Routledge Companion to Seals and Seal Studies in Antiquity

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), as well as 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 2nd millennium B.C. 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.

• Introduction (Sarah J. Scott and Oya Topçuoğlu)Part I: Image Agency, Objecthood, and Object Biography1. Collecting seals at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Yelena Rakic)2. From one hand to another: turbulent lives of cylinder seals from ancient Western Asia (Serdar Yalçın)3. Image and owner: personal names and generic imagery in early West Asian seals (Agnete Wisti Lassen)4. ArtWorks in miniature? Mesopotamia’s cylinder seals as instruments, aesthetic objects, and collaborative creations (Karen Sonik and David Kertai)5. Affect and composition: reading presentation scenes on cylinder seals (Elizabeth Knott)6. Depiction of rituals on seals in the 1st dynasty of Egypt – for which purpose and in which context? (Vera Müller)Part II: Materiality7. Engaging with seals as objects: re-integrating image and material support (Anastasia Tchaplyghine)8. Precious and negligible: visibility, concealment, and revelation in tiny Aegean seals (Emily S. K. Anderson)9. Iconography and material support: a case study of glyptic art of bronze age southeastern Iran (Holly Pittman)10. Seals, seal impressions and changing social worlds in neolithic western Asia (Sarah Kielt Costello)Part III: Text and Image11. Writing and reuse: recarved and retrograde inscriptions on cylinder seals (Gina Konstantopoulos)12. Patterns of seal ownership in Ur III Umma (Rudi Mayr)13. Heaven was a drink of wine: the protective and rejuvenative functions of tomb U-j’s wine Sealings (Morgan Moroney)14. Flip the script: early Egyptian seals and the bi–directionality of hieroglyphs (Andrew McCarthy)Part IV: Identity15. The east in the west: Egyptianizing culture as a Phoenician identity marker in the province of Huelva, Spain (M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro)16. What’s in a name? Personal identity and the use of Egyptian-style seals in Syro-Mesopotamia and the Levant (Vanessa Boschloos)17. The sealing practices of the scribes during the Late Bronze Age in Nuzi (Iraq) (Véronique Pataï)18. Sealed tablets from Kassite Babylonia: the evidence from the institutional archives (Elena Devecchi)19. Where are the proto-elamites? Exclusion of humans from the proto-elamite classic glyptic style (Clélia Paladre)Part V: Gender 20. Women’s seals in Iran and Central Asia: prestige items or administrative tools (or both)? (Marta Ameri)21. Seals and the city. Female sealing practice in Old Babylonian Sippar (Katrien De Graef)22. Women's seals and women as sealers in Hittite Central Anatolia (Mark Weeden)23. State Impressions: Mimesis, Alterity and Masculinity in the Royal Seals of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (Omar N’Shea)Part VI: Senses, Experience, and the Body24. Sealed in remembrance: embodied glyptic in Israel’s Worship (Christine Palmer)25. In decent exposure: female nudes in Near Eastern glyptic (Diana Stein)26. A sense of violence: social memory, the body, and sealing (Sarah J. Scott)27. Beyond impressions: cylinder seals of the Neo-Assyrian period as experiential object (Kiersten Neumann)28. Reciprocal Materialities: Seals, Impressions, and the Sense of Kingship in Achaemenid Persia (Neville McFerrin) Part VII: Practice and Technology29. Cutting Seals and Standing by. The Administrative Role of the burgul during the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 2004-1595 BCE) (Anne Goddeeris)30. Ethnoarchaeological approaches to Indus seal production: modeling variation in carving styles and manufacturing techniques (Gregg Jamison)31. Marginal notes: on sealing practices outside Sumer, and their connection to writing’s origins (Jennifer Ross)32. The Malia sealstone workshop: an iconographic study (John G. Younger)33. With Strings Attached. Sealing Practices in Hittite Anatolia (Willemijn Waal)