{"it":{"id":"NX-A41","name":"Pashupati seal","kind":"artifact","sub":"Authenticated","place":"National Museum of India, New Delhi (museum location; found at Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan)","lat":28.61181,"lon":77.21926,"date":"c. 2350-2000 BCE (Mature Harappan; INTERPRETATION)","src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Pashupati seal","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashupati_seal"},{"t":"Wikidata Q1942840","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1942840"}],"tags":[],"nfacts":4,"coord_basis":"museum location: National Museum of India (Wikipedia coordinate)","loc_note":"museum location","sum":"A figure sits on a low dais with its heels pressed together. Its arms are stretched out and covered in bracelets, it wears a horned headdress, and it has three faces, one in front and two in profile. Around it stand an elephant, a tiger, a rhinoceros and a buffalo, with two antelopes or mountain goats below. Above runs a line of Indus signs that no one can read.\n\nThis is seal 420 from Mohenjo-daro, in the Indus Valley. Ernest Mackay published it in Further Excavations at Mohenjo-daro, the official account of the digging there between 1927 and 1931. He placed the prosperous days of the city in the third millennium BCE.\n\nWhat is hard to explain is how much one small image can tell us about a religion whose writing is still unread. Mackay himself was careful. The horns are horns, he wrote, \"if, indeed, they are horns\", and he thought the signs were probably just the names of the seal's owners.\n\nThe bold reading came from Sir John Marshall, who identified the figure with Shiva in his aspect as Pashupati, \"lord of Beasts\". Mackay set that view down, with the three faces, the yogic seat and the ring of animals, without claiming more for it.\n\nThe open question is how far a living religion can be traced back without words, and whether we see our own gods in old images.","nsrc":2,"new":1,"qs":["If this 4,000-year-old seal really shows a proto-Shiva, a living religion would be older than we think. Do you buy it?","The Indus script is still undeciphered. What might a whole civilisation be telling us that we can't yet read?","Buffalo horns or a lord of animals? When we can't read the writing, are we just seeing our own gods in old images?"],"why":"A famous small seal at the centre of a debate about how old Hindu religion is.","yt":"Compare other seals.","rel":["ASI-012"],"hook":"A three-faced figure ringed by animals on Indus seal 420. Sir John Marshall saw an early Shiva."},"S":{},"rec":{"id":"NX-A41","qs":["If this seal really shows a proto-Shiva, a living religion would be older than we think. Do you buy it?","The Indus script is still undeciphered. What might a whole civilisation be telling us that we can't yet read?","Buffalo horns or a lord of animals? When we can't read the writing, are we just seeing our own gods in old images?"],"gal":[],"ms":[{"a":"Size","v":"3.56 x 3.53 cm","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikipedia: Pashupati seal","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashupati_seal"},{"a":"Thickness","v":"7.6 mm","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"MEASUREMENT","c":"Wikipedia: Pashupati seal","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashupati_seal"},{"a":"Find-site","v":"Mohenjo-daro, excavated 1928-29","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikipedia: Pashupati seal","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashupati_seal"},{"a":"Holding institution","v":"National Museum of India, New Delhi","u":"","b":"S","g":"SINGLE SOURCE","t":"DOCUMENTARY_FACT","c":"Wikipedia: Pashupati seal","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashupati_seal"}],"aa":[],"ac":[],"src":[{"t":"Wikipedia: Pashupati seal","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pashupati_seal"},{"t":"Wikidata Q1942840","u":"https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1942840"},{"id":"VNX-A41-3","t":"Mackay (1938), Further Excavations at Mohenjo-daro (Internet Archive)","u":"https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.70071"}],"sum":"When British India was divided in 1947, the finds from Mohenjo-daro had to be divided too. Some 12,000 objects, most of them pieces of pottery, had been moved from the Lahore Museum to the archaeological headquarters in New Delhi, where a new imperial museum was planned. Pakistan asked for the pieces from its territory back; India refused. In the end they were split equally between the two countries, in some cases so literally that necklaces and girdles had their beads separated into two piles. Of the two most celebrated sculptures, Pakistan received the Priest-King and India kept the Dancing Girl. India also kept a small square of carved stone, about three and a half centimetres across, known as seal 420. It is in the National Museum of India, founded in 1949. It is better known as the Pashupati seal.\n\nThe seal was uncovered in 1928 or 1929, in Block 1 of the southern part of the DK-G area of Mohenjo-daro, 3.9 metres below the surface, during excavations by the Archaeological Survey of India. It is carved in steatite and measures 3.56 by 3.53 centimetres, 7.6 millimetres thick. Ernest Mackay, who directed the digging, published it as number 420 in his report Further Excavations at Mohenjo-daro, and placed it in his Intermediate I period, now put at about 2350 to 2000 BC.