While the exact meaning of this grouping is unclear, scholars have used these seals as
a material expression of an early trading league that was perhaps organized in the
service of the gods (Jacobsen 1937 ; Matthews 1993 ; Steinkeller 2002 ). The tablets
impressed with these seals record the delivery and dispersal of luxury foodstuffs and
textiles, perhaps designated for the temple of the goddess Inanna. These city seals,
together with proto-Elamite seals that also carried short inscriptions, are the first
experiments that we see in seals of the combination of images and text in glyptic art.
Although we cannot read them, it is interesting that the names of cities, and perhaps
individuals, were carried in these earliest seal inscriptions. This relationship of text and
image carried on the seals continues to evolve during the third millennium.
The Long Early Dynastic period ( 2900 – 2250 BC)
The Early Dynastic period, so named for the first historically documented royal
dynasties of Sumer and Akkad, is a long one of almost seven centuries. It is divided into
two phases of unequal length: the first (ED I and II) is charted archaeologically
through the changing character of pottery and glyptic art; the second, considerably
shorter period (ED IIIa and IIIb) is the first to be defined through a succession of
rulers. Our knowledge of these seven centuries is dim, but through the efforts of
archaeologists, philologists, and art historians working together we can sketch at least
the outlines of development in both the style and the iconography of seals and the
function of seals in the administration and society.
Seals of the ED I period are best known from the site of Ur, in the so-called Seal
Impression Strata 8 – 4 that underlay the Royal Tombs of ED IIIa date (Legrain 1936 ).
In these layers of trash were found seal impressions on containers and doors as well as
about 500 tablets written in Archaic cuneiform script. None of these tablets, which
continue as before to provide records of economic and administrative matters, are
impressed with seals. The complete separation of the cuneiform tablets and the seals
is characteristic of the entire length of the Early Dynastic period. By the end of the
period, cuneiform script has developed into a full-blown writing system that can record
more or less completely spoken utterance (Cooper 1983 ). The language underlying
these earliest cuneiform documents is Sumerian, but other languages, especially
Semitic Akkadian but also Hurrian, are recorded primarily in the form of personal
names. This very separation of inscribed tablets and seal impressions must reflect a
profound change in the function and ways in which images carried meaning. No
longer was it necessary for the seal image to contribute directly to the administrative
message. It is during the long ED period that seals become more and more closely
associated with their owners, not as individuals perhaps, but as members of groups who
held positions in the recognized administrative hierarchy.
The City Seals’ imagery that first appears in the previous period becomes more
elaborate and difficult to decipher combining both figural and script in single image
fields (Figure 16. 13 ). Best known from the Seal Impression Strata at Ur, City Seals are
also recorded at a small number of other centers in the south and in southwestern Iran
(Matthews 1993 ). Remarkably the impression of a City Seal with the sign for Ur was
also found at a site on the Iranian plateau suggesting that the trading route along the
Persian Gulf was well established even at this early date (Pittman 2008 ). In addition
to the City Seals, narrative scenes related to earlier Uruk compositions continue
–– Seals and sealings in the Sumerian world ––