The Indus Civilization c9.5

c9.5

The slip used for so much of the painted ware is red ochre, which substance may have come from somewhere in the country or from Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, which at the present day exports an excellent variety of this material to India. After a jar had been shaped on the wheel, the ochre was painted thickly over it, and when dry was carefully polished with a piece of bone or a pebble. This process resulted, after firing, in a beautiful, highly burnished vessel, which in first-class work has the sheen, colour, and appearance of red Chinese lacquer. The designs, some which also occur on the pottery of other ancient countries, although others are peculiar to the Indus valley, were painted on this red surface with a brush before firing, the material used being a thick, black, or purplish-black, paint made from manganiferous hæmatite. The most popular design comprises a series of intersecting circles (Pl. O, 4), a pattern which does not appear on the wares of any other ancient civilization and which, it must be confessed, is somewhat bewildering to the eye when it forms the only decoration on a jar. Occasionally the circles are carefully drawn, the jar being first marked out with squares to ensure regularity; in the majority of cases, however, the pattern had obviously been drawn freehand, with the result that it sometimes became so confused that, were it not that perfect examples exist, the origin of the design would not be apparent at all.