About this site

Swastika Info is an independent informational site about a mark that is five thousand years old and still in daily use across several unrelated traditions.

What it covers

Six sections, 23 pages. The Sanskrit word and the household practices built around it; the four gatis of Jain teaching; the mark on carved footprints and temple walls in Buddhist and Bon practice; the steatite seals excavated at Mohenjo-daro; the running border of Greek and Roman workshops; and the joint declaration made by craftsmen of four nations of the American Southwest in 1940.

Each page states what is documented and where the documentation is. Where a connection between traditions is a hypothesis rather than a demonstrated chain, the page says so.

How it is checked

Pages are written against excavation reports, museum catalogues and published scholarship, and the institutions holding the objects are named on the page rather than left implied. Photographs from Wikimedia Commons carry their credit under the caption; the rest were commissioned for these pages.

This site is about the mark's history in the traditions that made it. It is not about the twentieth-century European appropriation of the shape, except where a tradition responded to it — as in the 1940 section.

Reaching every page

Every page is listed on its section page and in one flat index. Nothing is hidden behind a menu.