The Priest-King
A bearded man in a trefoil-patterned cloak, carved in steatite: the face of the Indus civilisation.
The Priest-King is a small sculpture of white steatite, about seventeen and a half centimetres high, found at Mohenjo-daro in 1927. It shows a bearded man with half-closed eyes and a band around his head, wearing a cloak over one shoulder decorated with trefoils that were once filled with red paste.
No one knows if he was a priest or a king; the name was given by the excavators. He is one of very few stone sculptures of people from the Indus cities.
At Partition he went to Pakistan and is kept in the National Museum in Karachi.
More from the Indus
The world's first great public water tank, sealed with bitumen on the citadel of Mohenjo-daro.
A bronze girl, ten centimetres tall, standing with hand on hip, her arm covered in bangles.
A horned figure seated cross-legged among wild animals: the most debated image of the Indus.
The commonest Indus seal: a one-horned bull before a ritual stand, with a line of script.
Long red beads drilled through with stone drills and etched with white designs, prized from the Indus to Ur.
Polished cubes of chert made to one standard from the Ravi to the Arabian Sea.
Two small stone torsos from Harappa so lifelike that their date is still argued.
Little bullock carts, whistles, rattles and animals with nodding heads: the playthings of Indus children.