Mohenjo-Daro seal M-304 shows a horned, possibly three-headed figure seated with legs drawn up, surrounded by four animals. Sir John Marshall in 1931 proposed reading this as a "proto-Śiva" — an early form of the god Śiva as Paśupati, Lord of the Beasts, in yogic posture. The proposal has been repeated for nearly a century in textbooks, popular Indic religious history, and many practitioner-lineage works as evidence that yoga and Hindu deity-worship go back to the Indus Valley civilization (2600-1900 BCE).
Geoffrey Samuel devotes early pages of Chapter 1 to dismantling the confidence behind this reading.1 His position: the seal cannot bear the interpretive load Marshall and successors have placed on it. The figure is ambiguous enough that at least six substantially different interpretations have been defended in scholarly literature, none confirmable, all plausible on the available evidence.
Samuel catalogs the readings:
Each interpretation has its supporting evidence; none has decisive evidence; they cannot all be right. Samuel's conclusion: "The only reasonable conclusion is that we do not actually know how to interpret the figure, nor do we know what he or she represents."2
The "proto-Śiva" identification has been institutionally entrenched for nearly a century. It appears in textbooks, in popular yoga histories, in practitioner-lineage materials that want to ground their practice in deep antiquity, and in cultural-nationalist narratives that want to claim Indus Valley civilization as Hindu civilization.
The institutional entrenchment makes the reading hard to dislodge even when scholars who work on Indus Valley material directly are increasingly skeptical. Once a single confident interpretation enters textbook circulation, the alternatives tend to get buried in specialized literature.
Samuel's diagnostic move is to put all six readings on the table at once. The exercise immediately shows what the institutional confident reading was hiding: substantial scholarly disagreement, no decisive evidence, multiple equally plausible interpretive frames.
Samuel is careful not to overclaim. He does not assert that yoga did not originate in the Indus Valley. He does not assert that there was no continuity between Indus Valley religion and later Indic religion. He asserts the more modest position that the proto-Śiva seal does not constitute evidence for either continuity or origin claims.
"Given what we now know about cultural continuities in the archaeological record between the Indus Valley cultural tradition and succeeding populations in the region, it is certainly possible that there was some continuity in the area of religion. The difficulty is that the early evidence is far from unambiguous, and that it is almost always interpreted by reading later religious forms into it."3
The claim is methodological: when interpretation depends on reading later forms back into ambiguous evidence, the resulting interpretations cannot serve as independent evidence for the continuity they presuppose. The reasoning is circular and the conclusion is not warranted by the evidence.
The Indus Valley skepticism page connects directly to Samuel's Critical-Anthropological Method — the seal interpretation is Samuel's clearest worked example of the method in operation. It connects to Samuel's Two-Period Thesis — yoga's first centre is 500-200 BCE, not Indus Valley. It connects to Indus Valley Civilization Not Centralized State — the broader picture of Indus Valley uncertainty.
Across the vault, the skepticism cuts against popular yoga-history claims that ground yoga in Indus Valley antiquity. Modern haṭha yoga texts often invoke the proto-Śiva seal as their deep-historical anchor; Samuel's diagnosis removes that anchor. The vault should preserve the popular claim but flag its evidentiary status.
You are writing a vault page about yoga history. You encounter a source citing the proto-Śiva seal as evidence for ancient yogic practice.
You ask: what is the actual evidentiary status of this seal? You discover that it has been read in six different ways. You realize the source you are citing has selected one interpretation without flagging the alternatives.
You write your page acknowledging the seal exists, acknowledging it has been interpreted as proto-Śiva by some scholars, and flagging the multi-interpretation reality. The seal becomes part of the data that needs to be explained rather than evidence for a single explanatory claim.
Marshall, Parpola, McEvilley, Hiltebeitel, the Allchins, Atre, and Sullivan all approach the seal from different scholarly traditions and produce different readings. None is straightforwardly wrong; all are partially right; none has decisive evidence. Samuel's diagnostic puts the multiplicity on display rather than picking among them.
The vault's existing practitioner-lineage material on yoga history often uses the proto-Śiva reading uncritically. Samuel's skepticism creates productive Tier-1 disagreement.
The seal-interpretation problem has structural parallels with other vault content involving ambiguous archaeological evidence.
In history, similar interpretive ambiguity affects readings of prehistoric monuments. The vault's Bradley material on British prehistory documents similar multi-interpretation problems with stone circles and burial mounds. The insight neither domain alone produces: when archaeological evidence is visually ambiguous and lacks dated context, projection of later cultural categories is the dominant interpretive move; recognizing this projection in one case helps recognize it in others.
In psychology, the analog is Rorschach inkblot interpretation — visually ambiguous stimulus, multiple defensible readings, the interpretation reflecting the interpreter rather than fixing the stimulus's meaning. The insight: ambiguous evidence acts as projective field; methodological discipline requires recognizing this rather than treating one's preferred reading as the established meaning.
The skepticism fails when treated as denial. Samuel does not assert that no continuity exists; he asserts that the seal does not establish continuity. Conflating the two would overstate the diagnostic.
It also fails when applied selectively. If the skeptical move is reserved for claims you want to dismantle and not applied to claims you prefer, it becomes polemical rather than methodological.
The strongest evidence for Samuel's skepticism is the multi-interpretation reality itself. Six substantially different readings by competent scholars indicate that the evidence does not discriminate among them.
The strongest evidence for some kind of continuity claim is the broader archaeological pattern of cultural persistence in the region — pottery styles, settlement patterns, certain iconographic motifs. Samuel acknowledges this but argues that broad continuity does not establish specific religious-practice continuity.
Open questions: Are there Indus Valley artifacts that more decisively suggest continuity with later Indic religion? What is the methodological status of "broad cultural continuity" claims when specific evidentiary claims fail?
Sharpest implication: Vault pages on yoga history should not cite the proto-Śiva seal as evidence for ancient yogic practice without flagging the multi-interpretation reality. Many popular yoga histories make this citation uncritically; the vault should not.
Generative questions: