You see, language is structured, but not rigidly so. What Rao and his associates did was try to find out if the number and occurrence pattern of glyphs was repetitive, but not too repetitive. There are a fish-like glyph and a grid and a diamond shape and a u-shape thing with wings sometimes called a double-reed that are all found repeatedly in Indus scripts, whether on seals or on pottery sherds. Since the seals aren't necessarily stamp seals, do the glyphs have to represent a language at all? Well, the glyphs do recur. Which is really too bad for us-decipherment would somewhat easier if we know or could guess that the glyphs represent something that might be shipped in a jar (Harappans grew wheat, barley, and rice, among other things) or that part of the glyphs might be numbers or place names. So if the seals weren't necessarily stamps, then they don't necessarily have to include information about the contents of a jar or package being sent to a faraway land. That may mean that it wasn't the seal's impression in clay that was important, but rather the seal itself that was meaningful. Further, the Indus seals don't show a lot of use-wear, compared to Mesopotamian versions. That's definitely different from the Mesopotamian model, where the seals were clearly used as accounting devices: archaeologists have found rooms with hundreds of clay sealings all stacked and ready for counting. Some question has arisen about whether these were seals at all-there are very few sealings (the impressed clay) which have been discovered. There are also (in descending order of frequency) short-horned bulls, zebus, rhinoceroses, goat-antelope mixtures, bull-antelope mixtures, tigers, buffaloes, hares, elephants, and goats. They were carved using bronze or flint tools, and they generally include an animal representation and a handful of glyphs.Īnimals represented on the seals are mostly, interestingly enough, unicorns-basically, a bull with one horn, whether they're 'unicorns' in the mythical sense or not is vigorously debated. Indus civilization stamp seals are usually square to rectangular, and about 2-3 centimeters on a side, although there are larger and smaller ones.

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