MOHENJO-DARO MACKAY 431 



In 1923, the veil which concealed the India of pre-Aryan days was 

 suddenly lifted in a dramatic and completelj'' unforeseen manner. A 

 ruined Buddhist stiipa had for some time been known in the Larkana 

 district of Sindh. Alone in a dreary jungle of dusty tamarisk and 

 stunted thorn trees, it raised its battered head, a prominent land- 

 mark, some 72 feet high, in a land of exceeding flatness. The late 

 R. D. Banerji, of the Archaeological Survey of India, on examining 

 it found that it stood upon a mound composed entirely of burnt brick 

 and mud filling. The bricks of the stuya corresponded in size with 

 the bricks of the mound, and to ascertain the nature of the sup- 

 posedly Buddhist buildings beneath the stuya^ Mr. Banerji cut down 

 into them. He came upon a number of the square stamp seals and 

 copper amuletic tablets — quite clearly not Buddhist — that have since 

 come to be recognized as the most characteristic of the smaller ob- 

 jects produced by the Indus Valley culture of about three millenia 

 B.C. 



He and Sir John Marshall, then director general of the Archaeo- 

 logical Survey of India, immediately realized that here were the 

 remains of a civilization whose existence had hitherto been little 

 more than dimly suspected — a few similar seals had been unearthed 

 two years before at Harappa, about 450 miles distant, on the old bed 

 of the Ravi River in the Montgomery district of the Punjab. This 

 site, which appears to have been an even larger and more important 

 city than Mohenjo-daro, lies not so far removed from the beaten 

 track, and it had, unfortunatelj^, served at one time as a quarry for 

 railway ballast. 



After a further examination of the new-found site. Sir John Mar- 

 shall published a preliminary^ account of it in the Illustrated London 

 News (Sept. 20, 1924), which immediately attracted keen attention. 

 A number of similar square stamp seals, bearing the same picto- 

 graphic script and animal devices, whose source had hitherto been 

 a mystery though they were found in Sumer and Elam, were at once 

 "re-excavated " from the Louvre, Paris, and elsewhere ; and many 

 similarities between the cultures of Sumer and the Indus valley were 

 noted. Mr. E. Mackay, at that time field director of the joint Oxford 

 and Field Museum (Chicago) expedition at Kish, had shortly before 

 unearthed one from among the foundations of a temple of Sargonic 

 date, where it had apparently been thrown in unnoticed with the 

 earth filling. He showed it to the late Miss Gertrude Bell, honorary 

 director of antiquities in Iraq, and a cast of it was sent to India for 

 comparison. The new-found civilization was, accordingly, tenta- 

 tively named the " Indo-Sumerian " civilization of the Indus valley, 

 and, from the Kish find, dated provisionally to the beginning of the 

 third millenium B. C. 



