纪录片《大英博物馆世界简史》 013印度封印（2）

"You could really say that that's where all the things that I am interested in - civil society - starts." (Richard Rogers)

"It speaks to me in so many different ways, and it doesn't appear to be something that is alien just because it belongs to the third millennium BC." (Nayanjot Lahiri)

This week I'm looking at how the first cities and states grew up along the great rivers of the world, and how these new concentrations of people and of wealth were controlled. Around five thousand years ago, the Indus River flowed, as it still does today, down from the Tibetan Plateau into the Arabian Sea. The Indus civilisation, which at its height covered nearly 200,000 square miles, grew up in the rich, fertile floodplains. Excavations have revealed plans of entire cities, as well as vigorous patterns of international trade. Stone seals from the Indus Valley have been found as far afield as the Middle East and central Asia, but the seals I want to tell you about were found in the Indus Valley itself.

I'm in the Asia study room of the British Museum and in front of me is a small collection of stone seals, made to press into wax or clay in order to claim ownership, to sign a document or to mark a package. They were made between 2500 and 2000 BC. They're all square-ish, about the size of a modern postage stamp, and they're made of soapstone, so they're easy to carve. And they have been beautifully carved - they have wonderfully incised images of animals. I've got in front of me an elephant, an ox, a kind of cross between a cow and a unicorn and, in my hand my favourite, a rhinoceros. All the beasts have above them a few symbols which look like writing, and we'll come back to that later.