Private Person or Public Persona? Use and Significance of Standard Indus Seals as Markers of Formal Socio-Economic Identities

Stamp seals made of fired steatite are one of the most distinctive standardized productions of the Indus Civilization. However, despite a century of continuous research and analysis, the system of semantic rules and socio-economic practices behind their sudden introduction and prolonged use with little variations for almost one millennium remains far from being fully decoded, with particular reference to the identity and roles of the individuals represented by these seals. Jonathan Mark Kenoyer addressed this topic in several sections of his seminal book Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization (1998), as well as in later specific papers (2013), leaving space for alternative hypotheses. This paper attempts to deconstruct the most distinctive features of the standard Indus seals comparing the resulting patterns and trends with those of better-known contemporaneous administrative systems in order to isolate some basic concepts that might have regulated their use. The application of general models of brands development in different types of marketing systems allows to tentatively circumstantiate and further test the resulting hypotheses within a robust methodological framework