Dancing Girl is a prehistoric bronze sculpture made in lost-wax casting about c. 2300–1750 BC in the Indus Valley civilisation city of Mohenjo-daro (in modern-day Pakistan), which was one of the earliest cities. The statue is tall, and depicts a nude young woman or girl with stylized ornaments, standing in a confident, naturalistic pose. Dancing Girl is highly regarded as a work of art. The statue was excavated by British archaeologist Ernest Mackay in the "HR area" of Mohenjo-daro in 1926, It is now in the National Museum, New Delhi; having been allocated to India at the Partition of India in 1947. Description This is one of two bronze figures found at Mohenjo-daro that show more flexible features when compared to other more formal poses. The girl is nude, wears a number of bangles and a necklace and is shown in a natural standing position with one hand on her hip. She wears 24 to 25 bangles on her left arm and 4 bangles on her right arm, and some object was held in her left hand, which is resting on her thigh; both arms are unusually long. Her necklace has three big pendants. She has her long hair styled in a big bun that is resting on her shoulder. Interpretations In 1973, British archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler described the item as his favourite 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, the archeologist at Mohenjo-daro who found the figure, 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". He is known to have reacted with surprise when he saw this statuette. He said "When I first saw them I found it difficult to believe that they were prehistoric." The archaeologist Gregory Possehl described Dancing Girl as "the most captivating piece of art from an Indus site" and qualified the description of her as a dancer by stating that "We may not be certain that she was a dancer, but she was good at what she did and she knew it." To the American IVC