Early India and Pakistan to Ashoka c7.126

c7.126

Consistent too are the results of the excavations recently carried out by Dr. P. V. Glob's Danish expedition on the island of Telmun or Bahrain itself.⁸⁶ The principal ancient settlement on Bahrain was at the northern end of the island, at Ras al Qala'a, where particularly good springs are available. The excavations there exhibit a town of the competent but rather crude kind which might be expected from its function merely as a mart and servicing-station. A few links with Mesopotamia and with the Indus have been identified, notably circular steatite seals with grooved and pierced bosses at the back, variants of an Indus pattern. Since only five of these seals have been found in fairly extensive excavation at Bahrain, they are perhaps unlikely to be local. They bear animal and other designs—short-horned bull with head twisted slightly to one side, a square grid, a manger (?)—reminiscent of Indus seal-motifs but not identical with normal mid-Indus types, amongst which the circular seal is itself exceptional. They approximate more nearly to circular steatite seals found occasionally at Ur and elsewhere in Mesopotamia:⁸⁷ there the general type is equally alien and intrusive, and since five or more of the seals bear the distinctively Indus script there is no doubt as to the origin of some of their users. Thus as a whole the Ur-Bahrain series can be ascribed neither to the great inland cities of the Indus, such as Mohenjo-daro, nor yet to Sumerian invention. Rather must we associate them in some more general fashion with the coastal entrepôts which we are beginning to identify between the Gulf of Cambay and the head of the Persian Gulf. To distinguish them from the Indus seals proper, as we know them, I propose to name them the ‘Persian Gulf seals’.