The Routledge Companion to Seals and Seal Studies in Antiquity New Approaches to Mediterranean and West Asian Visual Culture

Introduction 1

1 Collecting Seals at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 29

2 From One Hand to Another: Turbulant Lives of Cylinder Seals From Ancient Western Asia 47

3 Image and Owner: Personal Names and Generic Imagery in Early West Asian Seals 70 Agnete Wisti Lassen

4 ArtWorks in Miniature? Mesopotamia’s Cylinder Seals as Instruments, Aesthetic Objects, and Collaborative Creations 89

5 Affect and Composition: Reading Presentation Scenes on Cylinder Seals 115

6 Depiction of Rituals on Seals in the First Dynasty of Egypt—For Which Purpose and in Which Context? 149

7 Engaging with Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Seals as Objects: Re-Integrating Image and Material 169

8 Precious and Negligible: Presence, Concealment, and Revelation in Tiny Aegean Seals 187

9 Iconography, Style, and Material Support: A Case Study of Glyptic Art From Bronze Age Southeastern Iran 215

10 Seals, Seal Impressions, and Changing Social Worlds in Neolithic Western Asia 233

11 Writing and Reuse: Mirrored Writing and Recarved Inscriptions on Cylinder Seals 251

12 Patterns of Seal Ownership in Ur III Umma 271

13 Heaven Was a Drink of Wine: The Protective and Rejuvenative Functions of Tomb U-j’s Wine Sealings 299 Morgan E. Moroney

14 Flip the Script: Early Egyptian Seals and the Bidirectionality of Hieroglyphs 322

15 The East in the West: Egyptianizing Culture as a Phoenician Identity Marker in the Province of Huelva, Spain 333

16 What’s in a Name? Personal Identity and the Use of Egyptian and Egyptian-Style Seals in Syro-Mesopotamia and the Levant 357

17 The Sealing Practices of the Scribes During the Late Bronze Age (1450–1350 bce) in Nuzi (Iraq) 375

18 Sealed Tablets From Kassite Babylonia: The Evidence From the Institutional Archives 400

19 Where Are the Proto-Elamites? Exclusion of Humans From the Proto-Elamite Classic Glyptic Style 423

20 Women’s Seals in Iran and Central Asia: Prestige Items or Administrative Tools (or Both)? 451

21 Seals and the City. Female Sealing Practice in Old Babylonian Sippar 470

22 Women’s Seals and Women as Sealers in Hittite Central Anatolia 494

23 State Impressions: Mimesis, Alterity, and Masculinity in the Royal Seals of the Neo-Assyrian Empire 516

Omar N’Shea

24 Sealed for Remembrance: Votive Seals in Israel’s Worship 533

25 In Decent Exposure: Nude and Semi-Nude Females in Syro-Mesopotamian Glyptic 559

26 A Sense of Violence: Social Memory, the Body, and Sealing 587

27 Beyond Impressions: Cylinder Seals of the Neo-Assyrian Period as Experiential Object 613

28 Reciprocal Materialities: Seals, Impressions, and the Sense of Kingship in Achaemenid Persia 641

29 Cutting Seals and Standing by: The Administrative Role of the Burgul During the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2004–1595 bce) 665

30 Ethnoarchaeological Approaches to Indus Seal Production: Modeling Variation in Carving Styles and Manufacturing Techniques 685

31 Marginal Notes: On Sealing Practices Outside Sumer and Their Connection to Writing’s Origins 704

32 The Malia Sealstone Workshop: An Iconographic Study 725

33 With Strings Attached. Document Sealing in Hittite Anatolia 746

Site Index 783

Biography

Sarah J. Scott is Professor of Art History and Director of the Arts Administration Program at Wagner College. Her scholarship focuses on both small objects such as cylinder seals (Seals and Sealing in the Ancient World: Case Studies from the Near East, Egypt, the Aegean, and South Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2018) and monumental architecture and narrative ("Imagining Architectural Space: Methodological Approaches for Assyrian Palaces," in How Do We Want the Past to Be? On Methods and Instruments of Visualizing the Ancient Reality, Gorgias Press, 2016).

Oya Topçuoğlu is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Middle East and North African Languages Program at Northwestern University. She is an archaeologist, who specializes in the art, archaeology, and history of ancient Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Her research addresses issues of social identity and cultural exchange and the effects of political change and ideology on seals, seal imagery, and sealing practices in the second millennium bce. Additionally, she studies the looting and illegal trafficking of antiquities from Iraq and Syria, the political uses of the ancient past, and its role in the formation of national identities in the modern Middle East.