ancient technology - harappan seal

There are times you try simple stuff and get badly stuck. Like once, bitten by a Harappan 

bug, I got down to make a replica of an ancient  seal I had seen at the museum. 

Everything about  Indus Valley Culture fascinate me. Enigmatic, yet to be understood,  they left behind traces of an urban culture, leaving behind traces of their existence through relics, especially exquisite seals with unknown inscriptions for some purpose we are yet to decipher 

I decided to make a seal.

Copying them would take me closer to understanding them . Making a seal  should not be daunting, I thought...After all it’s some kind of clay...ha ha.The seal I had seen at the museum was small and well detailed and made from clay , faience really, Faience! I learnt there ( it was written  in letters big enough ).  

Now this faience! where the fuck was faience?. I was desperate to find some and trawled the web and it turned out after the long dead harappans, nobody on earth  had ever seen the material. Luckily, there was a substitute. A roadside potter's wife had some clay , a sticky brown goo , which I took home.

It looked workable

Back home I set the clay on the dining table, slappedtge  clay,  added a little water  and it turned into a unmanageable drippy mush. When I tried to mold it the goo ran through my fingers. Bah!. I grabbed some more clay and slapped to the mush and it crumbled in my palm. It was too dry to stick togetjer .

Get into shape, goddamn ,this is supposed to be easy! I set it on a chappati plank and was beating it into a flat cake when my wife looked over my shoulder and asked me if I was reinventing shit.

"next time you enter my kitchen , you're dead, dead, dead"....get out she yelled as she yanked the plank away. The goo flew!

I forgot to tell: please remember to factor in a few elements before you try ancient stuff. One, 'The Wife'. You have to convince her that whatever you are doing costs nothing,  will be of immediate use to her and that she will be famous. 

You'll need electrical devices too. Also, I would like to add a third and a fourth. All said, modern technology will help you zilch . If its a miniature you are trying to replicate, make sure the work piece is big enough , at least two feet by two feet!

Well. Outside, after an hour or so of real kneading and squishing, I got the wet clay into a three inch square and set to work  with a sharp knife. The first impression I made, cleaved the cake into two. I desperately licked it back to shape.

"A thin blunt wedge to make the markings ...oh yes ..that's what I need ,a wedge, a wedge!".

I rummaged the kitchen and found a dinner fork and snapped off three prongs. It was now handy and I made a proper impression, a wedge . A nice and proper incision there and when I tried to maneuver it into a circle, it widened and became an yawning gap, a fucking hole. I tossed the implement aside and used a bottle cap to get the round impression which looked so perfect, it stood out announcing it's mother. Anyway I kept working on it, using any implement that came to hand and soon had a few crude glyphs running across the top.

Next, I had to carve the central figure, an animal, the unicorn. It was a nightmare. How the f..k does one make an micro incision with a macro fork? The rump alone ran the length, the male organ was bigger than the four legs together and the tail ran out of the seal. There was no space for the sacred object.

I had some expert advice coming through the night though. Nuts suggesting various techniques. Tips on sculpting, art, besides late night drunken bastards urgently inquiring whether the goo could be used for something else...."check with your wife, she'll know, ..hahahah.."

"Put the light off .... tone the noise down, you moron..why cant you be normal like everyone else and sleep?". The Wife . The night loudly went by.

Nearly morning , I had a semblance of a seal in place which embarrassed me no end. Whatever, I had it in some form and the gooey effort had to be fired to dry and harden. I filched coal from the istriwallah's cart and tried to set it on fire. It refused to catch. Except for the istriwallah, nobody can ever set coal on fire  and the irony is, if you weren't careful at work place everything caught fire! Well, after several attempts I gave up and set the coal on the gas burner right beside the rice cooker, just as she ducked in for a bath. The coal burned alright and so did the rice cooker!

 


And when she got back , there was lot of blood.

I didn’t give up though and for a moment mulled using the microwave to fire the seal. But I was already dead, so I made a furnace and dumped the burning coal in it.

                              

 The furnace, a broken flower pot with strategic holes, was a total disaster. Once I had a fire going, it lost it's fizz. I tried to breathe life into the fire, but it didn’t sustain . A bellow... a bellows??, that was the answer. I had seen blacksmiths use that contraption to pump air and whip it up and I ripped an umbrella apart to make one when I realised I didn't know how to make one!!

Well, I had to do something and get out before she found out. I hooked her hair dryer up to blow air into the furnace. The lead was short , so I added a length of bare wire and delicately threaded it through a window into a socket in the kitchen. And soon I heard an almighty shriek. I didn't notice my wire was running by the stove and heat had melt the wire and when she went to take the milk down , she got an awful shock almost electrocuting her .

arrrhhh...."I told you... you'll kill us all, you moron,idiot..... what do you have in your silly head..mud?....madman, mahabrandhan!!!".She was livid. I’d never seen her so angry I ran away.

I gave up. Any comment good, bad or ugly about those ancient guys, is taken back. They were geniuses alright. Come to think of it, the Harappans were here for a longer length of time than we have been here and obviously they had a fire going.!!