Ring stones are an important and enigmatic category of early Indian sculpture. They are small, doughnut-shaped objects whose top surfaces, richly decorated with raised carvings, are contoured in the form of gentle parabolas that curve down and in to constitute the walls of their central voids.

The perimeters and bottom surfaces of ring stones are flat and smoothly finished but never decorated. Their bravura miniaturized carving, whose individual elements look more like repeated stamped impressions than integrated bas-relief carvings, seems to have closer affinities with the aesthetics of Near Eastern seals and early Greek mold-made ceramics than with later Indian sculpture