Museums

Visits to ancient Indus objects in museums on three continents.

Chanhiyun Jo Daro [Chanhu-daro] at the Met (II)

It may be hard to imagine that the best places to see artefacts of the ancient town of Chanhiyun Jo Daro [Chanhu Daro] are along the eastern seaboard of the United States. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have a number of pieces from a US-funded team the worked at the site in 1935-36, led by Mohenjo daro excavator E.J.H. Mackay [see Dorothy Mackay, Finds at Chanhu-daro]. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston lent some items to the Metropolitan which I was fortunate enough to see in the fall of 2016 [A Visit to the Met I]. It is over 7,000 miles

Mehrgarh @ the Lahore Museum

"Mehrgarh World's Oldest City" claims the banner in the Lahore Museum gallery, where the wooden display cases seem not to have changed since John Lockwood Kipling was in charge more than a century ago. There are few other places to glimpse some of the finer treasures from this 7000 BCE site in western Balochistan, the oldest larger settlement found in the subcontinent.

At the National Museum, Delhi

On a recent visit to Delhi, I found myself free for two hours and made my way in a rickshaw from Jama Masjid to the National Museum. It was a Sunday afternoon. After paying the entrance fee and breathlessly arriving at the Harappan Civilisation doorway, I found that it was closed for renovations! Momentarily dispirited, it turned out that there was another entrance and much of the gallery was still open – disaster averted.

Four Seals Up Close

A visit to the National Museum of Pakistan in Karachi gave me the opportunity to take close shots of four seals from Mohenjo-daro. They show both the exquisite workmanship of Indus craftsmen and the merciless wear, in different degrees, of four thousand years of history.

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