Seals

The Indus script remains to be deciphered and we will probably never be sure until a bilingual text of some sort is found (not improbable). Until then, Asko Parpola's work on the fish sign is probably the closest to guarded approval by other major scholars. The initial insight into the fish/star connection in Dravidian languages was made by a Jesuit priest, Father Heras, in 1932. Dr. Parpola has been studying this undeciphered writing for over 40 years at the University of Helsinki in Finland and is co-editor of collections of all seals and inscriptions in India and Pakistan. More detail … >

Impression of an Indus-style cylinder seal of unknown Near Eastern origin in the Musee du Louvre, Paris. All indications are that the Bronze age was built on a robust international trade system. Massimo Vidale's article Growing in a Foreign World: For a History of the "Meluha Villages" in Mesopotamia in the 3rd Millenium BCE gathers together all facts about Indus settlements and trading with ancient Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE. Conjectures and implications by an Italian archaeologist who is a pioneer in multidisciplinary analysis. The connections between these ancient Bronze age civilizations… >

"The earliest representation of a unicorn is found on seals and sealings from sites in the northern Indus region, dated to c. 2600 BCE," writes Jonathan Mark Kenoyer. "This motif is not reported from any other contemporaneous civilization and appears to be unique to the Indus region. The unicorn motif continued to be used throughout the greater Indus region for over 700 years and disappeared along with the Indus script and other diagnostic elements of Indus ideology and bureaucracy c. 1900 BCE (Kenoyer 1998; Possehl 2002). The unicorn motif found on seals and other forms of Indus iconography … >

A particularly beautiful tree on a terra-cotta tablet discovered at Harappa in 1995. "Growing from a low platform, this sinuous tree with short leaves may have been held sacred like the pipal tree" writes J.M. Kenoyer. See also Pipal Leaves: Revisited. >

A perfectly cut unicorn seal with a sign right above the horn. The seal was found in Harappa. The year is given at approximately 2000 BCE, when craftsmanship in seal manufacture was probably at its height. It was purchased by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, UK in 1956. This artifact is one of many unicorn seals from the Indus Valley people. >

One unicorn horn or two? Two leading Indus researchers, after years of thought and research, came to different conclusions. >

Long rectangular seals with no animal motifs from the last part of the Harappan Phase (2200-1900 BCE) found at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. "This type of seal is found with only abstract writing, which radically altered communication. Impressions made by the square seals carry two distinct messages, one is presented in a script that could only have been understood by a literate person and the other in the animal motif, that even a child could comprehend. Illiterate workers loading or unloading bundles of goods stamped with animal motifs could very easily perceive who the owners were and which bo… >

This seal plays an illustrative role in Asko Parpola's essay Beginnings of Indian Astronomy with Reference to a Parallel Development in China. He writes "The Yangshao culture burials discovered at Puyang in 1987 suggest that the beginnings of Chinese astronomy go back to the late fourth millennium. The instructive similarities between the Chinese and Indian luni-solar calendrical astronomy and cosmology therefore with great likelihood result from convergent parallel development and not from diffusion." For more information, read Asko Parpola's Beginnings of Indian Astronomy with Reference … >

There are some seals with clear Indus themes among Dept. of Near Eastern Antiquities collections at the Louvre in Paris, France, among them the Cylinder Seal of Ibni-Sharrum, described as "one of the most striking examples of the perfection attained by carvers in the Agade period [2350–2170 BCE]. >

None of the many proposed decipherments of the ancient Indus script by many different scholars since the late 1920's is widely accepted. But there are good ideas, and many of them are from Iravatham Mahadevan in Chennai, India's most important scholar of the Indus script. Here he proposes readings of some the most common Indus signs, including the three "functionaries," part of a set of signs, one of which combines the terminal "jar" sign, the most frequent Indus sign, for which Mahadevan also proposes a reading. Mahadevan has been studying the Indus script since he put together the first con… >