The Indus Civilization c11.7

c11.7

Other objects found at Mohenjo-daro or Harappa—for example, beads of unusual shape—can be linked up with countries further west, such as Egypt, Crete, or Greece. It is at present doubtful, however, whether India had any direct trading connection with these civilizations farther west so early as the third millennium B.C.; perhaps their existence was not even known at that time to the dwellers in the Indus valley, though commodities seem eventually to have reached them from India; as evidence we have a framed Greek cross with a linear cross in its centre, which apart from added ornaments resembles that on the seal in Pl. M, 5, appearing on a seal from North-east Greece, dated to Neolithic times. It is true that these framed crosses are also known in Elam, but no earlier than in India, and the fact that they are much more common in the Indus valley suggests that they originated there. A peculiar form of the same cross, with stepped edges, is well known at Mohenjo-daro and in Sumer and Crete, where they were used as inlays for pieces of wooden furniture. A motif of concentric squares that may have been magical, found at Tell Asmar by Dr. Frankfort, is duplicated on the Indus Valley seals, as their finder was the first to point out. Intertwined designs also were popular in India, Sumer, and Egypt, and seem in every case to have had a talismanic significance.