Seals

Seals and tablets with inscriptions from the ancient Indus Valley Civilization.

The Skies of Kot Diji

Asko Parpola writes: "Akinori Uesugi has shown that the spread of the Kot Diji culture all over the Indus Valley is connected with the spread of a new type of stamp seal, which continues to exist in the following Harappan period. The basic figure in these Kot Diji seals consists of “concentric circles,” usually four of them placed into the four corners of a square or cross-shaped seal."

The First Unicorn Seals

Harappan Seals
The splash of the new. Pictures of mysterious seals from Harappa had appeared in specialized journals, but no composite picture of seals had been offered to the masses until September 24, 1924. This set of seals from the Illustrated London News were the vehicle. From the very beginning, the face of the unicorn was the face of the Indus civilization, and that is probably how its rulers had intended it to be. Sir John Marshall, who published the findings wrote "The animal most often represented on the seals is the apparently single-horned beast . . .. There is a possibility, I think, that the

Grand and Rare Zebu Bull Motif

The grand and rare humped zebu (bos indicus) motif on a pot from Nausharo (ca. 2600-2500 BCE) and on a square steatite seal from Mohenjo-daro (ca. 2500 BCE). Note how similar they are. The majestic zebu bull, with its heavy dewlap and wide curving horns is perhaps the most impressive motif found on the Indus seals. Generally carved on large seals with relatively short inscriptions, the zebu motif is found almost exclusively at the largest cities of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. The rarity of zebu seals is curious because the humped bull is a recurring theme in many of the ritual and decorative

The Story of the Gulf Type Indus Seal

A very interesting paper by Steffen Terp Laursen, an expert on Dilmun, or the civilization in Bahrain contemporaneous with the ancient Indus civilization, suggests that the round, so-called [Arabian] "Gulf seal", often found with Indus signs and creatures like the short-horned bull and standard, developed from ancient Indus seals and representatives moving westward. Later these types of seals followed their own development trajectory and their Indus iconography. The westward transmission of Indus Valley sealing technology: origin and development of the ‘Gulf Type’ seal and other

Deity Seal

Mohenjo-daro seal
Deity seal from Mohenjo-daro. E.J.H. Mackay writes of what he calls a "deity, seated in what may be a yogi attitude" where, in this case, "the stool is omitted, however, and the figure is apparently seated upon the ground. The headdress consists of two horn-like objects between which there appears to be a spike of flowers. A pigtail hangs down one side of the head which has one face only, in profile, facing to the right. Unfortunately this seal is badly broken, but enough remains to show that the figure was surrounded by pictographs arranged in a somewhat haphazard fashion." (Further

Indus Cylinder Seals

Impression of a Harappan cylinder seal from Kalibangan
"The cylinder seals of Mesopotamia constitute her most original art," wrote the scholar Henri Frankfort, and much the same has been said about the very different square stamp seals used by the ancient Indus civilization. Cylinder seals are "small, barrel-shaped stone object[s] with a hole down the center, rolled on clay when soft to indicate ownership or to authenticate a document . . . used chiefly in Mesopotamia from the late 4th to the 1st millennium BCE." Many of the handful of cylinder seals found at ancient Indus sites or Mesopotamian ones with Indus themes are collected below. 1.

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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