Minerals and Metals in Ancient India v1.c11.s2.15

v1.c11.s2.15

Besides these metals and minerals, several other materials (bone, ivory, shell faience and vitrified paste) were in use for ornamental purposes, as well as for making various small articles. Bone must have been easily obtainable in the locality, and ivory is a commodity of which there has always been an abundant supply in India. Shells of many kinds, and in large quantities, were brought from the coasts of India as well as from the Persian gulf and the Red Sea, and the shell industry played a hardly less important part in the Indus Valley than it did in Sumer, though shell-inlay work does not seem to have been elaborated to quite the same degree as in the latter country. Faience, which resembled the faience of Mesopotamia, Minoan Greece and Egypt, but has preserved its colourless brilliantly than in Egypt, was a soft and friable paste, sometimes made of powdered steatite, usally white in colour and coated with a blue, green or white vitreous glaze. The widespread manufacture of faience, which is not likely to have been invented independently in different countries is one of the many striking illustrations of the homogeneity of culture in the chalcolithic times.