Images: Indus seal impression from Umma and reverse.

The late archaeologist Maurizio Tosi wrote:

"Further evidence for contact was recovered through the French excavations at Telloh and Susa, major urban centres of the Mesopotamian lowlands, in the concrete form of more steatite seals. But even more revealing for the intensity of contact and commercial exchange between the two alluvial heartlands was the discovery in the Louvre reserves of a well-preserved clay impression stamped by an inscribed Indus seal, which had been brought to the museum by a dealer shortly before World War I, before the Indus Civilization had even been recognized. It was said to have come from Jhoka, a site in southern Mesopotamia which is still unexcavated but has been identified from the texts collected by looters as the ancient Sumerian city of Umma. This provenance has never been confirmed and never will, but there is no reason to doubt that the find came from southern Iraq, where these dealers operated.

"The sealing bears the usual 'bull and manger' motif with a 6-sign inscription running above it (Pl. 97, 98). In 1931, this sealing was donated by the Louvre to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford on account of its relevance for British research in the Indus Valley. The seal impression had been carefully centred on the front of the piece of clay, while the back bears a clean imprint of a cloth tied over a jar mouth by a string around the neck of the vessel. A deeper hole on one side of the back marks the knot in the string covered by the lump of clay in order to seal the contents of the jar. For the archaeologist, such clay sealings represent a uniquely direct source of information on such administrative procedures as the control of storage and shipment of merchandise throughout the Middle East in the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC. Literally thousands of them have been found across Southwestern Asia, from Nubia to Anatolia and from Syria to Afghanistan. The immediate assumption one could draw from the Umma impression is that it relates to a shipment of expensive goods packed in sealed containers.

"But a less straightforward explanation might be necessary if we consider that this type of sealing, so common in the Middle East, is unknown from the Indus Valley and the countries of the western borders of the Subcontinent. Central Asia only a handful of these clay sealings has been recovered. With a ratio close to 10:1 of seals to sealings, the Indus Civilization is radically different from all other countries in the Middle East that had adopted the use of seals. Since there is no technical reason to explain the scarcity of sealings in all excavations, one has to conclude that seals in the Indus Valley did not serve the same functions as elsewhere. It might well be that the Harappan sealing from Umma was struck in Mesopotamia for an Indus expatriate in accordance with local formalities for sealed shipments."

- From The Indus Civilization beyond the Indian Subcontinent in Save Mohenjo Daro!, Compiled by Madad Ali Sindhi, Culture Department, Government of Sindh, 2022. pp. 56-57.