Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.137

c12.137

The stamp-seal is known, in one form or another, as early as Halaf times in Syria (with decorative patterns, not naturalistic designs) and similar ‘button-seals’ appear in the Tal-i-Bakun A phase in Southern Persia, with clay sealings showing that they were indeed used for this purpose, and again in Sialk III, Giyan V, and Hissar I in the north. All these seals are normally decorated with geometric designs, but at Giyan there is a roughly engraved figure of a scorpion. The fact that the Harappā Culture is characterized by stamp-seals should indicate that its eventual antecedents are likely to be found in Persia. But it is curious that stamp-seals are unknown in any of the Baluchistan cultures, the couple from North Baluchistan, already mentioned in Chapter IV, being of Harappā type and probably imported from the plains. While we shall see that there are certain points in common between Harappā painted pottery and that of North Baluchistan, this discrepancy in respect of seals is very interesting, and seems to place a barrier in the way of any more or less direct derivation of the Harappā civilization from any of the known peasant cultures of Baluchistan. The individual technique of the Harappā seals, which were subjected to heat after carving so that the steatite of which they were made acquired a lustrous white surface, can be recognized on the seal from Nal, although there the technique of engraving is not that of the Harappā artist, but that shown in the local pot designs.