Another Indus Valley Seal

Extract

The button-shaped seal communicated in this paper was kindly shown to me by Professor A. B. Cook, of Cambridge, who purchased it from a London dealer. The object was seen by the Cambridge professor among a lot of “Assyrian cone seals, etc.”, but the dealer had no recollection of its provenance. Babylonian press seals of the small coneshaped variety are constantly appearing in the hands of dealers in antiquities, and seals of the Indus Valley type, actually found in Mesopotamia, have been acquired through dealers in Paris. There is no evidence that any of the seals found in the hands of dealers have come from India, and the additional circumstance that the London dealer had it among Babylonian seals leads one to believe that this object was found in lower Mesopotamia. The photograph is made from a cast. There is the usual pierced boss on the reverse. The inscription reads:—

Reading right to left, the first sign seems to be intended for the ordinary sign , which does occur in some texts as the first sign. See No. 266 of my Sign List, Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilization, p. 451. The second sign is apparently a variant of No. 113, but I have never seen any variant like it. No. 113 does follow 266 on two seals. To No. 113 I assigned the value ta. The third sign is No. 154, with accent A ('). The fourth sign is the common fish sign, No. 175.