Origins of Yoga - Part 1 : The Seal at Mohenjo-daro

Our first glimpse of Yoga on Indian soil is tantalizingly brief. It is the famous satellite seal excavated at Mohenjo-daro, in what is now Pakistan. Mohenjo-daro is one of the principle cities that flourished in the Indus River Valley civilization, nearly 3000 years before Christ. This was a vast and well-organized urban culture extending in a thousand mile arc that extended from the Indus across to Delhi and down to the coast of the Arabian sea not far from the north of Bombay. It provides us with the earliest information of civilization in the Indian subcontinent.

The Indus Valley seal depicts a fertility god. He is wearing horns like the figures discovered in the ruined citadels of Mesopotamia, has an erect phallus, and is surrounded by wild animals: an elephant, tiger, rhinoceros, and buffalo. In front of him sits a pair of deer. The figure is cross legged in a yoga posture, on a low meditation couch like those used by yogis in India even today.

He is the prototype of the later Hindu deity Shiva, "the auspicious one", also known as Pashupati, "the Lord of all creatures." The source of life and time, Shiva creates the universe through the rhythm of his eternal dance and presides over the processes of change and re-creation. 

This enigmatic seal, barely two inches square is imprinted with the Indus Valley script that remains undeciphered  to this day. It is one of the very few pieces of archeological evidence that acts as a link between the great cultural unity that spanned the Indo-Mediterranean world in prehistoric times and the first known Indian civilization that succeeded it. Like some mysterious cipher, encoded with the essential wisdom of Yoga, the seal transmits a teaching that, since the dawn of history, has been inseparably linked with the premeval and regenerative forces that govern both man and beast.

Clay figurines such as the ones below found in Harappa also are hard evidence of the Yoga's origins as a science, during the same time.