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Below: Figure 127 (p. 155) from Black and Green, Gods Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia.

The caption in Black and Green reads: "Cattle gather around a byre, distinguished by its poles with rings. From a cylinder seal of the Late Uruk period."

The similarities with the Indus "unicorn," as the caption in Black and Green implies, apparently arise simply from the fact that the cattle are shown from the side. The claim that this was also true of Indus "unicorns" has been made in the past - and may have some truth in a few early examples - but by the time the Indus unicorn image reached mature form the horn was very long and heavily stylized. Moreover, the single horn seen on the creature contrasts sharply with all other real or mythical Indus animals shown from the side, which invariably show two horns regardless of the perspective. (These other two-horned Indus creatures shown from the side include goats, composite animals with human heads, buffalo, zebu, and a number of others.)

Also missing from the Mesopotamian images is the prominent phallus that is always associated with the Indus "unicorn" - which did, in fact, plausibly have associations with fertility rituals - as well as the prominent bangles, hatching, and other ritual decorations (including drapings that look like a heart or pipal leaf, or possibly both through a bandhu-like association) that are typically found on the animal. The tails are also much longer than those shown in the Mesopotamian examples. For these elements, see, among many hundreds of examples, M-10a, from Mohenjo-daro, which doesn't look much like the Mesopotamian example:

The upshot is that the similarities we find with side illustrations of Mesopotamian cattle are probably coincidental. It can also be pointed out that most Mesopotamian bull figures, shown with one horn because of artistic perspective, look even less like Indus unicorns. See, e.g., this other bull image, also from Black and Green, page 96:

Accidental similarities may or may not be true of the eagle sign that we find both at Harappa and Tepe Yahya. Below I show the two images side-by-side that I mentioned in an earlier post. I've seen a lot of pictures of eagles, e.g., from the BMAC, but I can't recall two as similar iconographically as these. H-166 from Harappa may be foreign, as suggested in the Corpus (Vol. I, p. 205), but maybe that's the point.

On the left, eagle on a ceremonial chlorite axe head (Potts 2001: Figure 9.6). On the right, Harappa H-166a (a seal impression flipped horizontally to mimic the way the seal itself would look). Maybe the similarities are accidental, but there are other (and in some ways more striking) resemblances in Indus/Jiroft/Tepe Yahya iconography - e.g., regional variants of anthropomorphic Gilgamesh-like figures holding two lions, or very similar looking hut structures (used in sacrifices in the Indus Valley) - that at least make you wonder. I don't have any real idea what this all means, but the similarities certainly are worth noting.

Web page posted made to illustrate a post in Lars Martin's Fosse's Indology List, March 17, 2004, S. Farmer.

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