Remains from the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation (on the northwest Indian subcontinent) include seals decorated with a creature (IVC creature). Some claim it's a unicorn, even though it doesn't look like a unicorn. The 'justification'? It has just one visible horn.
Bovine
The IVC creature is quite clearly bovine in nature, especially in regards to the head, dewclaws and dewlap.
Unicorns, whether the modern horses or the classical horse mixed with goat, deer and narwhal, aren't bovine at all. So to call a bovine creature
a unicorn doesn't make sense.
Also, the IVC creature has a long back with short legs: if it were a unicorn/horse, the legs would be far longer in proportion to the back.
Admittedly, the bovine tail of the IVC creature does match the tail of classical unicorns.
However, classical unicorns had lion tails and, in medieval art, lion tails look like bovine tails. Hence there isn't an actual link between bovine tails and unicorns.
Thus the IVC creature having a bovine tail can't be used as evidence that the IVC creature is a unicorn.
One Visible Horn
The seal creature is labelled a unicorn because the seal depicts it with one horn.
However, the IVC creature also only depicts one ear, eye and nostril. This doesn't mean the creature only has one of these features. Rather, one is visible (the near side) and the other is hidden (the far side).
Horns, just like ears, eyes and nostrils, usually come in pairs. So why would it be assumed that the IVC creature has one horn simply because only one horn is depicted?
Let's head up some incoming criticisms.
This doesn't mean every pair of the IVC creature has to be partly hidden. The four legs are clearly in a walking position. So of course the far legs can't be hidden by the near legs.
Nor does this mean every singular thing depicted is part of a pair. Namely, the tail. Animals almost always have just one tail, so it's safe to say the IVC creature has just one tail, too. If it did have multiple tails, an effort would have been made to depict such an unusual feature.
Of course, this doesn't mean the IVC creature can't have just one horn.
(Perhaps the farside horn was broken off.) So, as 'unicorn' means 'one horn', the word 'unicorn' could be used as a descriptor, but not as a name.
After all, 'unicorn' as a name already has an image, an image which the IVC creature does not resemble.
Conclusion
So, is the IVC creature on the Indus Valley Civilisation seals a unicorn? No. It's bovine, not equine, so it can't be a unicorn. Plus the single visible horn doesn't mean the creature only has one horn, so naming the creature after a feature it doesn't have lacks sensibility.
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