Indian Art: A History of Indian Art from the Earliest Times up to the Third Century A.D. c7.s6.2

c7.s6.2

The intaglios or engraved designs on the seals include a wide range of animals with some pictographic signs. Some have only linear designs including the *Svastika*, multiple squares set concentrically, a cross pattern both plain and multiple. It should be noted that the Indus Valley seals have no resemblance either in shape or device or in the pictographic signs with any seals of Sumer or other civilizations of Western Asia. The technique of cutting and polishing the seal with its white lustre was an invention *sui generis* or unique to the Indus Valley people which no other people of antiquity can share with them. Their independence is established in many other fields, e.g. the script of which not a single sign out of 400 has been traced elsewhere, a good deal of pottery, ornaments and decorative designs; no doubt they had wider contacts and perhaps colonies of Indian merchants settled in Mesopotamia, but that was in the normal course of trade and the creative genius of the people in many fields asserted itself in their own land in accordance with their own inspiration.