much-cited example, depicted on some of the Harappan seals, is that of a big-nosed gentleman wearing a horned head-dress who sits in the lotus position with an erect penis, an air of abstraction and an audience of animals. He may indeed be an early manifestation of Lord Shiva as Pashupati, ‘Lord of the Beasts’. But myth, as has been noted, is subject to frequent revision. The chances of a deity remaining closely associated with the same specific powers – in this case, fertility, asceticism and familiarity with the animal kingdom – for all of two thousand years must raise serious doubts, especially since, during the interval, there is little evidence for the currency of this myth. Rudra, a Vedic deity later identified with Shiva, is indeed referred to as pasupati because of his association with cattle; but asceticism and meditation were not Rudra’s specialities, nor is he usually credited with an empathy for animals other than kine. More plausibly, it has been suggested that the Harappan figure’s heavily horned headgear bespeaks a bull cult, to which numerous other representations of bulls lend substance.
Similar doubts surround the female terracotta figurines which are often described as mother-goddesses. Pop-eyed, bat-eared, belted and sometimes mini-skirted, they are usually of crude workmanship and grotesque mien. Only a dusty-eyed archaeologist could describe them as ‘pleasing little things’.7 The bat-ears, on closer inspection, appear to be elaborate head-dresses or hairstyles. If, as the prominent and clumsily applied breasts suggest, they were fertility symbols, why bother with millinery? Or indeed mini-skirts?
These and other ‘folk’ products, including numerous toys, scarcely merit comparison with the finest of Harappan sculptures. Indeed the latter are so fine and so exquisitely modelled that, ‘for pure simplicity and feeling’ nothing comparable was produced ‘until the great age of Hellas’.8 They are, however, extremely few: Sir Mortimer Wheeler records just eleven ‘more or less fragmentary’ stone statuettes and one bronze figure. They are also extremely small, indeed just a few centimetres high. This combination of rarity and pocket-size invites doubts as to their provenance. They could easily have come from somewhere further afield. Two perfectly modelled miniature torsos were found at Harappa – one decidedly male, the other probably female; both have socket holes by which their missing arms were attached. On this evidence they have been convincingly related to a similar technique used by artists of the contemporary Namazga culture which was discovered by Soviet archaeologists in the Ashkabad region of Turkmenistan. Namazga equivalents have also been cited for the formidable bearded figure in an embroidered toga, of which there are two examples, and even for the most famous of all Harappan works of art, the bronze ‘dancing girl’.
Although probably not dancing, the ‘dancing girl’ is unquestionably ‘a pleasing little thing’. Naked save for a chunky necklace and an assortment of bangles, this minuscule statuette is not of the usual Indian sex symbol, full of breast and wide of hip, but of a slender nymphet happily flaunting her puberty with delightful insouciance. Her pose is studiously casual, one spindly arm bent with the hand resting on a déhanché hip, the other dangling so as to brush a slightly raised knee. Slim and attenuated, the legs are slightly parted, and one foot – both are now missing – must have been pointed. She could be absent-mindedly surveying her wardrobe, except that her head is thrown back as if challenging a suitor, and her hair is somehow dressed into a heavy plaited chignon of perilous but intentionally dramatic construction. Decidedly, she wants to be admired; and she might be gratified to know that, four thousand years later, she still is. If there is one piece of Harappan fine art that one is reluctant to yield to the Namazga culture it is the ‘dancing girl’.
Happily her local credentials are not insignificant. For one thing her features, including full lips and broad nose, are distinctly proto-Australoid, a type not usually associated with the Central Asian culture of Namazga. Skeletons unearthed in the Indus valley, however, attest that the Harappan people were of several different racial types, amongst them that, related to Australia’s native people and still represented in parts of India, of proto-Australoid cast. Furthermore, although most of the surviving Harappan stone sculptures were found at Harappa itself, whence contacts with Namazga seem to have been closest, the ‘dancing girl’ was found at Mohenjo-daro, whose external trade was more orientated to the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia. A better case will need to be made before the Harappans are robbed of their most celebrated representative.
Trade, both within the sprawling Harappan world and without, was clearly essential to the development of its culture. Bronze or tin (for making bronze), silver and certain precious stones like lapis lazuli and soapstone are not found within easy reach of the Indus valley, and must therefore have been imported from elsewhere. Likewise it is clear that the Mesopotamian cultures obtained numerous commodities from the Harappans, including copper, gold, timber, ivory and probably cotton textiles. Harappan sealings and seals have been found in Sumerian sites, and Sumerian documentation makes frequent reference to relations with the distant lands of ‘Dilmun’, ‘Magan’ and ‘Meluhha’. The first seems to have been in the Persian Gulf, possibly Bahrain, and to have been something of an entrepôt. ‘Magan’ is usually identified with the coastal regions of Iran and Baluchistan, the modern Makran coast. And ‘Meluhha’, by a process of deduction from the trade items associated with it, looks to have been the Harappan civilisation. There are objections to this hypothesis. The Mesopotamians claim to have once conquered ‘Meluhha’, for which there is no archaeological evidence. And a later ‘Meluhha’ was usually associated with the African coast. Notwithstanding, opinion still favours the idea that in Sumerian references to ‘the ships from Meluhha’ which King Sargon the Great ‘made tie up alongside the quay of Agade’ we have a positive identification of the Harappan world.
The importance of Harappan, or ‘Meluhhan’, trade, and the recent speculation about it, rests heavily on the evidence provided by the Harappan seals. Usually of soapstone, or steatite, the face of each is carved intaglio and in reverse so as to leave a legible impression on soft clay. Most are rectangular and about the size of a postage stamp; and typically they include an average of five characters, or word symbols, in that unintelligible script, plus one or more images. The latter are often of animals and, in the famous examples of a humped bull with pendulous dewlap, the Harappan genius for vivid depiction from life in the minutest and most demanding of mediums has been universally acknowledged.
Several thousand seals and sealings have now been found. The seals appear to have been distributed throughout the Harappan world, not simply in its major population centres, and to have been carried about or worn, each having a boss or hole by which they could be threaded on a string. The distribution of the sealings suggests that seals may have been used to facilitate the exchange of goods over long distances. Thus the stamped image, attached to a consignment of goods, might have identified their owner, provenance, destination or contents, and so have served somewhat the role of a waybill or even a bar-code. Clearly, if this was indeed their purpose, their multiplicity and far-flung distribution argues for a vast and buzzing commercial network. Perhaps, instead of conspicuous expenditure on monuments and memorials, the Harappans pumped their surplus into commodity exchange. It has even been suggested that the Harappans were so dependent on this exchange that its apparent decline in the early second millennium BC was a cause, rather than an effect, of the disintegration of urban life.
Although the script remains indecipherable, interesting conclusions have been drawn from the images which usually accompany it on the seals. These are often single animals, as with the humped bull, the elephant, the tiger and a magnificent rhino. Commonest of all, however, is a stocky creature unknown to zoology with the body of a bull and the head of a zebra, from which head a single horn curls majestically upwards and then forwards. In fact, ‘the “unicorn” occurs on 1156 seals and sealings out of a total of 1755 found at Mature Harappan sites, that is on 60 per cent of all seals and sealings.’9 Shireen Ratnagar, an authority on Harappan trade, also notes that, since the word symbols which accompany these images vary from seal to seal, image and text must have conveyed different information; and that, since the images recur frequently and look like totemic subjects, they may be the identifying symbols of different social groups. Assuming such groups were based on descent, as with the Vedic Aryans, Ratnagar calls them ‘lineages’ or clans.
… we would therefore infer that the ‘unicorn’ was the symbol of the dominant lineage which