In my previous post, I discussed the Indian subcontinent's first civilization and asked whether it might have been a utopia.

Of course, it is impossible to write about the Indus Valley Civilization without also writing about its famous seals.

These soapstone seals are a little over one-inch square and engraved with an image in the centre, and, on top, have signs that look like writing. Often, they have a pierced boss on the reverse to accommodate a cord.

The images are most commonly of animals such as bulls, elephants, and rhinoceros. But by far the most represented animal, on more than half of the seals, is a "unicorn" with what seems to be the body of a bull and the head of a zebra, crowned by a single, sigmoidal horn (Figure 1).

Some five thousand Indus seals have been found, some as far afield as Central Asia and the Middle East. From the large number of surviving sealings, it seems that they were used like signet........

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