A History Of The World In A 100 Objects: No. 13

A History Of The World In A 100 Objects
Number 13

Indus Seal
Stone stamp, from Harrapa, the Indus Valley (Punjab), Pakistan
2,500-2000 BC

The last two items come from the time of the first great empires of the world were growing, around the river's Nile & Tigris & Euphartes. This item comes from around that era too & is from another great empire that grew around a river, this time the Indus. The Indus civilization was vast being 200,000 square miles in size & it's population grew rapidly during the period of this object.This civilization disappeared due to climate change & this item is a fairly new find & one of the great achaelogical successes from this period.
This item is actually a group of items, it's a set of seals or wax/clay stamps about the size of a modern postage stamp & is made of soapstone so is fairly soft so it's quite lucky that it was found as soapstone is a very soft, crumbly rock.
They all have images of animals, there's an elephant, an ox, a kind of cow/unicorn thing & a skippy rhinocerous.
It was found in the 1850s during the time of British rule of the Indian subcontinent in a place called Harappa, 150 miles south of lahore, which was on the main trade route between the far east & the middle east which was to become known as the silk road & would have been a prosperous & burgeoning civilization which was unfortunately wiped out after the Indus flooded.
Unlike the last two objects this item doesn't seem to depict a king or pharaoh or any sort of leader & no one's quite sure if there was any. But these items do show that the Indus cities were growing at a similar speed to their counterparts in Egypt & Mesopotamia before they were lost & archaeologists are still unearthing remnants from the period today, hopefully they'll shed more light on this rather lost culture.