Indus Valley Painted Pottery: A Comparative Study of the Design on the Painted Wares of the Harappa Culture

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Excavations of Indus cities have produced much evidence of artistic activity. Such findings are important because they provide insights into the minds, lives, and religious beliefs of their creators. Stone sculpture is extremely rare, and much of it is quite crude. The total repertoire cannot compare to the work done in Mesopotamia during the same periods. The figures are apparently all intended as images for worship. Such figures include seated men, recumbent composite animals, or in unique instances (from Harappa) a standing nude male and a dancing figure. The finest pieces are of excellent quality. There is also a small but notable repertoire of cast-bronze figures, including several fragments and complete examples of dancing girls, small chariots, carts, and animals. The technical excellence of the bronzes suggests a highly developed art, but the number of examples is still small. They appear to be Indian workmanship rather than imports.

THIS volume is not, nor could it be, so complete and conclusive a discussion of the subject as to pretend solution to all its riddles and answers to all its questions. The mysteries of prehistoric interrelationships could not be so easily or fully penetrated. It is, rather, the hope of the author that this work will help to clarify and stimulate future and further discussions in this field; and if the data and suggestions in the following pages help to an appreciable degree in clearing away the haze that has surrounded the Indus Valley in its relationship to other portions of the ancient world, the real purpose of this work will have been accomplished.

This study originated in 1938 as a dissertation presented to Princeton University in candidacy for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Since then, it has been entirely revised and rewritten; the less important material has been eliminated and much has been added that was originally overlooked or has been newly discovered.

SCHOLARS interested in those remote periods when Oriental man was struggling toward the edge of history had for long concentrated their attention either on the Near East or on distant China. Prehistoric India, it seemed, had nothing to offer comparable in antiquity and material development. Yet within the last two decades the situation has changed. Intensive archaeological investigations at ancient sites along the Indus River in northwestern India have laid bare the remnants of a civilization far greater in antiquity than anything previously known as Indian.

The first of these excavations was started in 1920 in the mound Harappa, in the Punjab, and the importance of the finds led to the commencement of the great excavations at Mohenjodaro in Sind in 1921. The results revealed a non-Aryan civilization, clearly prehistoric so far as India is concerned, and in some ways far in advance of Sumer and Elam, its nearest comparable neighbors. The scientific world which had long considered Sumer as the peer of early Asiatic cultures suddenly found itself confronted by another claimant from this entirely unexpected quarter. Nowhere in antiquity had so high a degree of civic prosperity been reached at such an early date, and nowhere in the Ancient East was there a people who seem to have been less baited by princes, priests and war. The amazing absence of what may properly be called palaces and temples, and the scarcity of weapons of offense, attest this. No- where in antiquity has life appeared so ordered and secure. And if we lack the spiritual concepts found elsewhere, or the wealth of works of art, it should be remembered, first, that the vast majority of their writings has quite certainly perished and that what little is left to us is still undecipherable, and second, that archaeological research among these people is still in its infancy.