Pashupati seal

The object

The seal, catalogued from Mohenjo-daro and often referred to by its excavation number, shows a figure seated on a low platform with legs folded and heels together, wearing an elaborate horned headdress, with arms extended and covered in bangles. Around the figure are four animals — an elephant, a tiger, a rhinoceros and a water buffalo — with two smaller animals, usually read as antelopes or goats, beneath the seat. A short inscription runs above.

Marshall's reading

John Marshall, who directed the excavations, identified the figure in 1931 as a prototype of Shiva in the aspect of Pashupati, lord of animals. His argument rested on the seated posture, read as yogic; the horns, connected to Shiva's later iconography; the surrounding animals, matching the epithet; and what he took to be an ithyphallic detail, linked to the linga.

The reading was influential and passed into general accounts, where the seal is still often captioned as proto-Shiva.

The objections

Each element has been challenged. The posture occurs in Mesopotamian and Elamite art and is not distinctively yogic. Horned headdresses are a widespread marker of divinity or authority in the ancient Near East. The Pashupati epithet attaches to Rudra in Vedic literature composed much later, and there is no demonstrated line of transmission. The supposedly ithyphallic feature has been argued to be part of a waistband. Doris Srinivasan in particular made a detailed case against the identification.

There is also a general objection: the reading works backwards from later Hinduism to an undeciphered civilization, which is exactly the method that ought to be treated with most suspicion.

Where it stands

Nobody knows what the seal depicts. That it shows a figure of some importance surrounded by wild animals is clear; that the figure is a deity is likely but not established; that it is Shiva, or an ancestor of Shiva, is an interpretation resting on resemblance across a gap of more than a thousand years and an undeciphered script. It is worth stating plainly, because the seal is reproduced constantly with the identification attached as though it were a caption rather than a claim.