The ancient Akkadian name for the Indus region. It was a land which traded with the city-states of Sumer, to its west, and appeared in Mesopotamian texts of the Akkadian and Ur III periods. The land was described as a source of gold and is usually identified as the area of the Harappan civilization in western India and Pakistan during the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. In the 1st millennium BC, Meluhha refers to Nubia, to the south of Egypt. Literary references to Meluhhan trade date from the Akkadian, Ur III, and Isin- Larsa Periods (i.e., c. 2350-1800 BC), but as texts and archaeological data indicate, the trade probably started in the Early Dynastic Period (c. 2600 BC). During the Akkadian period, Meluhhan vessels sailed directly to Mesopotamian ports, but by the Isin-Larsa Period, Dilmun (modern Bahrain) was the entrepôt for Meluhhan and Mesopotamian traders. By the subsequent Old Babylonian period, trade between the two cultures evidently had ceased entirely.