Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c11.121

c11.121

Cattle figurines were found in very large numbers – 66 were found, for example, in the restricted areas Stein dug into at Kulli, and no less than 85 were found in a restricted area on the lowest occupation-floor at Shahi-tump, which looks more like offerings massed at a shrine than the stock of a toy-shop. The size of the figures is from 3 to 4 inches long, and the characteristic features of the humped cattle are well enough suggested. The eyes are painted in, and additional ornament takes the form of vertical stripes across the body, and a line of short transverse strokes down the shoulders and forelegs (Fig. 8). This decoration, which, as we have seen, recalls the treatment of the animals painted on the Nundara pots, may be purely an adornment of the figurine, or may imply a prehistoric custom of painting the real animal in the manner of the gay ochre spots and stripes that on festivals adorn the grey-white Brahmini bullocks of the present day. From one site (Men-damb) comes a bull figurine with the stumpy stylized legs pierced for wheel-axles and with a hole through the hump for a string to pull it along; clay wheels have also been found on other sites; and in this case we are obviously dealing with a child’s toy. This is a convenient place to mention the little modelled representation of a dog on the edge of a pot from Mehi, and there are also certain model birds, often hollow and with a hole at the ‘tail’ which, if adroitly held to the lips, can be blown into in such a way as to produce a surprisingly loud hooting noise, as I once found to my own astonishment (and even more to that of the attendants) in the Central Asian Museum one day in 1942. But these bird-whistles are more common in the Harappā Culture, and it is probably there that we should look for their origin in the Kulli sites.