The Gold Rivers of Kashmir (part 4/7)

More about The Gold Rivers of Kashmir (part 4/7)

In Kashmir, the rivers run with ghosts of stars.

On a clear afternoon, a man can stand knee-deep in freezing water and swirl a pan of sand until the heavy specks settle in the bottom, glinting like trapped sunlight.

Gold.
Fine, bright, eager gold.

The guild maintained a small house there: a low, stone building near a bend in the river, with a kiln out back and a clay-smeared courtyard. I arrived exhausted, my caravan shortened by mountain sickness and bandits. But my pouch of black sherds was intact.

The master of the house, an old woman from Elam with hair like silver ash, took the sherds and turned them in her fingers.

“Indus fire,” she said. “Good. We will need it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because this valley is changing. Too many languages, too many gods. We need pots that everyone trusts.”

At night, sitting by the hearth, she unrolled a strip of leather on which someone—perhaps in Susa, perhaps in Memphis—had painted a universal script:

A jar for “measure”

A mountain for “mine”

A shining disk for “gold”

A zig-zag line crossing a circle for “copper debt repaid”

A broken jar for “canceled”

“These are the signs we will scratch on the trade jars here,” she said. “A man from the Nile, a man from Akkad, a man from Meluhha, and a man from these hills will all read the same thing from them, even if they curse each other in their own tongues.”

Proto-hieroglyph. Proto-Indus. Proto-Sinaitic. Proto-cuneiform.
All boiled down into a logographic pidgin carved on clay.

The jars we fired in Kashmir were different.

Into the clay went:

Rice-water from the paddies that clung to the valley slopes.

Grog from shattered Black Bone jars that had traveled from the Indus and beyond.

Fine sand from the riverbanks.

A pinch of crushed basalt that an Anatolian wanderer claimed made the pots less brittle (he would have said it added aluminosilicate modifiers).

We smudged them with pine resin from the local forests.

The result was a Black Bone ware so strong that one could stand on a thin-walled jar and not break it. We used these for the longest routes:

Kashmir gold down to Harappa and on to Dilmun.

Dilmun copper up the rivers to Mari, then overland to the Levant.

From the Levant, pine resin, pitch, and amber moved back along the same chain.

Salt followed in all directions—soldiers, slaves, and sailors all needed it.

These jars were the backbone of the invisible road that the people of your time would later call the Silk Road, though in my day silk was just one more luxury among many.

Our road carried metal, carbon, glutamate, and faith.

Aaron Baker
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