The Sumerian World (Routledge Worlds)

SEAL IMAGERY AND FUNCTION: CHANGES THROUGH TIME

The first cylinders: Uruk and Jemdet Nasr/Proto-Elamite periods

During the Middle and Late Uruk periods, the storage and transmission of infor-
mation crucial to the administration of the economy and labor had to be radically
reorganized because of the increased complexity of mobilizing a large body of spe-
cialized (and forced) labor that was supported through food rations and was supervised
through a hierarchy headed by a newly emergent elite. Within this context, several
cognitive leaps occurred at essentially the same time. First was the invention of abstract
numbers, next was the invention of the cylinder seal and the system of imagery that
carried information central to the administrative process, and third was the invention
of proto-writing that would shortly develop into the cuneiform script that would over
the course of the third millennium evolve into a system capable of recording spoken
utterance in symbolic form (Nissen et al. 1993 ). This script was applied to many of the
languages of the ancient Near East for millennia to come. While the invention of
numbers and writing are covered in more detail elsewhere, it is important to emphasize
that cylinder seals first appear in this context.
It will probably never be possible to locate exactly where the cylindrical shape of
the seal was invented, but there can be no question that, like proto-cuneiform, it was
a single invention whose usefulness was immediately appreciated within the admini-
strative circles. The earliest stratified evidence for the use of cylinder seals comes from
several sites, none in southern Mesopotamia, in contexts dating to the late Middle
Uruk period. They include Sharafabad (Wright et al. 1980 ) and Susa Acropole sound-
ing I (Le Brun 1999 ) in southwestern Iran; Tell Brak (Oates and Oates 1993 : figs. 31 , 44 )
in the Habur region in northern Mesopotamia and at Sheik Hassan (Boese 1995 ), an
early colony site on the upper Euphrates. All of these were big cylinders that carried
figures rendered in the same “baggy” style aptly named because of the heavy and
unmitigated use of the drill (Figure 16. 7 ). The only example of an actual seal of this
style found in a controlled stratified context comes from Tell Brak, but others of exactly
the same type are known from Uruk, Susa, Telloh and Nuzi. We know that this type

–– Holly Pittman ––

Figure 16.6 Modern impression of

a cylinder seal showing a

presentation scene. Ur III period

(Porada 1948 : 277. Courtesy of the

Pierpont Morgan Library)

Figure 16.5 Modern impression of a highly

schematic seal showing a file of three horned

quadrupeds. Late Uruk/Jemdat Nasr period

(Porada 1948 : 18. Courtesy of the Pierpont

Morgan Library)