An Unfinished Unfired Seal from Mohen jo-daro
One of the most intriguing of Indus inscriptions, displayed upside down in the glass case in the second image [above]. Was it going to be a seal or not? It looks like it. Dr. Kenoyer points out that “The depression under the script is the beginning of a unicorn horn or possibly the place for a head but there is not enough space and they may have discarded it. It is unfired steatite and therefore was never completed.”
That the inscription was probably not intended to be longer is indicated by the relatively ample room on each side of the boundary characters. But it is the perfectly assured cuts of shapes, the geometry of it, the triangle of the arrow sign on the left, the curious geometric/anti-geometric center curve of the sign the right (Indus script was read from right to left on seal impressions, left to right on seals like the one above, the “negatives” from which sealings were cast [see Parpola, Deciphering the Indus Script, Very confident design and execution in this burst of characters.
