Mehrgarh Crane bowl

A Terracotta Bowl, Mehrgarh, Balochistan, Indus Valley, 3500–3000 BC...

Decorated with three elongated zebu bulls, each with a water bird perched on its back and a leaf motif between the horns... 

Just a decoration? Don't think so...

These birds are Siberian cranes, native to Russian Arctic...Every Sep-Oct, they fly over 4,000 miles southward, to spend winters in India. When winter is over, the cranes fly back to native northern habitats and nesting grounds by the end of April...

But not for much longer...Every year thousands of these beautiful birds are captured and killed by the locals in Pakistan Pouting face...You can read more about it in this post entitled "Balochistan's Siberian secret"...

That bird depicted on the pot looks very much like a crane...But why would it stand on a bull's back? Well cause Taurus, the ancient animal calendar marker for Apr/May, calving season of Eurasian wild cattle, is also when cranes land in Balochistan on their way back to Siberia...

I talked about "the old Taurus" in many of my posts. This is a good example "Bulls and grain bowls"...

I couldn't find any data about the natural mating or calving season of the wild ancestors of zebu cattle. But considering that they belonged to the same auroch species, they probably had the same or similar reproductive cycle as the rest of the aurochs of Eurasia...

And certainly, bull was used as a symbol for the beginning of summer and for summer itself in India...I talked about this in many of my posts and threads...For instance "Ardhanarishvara"... 

But how can we be sure that this is really a depiction of "Cranes in Taurus"? Because of the leaf depicted between bull's horns. The lief belongs to Ficus religiosa or sacred fig (also known as bodhi tree, peepal tree...)

This tree is Drought deciduous plant. It sheds its leaves during the peak of the dry season, between February and April. And new leaves start growing in end of April beginning of May, during Taurus...Beginning of summer, season marked by Bull...I talked about this in my posts "Harapan wheel seal", "Fig with bulls"...

Right at the time when cranes fly over Indus Valley on their way to Siberia...Or used to...