Shard from Mehrgarh

A ceramic fragment, found in Mehrgarh, Indus Valley, Pakistan. The fragment was found in the layer IV, dated to around 2800BC. I want to thank Gabriella Brusa-Zappellini for posting the pic...

The fragment is decorated with depictions of:

Horned animals: Ibex goats, Goitered gazelles

Birds: Old world vultures

Gabriella Brusa-Zappellini says that this fragment closely resembles the earliest stamps from Dilmun adds that "this testifies once again to the close ties between the regions of the Persian Gulf and Indus Valley...

I would suggest that this ceramic fragment most likely comes from Persian gulf. Why? Because of the climate in Persian gulf and the annual lifecycle of the depicted animals and how they correspond to one another...

This is climate in Dilmun (today Bahrain). 

You can see that the climatic year is divided into hot, dry summer (Apr/May-Oct/Nov) and cool, wet winter (Oct/Nov-Apr/May)...

This is more or less the same climate we find in the rest of the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia...

It just so happens that Ibex goats, Goitered gazelles and Old wold vultures all begin to mate at the beginning of the cool/wet season in this part of the world. Making them animal calendar markers for rain season...A very important event in this part of the world...

So I don't think finding these three animals depicted together like this is random...You can read a lot more about these animal calendar markers and their link with rain/snow and water in general in my post "Kassite seal with Apkallu", in which I give symbolic analysis of this amazing Kassite seal (18th-12th centuries BC) from Syria. National Museum of Damascus. 

That's it. To read more about ancient animal and plant calendar markers, start here…Then check my twitter threads I still didn't convert to blog post...I am way way behind...