\n\nThousands of seals have been found in the Indus Valley, and most show an animal as the main figure. This one shows a person. At the centre, on a low platform, a figure sits facing forward, knees bent, heels pressed together, toes pointing down. The arms reach out and rest lightly on the knees, thumbs turned away, covered with eight small and three large bangles. Necklaces cover the chest, and a double band wraps the waist. On the head is a tall headdress, a fan-shaped crest between two large ridged horns. The face may be one of three, one forward and two in profile. Around the figure stand four wild animals: an elephant and a tiger on one side, a water buffalo and an Indian rhinoceros on the other. Below the platform two deer or ibexes, sometimes called antelopes or mountain goats, look back so that their curved horns almost meet. Across the top run seven signs of the Indus script, the last pushed downward for lack of room. No one can read them.\n\nThe first reading came from Sir John Marshall, who had directed the Archaeological Survey and led the excavations of the Indus sites. In a publication of 1928 to 1929 he gave four reasons for seeing the figure as an early form of the Hindu god Shiva. It has three faces, and Shiva was shown with three as well as five. Its head is crowned with what he took to be the horns of a bull, and horns and the trident are emblems of Shiva. It sits in a typical yoga posture, and Shiva is the mahayogi, the prince of yogis. It is surrounded by animals, and Shiva is Pashupati, \"Lord of Animals.\" In 1931 he added that Shiva is linked with the phallus, and that medieval art shows him with deer or ibexes like those below the seat. He also saw the figure as ithyphallic, though he admitted that what looked like a phallus could be a tassel hanging from the waistband.\n\nMackay himself was more careful. The horns are horns, he wrote, \"if, indeed, they are horns,\" and he thought the signs were probably just the names of the seal's owners. He set down Marshall's view, with the three faces, the yogic seat and the ring of animals, without claiming more for it.\n\nMarshall's reading shaped the field for two generations. In 1964 Herbert Sullivan, who disagreed with it, admitted that it had been accepted almost universally and had greatly influenced scholarly understanding of the history of Hinduism. In 1976 Doris Srinivasan observed that, whatever position one takes on the seal, \"it is always prefaced by Marshall's interpretation.\" In 2011 Alf Hiltebeitel noted that nearly every attempt to interpret Indus religion has centred on this figure. Thomas McEvilley identified the posture as a specific yoga pose, a squat with joined heels described in the Kalpa Sutra as used with meditation and fasting to reach infinite knowledge. The archaeologist Jonathan Mark Kenoyer still described the figure as ithyphallic in 2003.\n\nThe objections are many. Sullivan read the figure as a goddess: the supposed phallus is the dangling end of a girdle, a feature found on many clearly female clay figurines, and the jewellery is that of female rather than male figurines. Srinivasan argued that the side \"faces\" are cow-like ears and that the central face is a bull's or buffalo's, and suggested a divine buffalo-man, comparing a horned mask from Mohenjo-daro, a clay bull from Kalibangan and a horned figure on a pot from Kot Diji. Hiltebeitel insisted the horns are a buffalo's, not a bull's, a difference no one in the Indus would have missed, and linked the figure to Mahishasura, the buffalo demon enemy of the goddess Durga, who is often shown riding a tiger. He also suggested the four animals could be the mounts of the gods of the four directions. Walter Fairservis read the inscription as Dravidian and named the figure a chief of four clans. Asko Parpola compared the pose with Proto-Elamite images of seated bulls and read the figure as the servant of a water god, perhaps connected with Varuna. M. V. N. Krishna Rao combined the first sounds of the animals' names to reach an epithet of Indra.\n\nSome scholars now urge restraint. Wendy Doniger allowed a general resemblance to later images of Shiva, but wrote that \"we cannot know it,\" and that a resemblance does not make the Indus image the source of the Hindu one, or give it the same meaning. Geoffrey Samuel noted that the many readings \"certainly cannot all be right,\" and that reading later practices back into the material makes it of little or no use for writing a history of yogic practice.\n\nAnother seal from Mohenjo-daro, DK 12050, now in Islamabad, shows a naked three-faced horned figure on a throne in a yogic pose, with bangles on its arms but no animals. Its sex is disputed too, although it seems to have a beard. The seated posture appears on a number of other seals and sealings as well, and some of them, Srinivasan noted, seem to show the figure receiving worship.\n\nPicture the seal itself, three and a half centimetres square: a figure seated with heels together, arms out, horns curving up from its crown, the elephant and the tiger on one side, the buffalo and the rhinoceros on the other, and above it a line of seven signs that, for now, say nothing to us."},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/NX-A41-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Pashupati seal, National Museum of India, New Delhi (museum location; found at Mohenjo-daro, Pakistan) — Pashupati Seal. From the Harappan Civilization, Mohenjo-Daro, Terracotta, 2700 – 2100 BCE. Presently kept at the…","by":"Aadrit28","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pashupati_Seal_from_the_Harappan_Civilization.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":null,"hs":{}}