Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.162

c12.162

One other type of painted pottery in the Harappā Culture should be mentioned, that in which the design is painted in several colours. Such polychrome ware is very rare in the Ancient Orient, although painting in two colours, usually black and red, is not unusual and crops up in various cultures at various times - Tell Halaf, Jemdet Nasr, the Zhob Valley or Amri, for instance. But true polychromy, such as we find on the sherds from Harappā and Mohenjo-daro which are painted in red and green on a buff slip, or that from Chanhu-daro which appears to show a naturalistic scene of birds and animals in black, white, and red on a yellow ground, is very exceptional. Nevertheless, as we have seen in the last chapter, polychrome ware employing a very full range of colours, including red, blue, green, and yellow, is characteristic of the Nal Culture of Baluchistan, and it seems difficult to dissociate this from the few examples in the Harappā sites. The Chanhu-daro sherd at least, with its use of yellow colouring, strongly suggests some sort of connexions with the Nal series of painted pots.