Artifacts

"The Dancing girl" artifact found in Mohenjo Daro

A clay toy from Mohenjodaro

The Dancing girl found in Mohenjo Daro constitutes an interesting artifact some 4500-years old. The 10.8 cm long bronze statue of the dancing girl, found in 1926 from a house in Mohenjo Daro, had been British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler's favorite statuette, as he said in this quote from a 1973 television program: "There is her little Baluchi-style face with pouting lips and insolent look in the eye. She's about fifteen years old I should think, not more, but she stands there with bangles all the way up her arm and nothing else on. A girl perfectly, for the moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There's nothing like her, I think, in the world." John Marshall, one of the excavators at Mohenjo-Daro, described her as a vivid impression of the young ... girl, her hand on her hip in a half-impudent posture, and legs slightly forward as she beats time to the music with her legs and feet.[1] The artistry of that statuette has remained recognizable today, telling of a strange, but at least fleetingly recognizable past. As author Gregory Possehl says, "We may not be certain that she was a dancer, but she was good at what she did and she knew it." The statue could well be of some queen or other important woman of the Indus Valley Civilization judging from the authority the figure commands.

Seated male sculpture, or "Priest King" (even though no evidence exists that either priests or kings ruled the city). That 17.5 cm tall statue represents another artifact which has become a symbol for the Indus valley civilization. Archaeologists discovered the sculpture in Lower town at Mohenjo-Daro in 1927, found in an unusual house with ornamental brickwork and a wall niche, lying between brick foundation walls which once held up a floor.

"The Priest King" Wearing Sindhi Ajruk, ca. 2500 B.C.E. National Museum, Karachi, Pakistan

This bearded sculpture wears a fillet around the head, an armband, and a cloak decorated with trefoil patterns that were originally filled with red pigment. The two ends of the fillet, falling along the back and though the hair, has been carefully combed towards the back of the head, without a bun. The flat back of the head may have held a separately carved bun, like the other traditional seated figures, or it could have held a more elaborate horn and plumed headdress. Two holes beneath the highly stylized ears suggest that a necklace or other head ornament had been attached to the sculpture. The left shoulder, covered with a cloak decorated with trefoil, has double circle and single circle designs originally filled with red pigment. Drill holes in the center of each circle indicate they had been made with a specialized drill and then touched up with a chisel. Eyes, deeply incised, may have held inlay. The shaved upper lip and a short combed beard frames the face. The large crack in the face resulted from weathering or may have happened in the original firing of that object.