Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c12.163

c12.163

An artificial substance manufactured and used in the Harappā civilization, and of some importance, is faience. This is essentially a composition of some base, mixed with a powdered glaze, which is then fired to form a vitreous substance with a glazed surface which can be coloured in manufacture by the addition of various mineral substances to the composition. The process of manufacture is complex, intimately associated with the use of frits and glazes, though not necessarily with the manufacture of glass itself. Such an elaborate technique is not likely to have been invented independently in several areas of Western Asia in prehistoric times. It is nevertheless known at least as early as Jemdet Nasr times in Mesopotamia and Syria, when faience beads are already common, and about the same time it appears in Egypt, while at Susa in Elam it actually appears to have been known to the people of the first phase of occupation and burial on the site. This Susa I phase should in general terms be contemporary with the later part of the Al 'Ubaid and the first half of the Uruk periods in Mesopotamia, so the presence of faience there seems to mark its earliest appearance in Western Asia. But it does not appear in the Baluchistan cultures, except at Nal, where a few beads are an obvious Harappā import; and elsewhere in the regions immediately to the west of India its appearance is sporadic and late - as for instance the solitary bead from Anau III and another from Shah Tepe. The use of faience by the people of the Harappā civilization, then, seems likely to be derived from Mesopotamia or perhaps Elam at some still unidentified stage of the culture's earlier evolution, for it is frequent at all levels in the excavated sites, from the beginning to the end of their occupation, where it was much more extensively employed than, for instance, in Early Dynastic Sumer.