The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c20.1

c20.1

The Indus civilization is dated primarily by its contacts with the proto-historic cities of Mesopotamia in the latter half of the third millennium B.C. and the earlier centuries of the second. The classic source is still the paper by Mr C. J. Gadd in the *Proceedings of the British Academy*, XVIII (1932), in which the author discussed sixteen seals in the Indus style from Ur and two others of unspecified Babylonian origin, with a bibliography of eight earlier discoveries from Kish, Susa, Lagash, Umma and Tell Asmar and two from unknown sites.⁴ A second seal from Tell Asmar and another from Tepe Gawra near Mosul may be added together with a seal from farther afield, in Syria. The total of twenty-nine or thirty examples is an impressive one, but analysis reveals important unsolved queries. In particular, only twelve of the seals are recorded by their finders in anything like a chronological context, and in our present knowledge typology, save for that of the cuneiform lettering on one example, does not come to the rescue. By the same ilk it is not always clear whether an imported Indus product or a local imitation or even a seal from some third source is in question, though in certain instances local workmanship may be postulated. The prevailing use of circular rather than rectangular seals is the reverse of local Indus custom, but may merely imply that the circular form was found in practice more serviceable than the rectangular for the particular goods or materials on which they were used in the export trade. The alleged occurrence of one of the significant seals on a bale of cloth at Umma near Lagash may indicate the nature of a part of this trade.