Single piece. This consideration supplies a valuable hint for the posture of the missing limbs. They did not cling to the body but protruded into space, perhaps even swayed: obviously the most convenient way to carve such limbs is separately. Moreover, the point at which the lower left leg was attached was just above the knee-suggesting that the left foot did not rest on the ground but was in the uplifted attitude of a dance posture. Nor does it require much imagination to recognize what the posture must have been. One has only to seek some counterpart in the later Hindu tradition, and in this case, at any rate, he who seeks will quickly find. For the most magnificent and best known of the medieval South Indian bronzes are those representing śiva in his manifestation as Naṭarāja, "the king (rāja) of dancers (naṭa)". The uplifted foot and widely flung arms can be readily cast in bronze, but for the sculptor in stone such a pose is difficult. His most convenient solution is to shape the projecting members separately and attach them to the trunk with pegs.

It seems fairly clear that the torso of Mohenjo-daro must have represented a dancing figure of this type, even though we cannot be sure that the gesture of the arms corresponded to the bold postures of the bronzes wrought almost four millenniums later. In fact there is no evidence that any of the images of the Indus Valley had four arms. This specifically Hindu trait does not appear even in the early Buddhist and Hindu monuments of the era B.C.; it was evolved, apparently, during the first millennium A.D. The idea of four, and even more numerous, arms was developed to indicate the supranormal divine character of the beings thus represented. A god with no more than two arms, one might say, would be an understatement. The hands exhibit simultaneously the various weapons, emblems, and symbols denoting the powers and the manifold activities of the deity in question: weapons threatening death appear side by side with symbols of prosperity and life, thus making evident the ambivalence of divine power. For, transcending the pairs-of-opposites, the Indian gods and goddesses are at once benevolent and wrathful, terrible and auspicious; they are harmonies of contrariety capable of manifesting all or any of their antipodal powers at will.

The animals on the Mohenjo-daro seals have, for the most part, a high aesthetic value. They are masterpieces of an art that ranks with the best traditions of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, while standing in a position of apparently complete independence. The style is unmistakable and distinctive. In the representation of the Indian bull, the treatment of the dewlap, the modeling of the muscles, and the slenderness of the hoofs originate in a conception