CHAPTER SIXTEEN

SEALS AND SEALINGS IN

THE SUMERIAN WORLD



Holly Pittman

W

e are all familiar with stamps that make marks, either in ink or with an impres-
sion, to prevent unauthorized tampering of letters or packages. An equally
familiar use for such marks is on official documents. You cannot get a loan from a bank
or pass through an international border without receiving an official authorizing stamp
on your papers. The problem of securing and protecting possessions against illegitimate
use and the recording of authorization has been a challenge for a long time. As early
as the sixth millennium BCin villages of the aceramic Neolithic period, a particularly
creative and enduring solution to the monitoring and tracking of things was found.
During the excavations at the site of Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria (Duistermatt 2000 ),
abundant evidence indicates that a simple and profound solution had been found: a
unique and distinctive mark that held conventional meaning familiar within the
community could be repeatedly made through impressions into a soft material, like
clay (Figure 16. 1 ). Some two thousand years later, at the time of the first urban centers,
the potential of this ingenious system of a unique but reproducible mark with shared
meaning was the centerpiece of an administrative system of the control of goods and
the identity of actors that remains in use today. The first seals were stamps that were
carved with designs, both abstract and figural, that were impressed into clay masses
used to secure stone and clay vessels, bags, bundles and finally doors (Ferioli et al.
2007 ). Later, appearing alongside the invention of proto-writing, a new form of seal
was invented. This cylindrical form carried imagery on its continuous side that was
transferred through rolling into soft clay applied to secure mobile containers, stationary
doors or administrative documents made from clay.
Like pottery, seals and their impressions are important and abundant artifacts for
the study of the societies of the ancient Near East. In addition to their continual and
evolving administrative role, they are the single most abundant art form that we have
from Sumer and Akkad, serving as the single source of an unbroken sequence of style
and imagery (Frankfort 1939 , 1955 ; Moortgat 1940 ; Porada 1948 , 1980 , 1993 ; Amiet
1980 a; Collon 1987 ). Seals were used in almost all communities that participated in
the greater Mesopotamian cuneiform culture, and because they are small, made of
durable materials, and are preserved both as seals themselves and through their impres-
sions, we have literally tens of thousands available for study. These small and intriguing
documents are evidence for a variety of different themes about ancient societies
including issues of economy and hierarchy, trade and interaction between communities