I love this tiny
metal sculpture, about 4,500 years old---the so-called ‘dancing girl.’ Is there
anything about this image that displays dancing? A posture indicating movement?
Anything at all? Not that I can see. But Mortimer Wheeler, the great archeologist
who worked in Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, termed this the ‘dancing girl’ because
she was nude—and in his mind and those of his day, and actually of today also,
women who are naked must be performing for men, so the ‘dancing’ name has
stuck.
But as I look at her, the way she is standing, she might be
waiting for the bus…or her friend…or just nothing. Incidentally the one on
display at the National Museum is an imitation which doesn't do justice to the original.
For your information, from Wikipedia is the description
below:
“A bronze statuette
dubbed the "Dancing Girl", 10.5 centimetres (4.1 in) high [19] and
some 4,500 years old, was found in 'HR area' of Mohenjo-daro in 1926.[19] In
1973, British archaeologist Mortimer
Wheeler described the item as his favorite statuette:
"She's
about fifteen years old I should think, not more, but she stands there with
bangles all the way up her arm and nothing else on. A girl perfectly, for the
moment, perfectly confident of herself and the world. There's nothing like her,
I think, in the world."
John Marshall, another archeologist at Mohenjo-daro,
described the figure as "a young girl, her hand on her hip in a
half-impudent posture, and legs slightly forward as she beats time to the music
with her legs and feet."[20] The archaeologist Gregory
Possehl said of
the statuette, "We may not be certain that she was a dancer, but she was
good at what she did and she knew it." The statue led to two important
discoveries about the civilization: first, that they knew metal blending,
casting and other sophisticated methods of working with ore, and secondly that
entertainment, especially dance, was part of the culture.[19]”
