Mohenjo-Daro: Seal from Mohenjo-daro, mostly of steatite, Lahore, Museum

As we mentioned in our introduction, the square seal is an artistic creation peculiar to the Indus River civilization, and through its export or import to Mesopotamia and Egypt, exerts and receives influences in motif and shape, Most of the seals, the majority in our slide, show animals alone or with other figures accompanied by legends in the Indus script, The use of the seal was to provide a 'signature' impression of a specific sort for its owner who would 'sign' his documents, written in clay, with a stamp of the seal, In Egypt, where the scarab or beetle shaped seal was popular, and in Mesopotamia, where the cylinder seal appeared, the use of the stamp was the same, The Indus Valley seal, however, seems to have been invented before those of the other civilizations, The technique used in producing the images on the seals was the same for all, that is, intaglio: the method of cutting away the matrix around the image leaving the figures and script raised above the surface of the stamp so that the image produced when pressed into soft clay was indented, In terms of quality, the Indus seals were carefully worked and skillfully modeled with little or no evidence of the tooling visible in the finished work, The Mesopotamian seals were more choppy and geometrically handled leaving decorative tool marks on the raised surface