Page 320 - The Tigris Expedition

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The Tigris Expedition
soapstone no bigger than my own thumb. The label merely said:
‘Seal with house boat’. And there was the boat indeed, engraved on
the flat surface. The little stone had been broken in two and
carefully mended by its finder. The symbol chosen by the original
owner was that of a ship, a sea-going ma-gur of typical sickle shape,
designed to ride the ocean swells. Cross-lashings characteristic of a
reed-craft were clearly shown, with double rudder-oars astern and a
deck cabin between two masts. Both seemed to be straddling bipod
masts, and at least one clearly showed the rungs of the mast ladder
of the kind copied by us on Ra and Tigris from Egyptian designs.
Rarely can the artless scratches on a tiny piece of stone have
impressed seafarers more than this relic from an ancient mariner or
merchant, left for thousands of years in the refuse of Mohcnjo-
Daro. The former owner could not have fancied that every little
furrow he had cut out into his little piece of steatite would be
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studied with such care and cause so much excitement. But we were
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not the first to see the implications of this find. In his report on the
actual discovery, Ernest J. H. Mackay wrote:
The vessel portrayed on this seal is boldly but roughly cut,
apparently with a triangular burin, and is apparently not the
work of an experienced seal-cutter; hence its interest, because,
probably in consequence of inexperience, the motif is not a
stereotyped one. The boat has a sharply upturned prow and stern,
a feature which is present in nearly all archaic representations of
boats; for example, the same type of boat appears on Early
Minoan seals, on the Predynastic pottery of Egypt, and on the
cylinder seals of Sumer. In the last mentioned country this type of
boat was used down to Assyrian times.5

! Mackay realised that the parallel hatchings indicate lashings of a
boat ‘made of reeds like the primitive boats of Egypt and the craft
that were used in the swamps of southern Babylonia’. He stated that
this seal indicates a type of vessel that was in use in ancient
Mohenjo-Daro, and proposed that its owner was perhaps con­
nected with shipping of some kind, for so much attention had been
paid to detail.
Not much attention was paid to Mackay’s discovery, and he
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■ found only one other and much cruder ship scratched on a pottery
sherd, which at least showed a strongly arched hull, double-mast
with a pair of yards, and a rudder-oar with tiller in the stern. But
scholars who have subsequently referred to the discovery agree in
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