Place · Nal ware type site · Pakistan
Sohr Damb, Nal
The mound at Nal in Khuzdar district that gives its name to the finest painted pottery of fourth-millennium Balochistan. Hughes-Buller dug it in 1903 and a German mission re-excavated between 2001 and 2004, establishing a sequence running from roughly 3800 to 2000 BCE. Nal ware is polychrome — buff ground, black outline, and the enclosed fields filled in with red, blue and yellow — a technique that almost nothing else in the region attempted at that date.
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 27.689, 66.308
Worth knowing
Nal ware's painters outlined in black and then filled the shapes with three further colours, which makes it the most ambitious ceramic palette in the subcontinent for another two thousand years.
Connections (2)
- In the same set asAmri
The Amri–Nal culture of fourth-millennium Balochistan and Sindh is named from these two mounds, and the naming records a real link: Nal polychrome pottery turns up in the Amri levels and Amri wares at Nal. Sohr Damb's painters worked in black outline filled with red, blue and yellow on a buff ground, the most ambitious ceramic palette in the subcontinent for the next two millennia; Amri's is soberer, geometric bands with ibex. The German re-excavation at Nal from 2001 and Casal's at Amri are the two sequences the culture is dated by.
- Succession in timeMehrgarh
Mehrgarh on the Kachi plain and Sohr Damb at Nal in the Khuzdar hills carry the long Balochistan sequence between them. Mehrgarh runs from about 7000 BCE and shows farming, herding and the first potting in the region; Nal begins around 3800 BCE, as Mehrgarh is ending, with a ceramic tradition of far greater technical ambition. Read together they cover roughly five thousand years of the uplands west of the Indus without a serious gap, which no single site in the valley itself can do.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Sohr Damb”. H. Hughes-Buller, Archaeological Survey of India Annual Report 1903–04; Ute Franke-Vogt, Sohr Damb / Nal excavation reports (2001–04).
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