated flax or sesame. The botanical identification of šamaššammū as sesame gained strong support following landmark studies by Dorian Fuller, which mapped the westward crop diffusion from South Asian cultivation centers into Mesopotamian agricultural systems.

Historical linguists studying the vocabulary of ancient trade focus on the underlying etymological roots of these terms. Because neither Sumerian nor Akkadian is native to South Asia, scholars look for traces of non-Semitic and non-Sumerian substrate words that may have entered cuneiform script via maritime merchants operating out of Meluhha—the ancient Mesopotamian designation for the Indus region.

⚖ Scholarly debate

Dravidian or Austroasiatic Substrate?

Historical linguists divide into competing camps regarding the linguistic substrate behind early Near Eastern oilseed vocabulary.

Evidence shows that Proto-Dravidian reconstructions contain terms for sesame and oil products, such as *eḷ or *eḷḷu (sesame seed). Proponents of a Dravidian substrate hypothesis argue that merchant contacts along the Arabian Sea coast facilitated the borrowing of maritime trade terms into Gulf dialects. Under this model, coastal Indus communities speaking an early Dravidian language exported sesame seeds along with their indigenous vocabulary, influencing local designations for oil-bearing plants across Near Eastern markets.

Conversely, alternative models propose an Austroasiatic origin for the term. Historical linguists favoring an Austroasiatic substrate point to comparative lexical patterns across Austroasiatic branches in eastern and central South Asia. They suggest that early agricultural terms for specialized crops spread westward across the Indian subcontinent prior to the consolidation of urban Indus networks. In this view, Harappan traders acted as intermediaries, transmitting an Austroasiatic phytonym across maritime routes to Mesopotamian ports, where scribe guilds adapted the foreign sounds into cuneiform logograms.

A third group of comparative linguists maintains a cautious stance. These scholars emphasize that Sumerian remains a language isolate, while Akkadian is an East Semitic language whose internal sound changes can account for reduplicated forms like šamaššammū without requiring a South Asian loanword. They contend that establishing a direct phonetic bridge between an unwritten Harappan language and third-millennium BCE cuneiform script remains speculative.

Linking Botany and Epigraphy

The convergence of archaeobotanical data and cuneiform translation provides a clearer chronology for ancient trade than text alone. Archaeobotanical samples demonstrate that South Asian crops were integrated into domestic contexts in Mesopotamia by the mid-third millennium BCE. The presence of Sesamum indicum at Abu Salabikh shows that physical trade was active during the exact era when cuneiform administrative tablets recorded expanding merchant transactions.

Whether šamaššammū represents an adapted foreign loanword or an indigenous Semitic compound, the physical presence of South Asian sesame seeds in early Mesopotamian houses demonstrates a concrete material link between the Harappan world and the Tigris-Euphrates basin. As residue analysis techniques advance, pot sherds from ancient Gulf ports continue to yield organic evidence of the goods that traveled alongside early human speech.