The Indus Civilization (Cambridge History of India, Supplementary Volume) c8.41

c8.41

Less provincial is the culture-group associated with Kulli, a site in the southern foothills of the Baluch mountains. With it is sometimes combined the name of Mehi, further to the north-east in the valley of the Mashkai, giving the double-barrelled name Kulli-Mehi to the group. Upwards of twenty-five of these buff-ware sites are known, extending southwards and westwards from the vicinity of Nal but not intruding into the Indus plain. Cremation-burials have been found at Mehi (unlike Harappā), and at both sites houses were built of plastered stone and mud-brick, not of Harappan baked bricks. The pottery has not been stratified and the interrelationship of its various elements is conjectural. Some of it shows clear Harappan motives, including black-on-red decoration, pipal leaves and even the Harappan "sacred brazier" (p. 77), though whether this affinity is due to interaction between the Kulli-Mehi and the Harappā cultures or whether the former is in a true sense antecedent and proto-Harappan cannot at present be decided. Non-Harappan features of Kulli-Mehi include friezes of elongated animals, particularly bulls, with strongly outlined and vertically striped bodies and large circular eyes. Small caprids, plants, dots-and-circles, comb-patterns and other objects crowd the background, recalling the same *horror vacui* in the "scarlet ware" of the Diyala region near Baghdad in Early Dynastic times, after *c.* 2800 B.C. The designs are mostly in black paint, but a red line is occasionally added in the framework. From Mehi comes a group of stone pots, possibly unguent-pots, either square or circular on plan and sometimes subdivided into four compartments. They commonly bear friezes of incised and hatched triangles. One is unfinished, so that some at least of them were made on the spot. Similar stone pots have been found at Mohenjo-daro to the east and in southern Iran (Persian Makrān), Mesopotamia and eastern Syria (Mari) to the west, and are comparable with small stone "house-urns" which occur throughout the same zone, perhaps at a somewhat earlier date (see below, p. 87). Piggott has conjectured that Makrān was the main centre of dispersal, and that the Kulli-Mehi culture is an integral part of a creative complex with wide commercial contacts (possibly a partly sea-borne trade in unguents) rather than close cultural links, as far as the Indus and Euphrates valleys. These links suggest fairly accurately an Early Dynastic date, and reinforce the vaguer hint noted above in connexion with the decorated pottery.