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QUADERNI NAPOLETANI
DI ASSIRIOLOGIA
RICERCHE 1
A10126/R/1
Stefania Altavilla
Neo–SumerianSealing Impressions
in the British Museum
ARACNE
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I edizione: ottobre 2005
PRESENTAZIONE
Con questo volumetto, che presenta i risultati della ricerca della Dott.Stefania Altavilla nel campo della glittica del periodo neo-sumerico, siinaugura una nuova serie dei “Quaderni napoletani di assiriologia”, laserie “Ricerca”.
La disponibilità e la rapidità con cui la casa editrice Aracne rendedisponibile sul mercato, in “micro-tiratura” (ovvero un atrentina dicopie) lavori di non grandi dimensioni, consente di far conoscere irisultati delle ricerche alla ristretta cerchia degli studiosi interessati intempo relativamente assai breve.
Approvato dal Prof. Pomponio e da chi scrive, Neo-Sumerian SealingImpressions in the British Museum, corredato da adeguato apparatoiconografico, inaugura nel modo più brillante la nuova serie.
Pietro Mander
Roma, 13 Ottobre 2005
Table of Contents
Abbreviations 5
List of Illustrations 7
Acknowledgements 9
Preface 11
Chapter 1 13
An Overview
Chapter 2 15
An Analysis of the Sealing Impressions in the Catalogues Standardization of the Drawing: Investigating the Causes
Chapter 3 23
Catalogue of the Sealing Impressions on the Tablets/Envelopes from the City of Ur in theBritish Museum
Sealing Impressions from Nisaba 5Sealing impressions from UET III
Catalogue of the Sealing Impressions on the Tablets/Envelopes from the City of Girsu in the British Museum
Sealing Impressions from the Catalogue of Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum, Volume III
3
Sealing Impressions from the Catalogue of Babylonian Tablets in the British Museum, Volume II Sealing Impressions from Nisaba 10
Final remarks 75
Indices 77
Bibliography 91
Images 93
4
Abbreviations
Š Šulgi AS Amar-Suen ŠS Šu-SuenIS Ibbi-Suen
JCS Journal of Cuneiform Studies SAOC Studies in Ancient Oriental CivilizationsUET Ur Excavations Texts ZA Zeitschrift für Assyriologie
5
List of Illustrations
Charts
Chart 1: Bar-Chart Representation of Scene Type Occurrences 17
Chart 2:Comparison between Number of Occurrences of Presentation Scene and of Other Scenes (A Further Analysis of the Data from Chart 1)
75
Figures
Figure 1: Chronological Table 19
Figure 2a: BM 28850 95
Figure 2b: BM 28850 96
Figure 3: BM 19525 97
Figure 4: BM 130529 97
Figure 5: BM 15932a 98
Figure 6: BM 130104 98
Figure 7: BM 24047 99
Figure 8a: BM 18824 100
Figure 8b: BM 18824 100
Figure 9: BM 29917 101
7
Figure 10: BM 19948 101
Figure 11: BM 24846a 102
8
Acknowledgements
For this work I wish to express gratitude particularly to Dr. Christopher Walker whose support during my research has been critical not only for his significant suggestions but also for his essential help to transliterate some seal inscriptions present in the catalogues of this work. I would also like to thank Dr. Dominique Collon for her guidance since the beginning of my study. Moreover I would like to acknowledge all the staff of the Department of Ancient Near East of the British Museum for their kind assistance and the permission they have given to me to study the tablets which are under their custody.
Furthermore, I would like to thank Prof. Francesco Pomponio for his constant help in my studies ever since I have started to be interested in the Ancient Near East world. I am also very grateful to Prof. Pietro Mander who agreed to publish this work in the series “Quaderni napoletani di Assiriologia” and to all my colleagues for their generous assistance.
Finally, I would like to thank Mum, Dad, Valy and Adam for their exceptional support during the development of this work and for their continued encouragement.
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Preface
This work is a further elaboration of the study I have conduced for the drafting of the thesis for the Degree of Master of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. It has the main aim of enriching the picture of Neo-Sumerian iconography, adding to the material already published about this topic, 211 sealing impressions never studied before. The catalogues presented in this work include Neo-Sumerian impressions of cylinder seals found on tablets, envelopes or sometimes bullae coming from two different cities, the capital Ur and the city of Girsu. The catalogues register the date of each tablet and the seal legend, where legible, and the description of the visible image. All of the tablets I have taken into account are property of the British Museum and the numbers I have used to catalogue them correspond to the museum's numbering system.
Moreover, I have tried in this work to explore and to consider potential motivations for the extraordinary repetitiveness of the motifs encountered in the glyptic of the discussed period. As said, the tablets taken into account come from two different cities and the decision to carry out the study in this direction has been also made in order to underline the homogeneity of the Ur III glyptic, despite the different origins and furthermore, the different grade of importance or prestige of the cities, considering that one of them was the capital of the state.
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-Chapter 1-
A brief overview
Ancient Mesopotamia provides us an excellent example of the practice of sealing, which originates as early as 7500-6000 BC and which continued, without interruptions for the entire Mesopotamian history.
At the very beginning, before writing had been invented, the seals were “stamp seals”: little objects made in various shapes with a design carved in intaglio on the base. The practice of making and employing seals developed together with the evolution of the agricultural societies and the increase of the sedentary lifestyle. The use of stamp seals therefore passed from the earliest stage when very likely they were used to stamp textiles to a stage when their use became more frequent and changed as they were utilized to impress clay tags or to fasten doors and containers, generally to mark ownership1.
With the further evolution of the society the economic system began to become more complex and to require various innovations; the Mesopotamian administrative organization started then to acquire its forms. The first administrative tools were clay tokens, which represented a range of different goods and which were enclosed in sealed clay balls, on the exterior of which a summary of the content was written. Shortly afterwards clay tablets, a more convenient way of storing records, were invented and moreover, cuneiform writing was developed. These further progresses were accompanied by another change pertaining to seals; they acquired, in fact, a cylindrical shape and a more elaborate scene was carved in intaglio on the surface; the result was that they could cover a much larger area with one impression but they could also be rolled more than once generating a continuous design.
1 In northern Iraq the first impressions of stamp seals on clay appear at the sites of Tepe Gawra and Niniveh towards the end of the fifth millennium and some stamp seals made of stone, pierced so that they could be worn, have been found which belong to the same period (see D. Collon, 1990).
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Obviously the administrative and economic system continued to evolve and the seals were used more and more as true administrative tools and bearing a legend, seal impressions on tablets began then to refer to an individual and to denote his responsibilities within the transaction recorded, as they were like modern signatures. The apogee of the most bureaucratic use of cylinder seals occurred during the Ur III empire when a massive quantity of documents was produced as a result of the distinctive standardized and centralized character of this state. During this period the tablets were very often enclosed in clay envelopes, which guaranteed the content of the document, and the seal was then rolled one or more often few times on it.
Unfortunately these envelopes had to be broken in order to read the tablet and this means that most of the time the sealing impressions are not properly visible anymore.
Whether the seal was rolled on the tablet or on the envelope there are cases when the seal was placed in an apposite area left without writing (See for example BM 130104), but often the seal overlapped the writing or vice versa, in case the tablet was sealed before being written.
Shape, size and materials varied from time to time, although cylinder seals were generally made of hard stone, and during the Ur III period, specifically, calcite was the most used. They were pierced through from end to end and covered with caps so that they could be worn on a string or a pin.
Being specifically connected with cuneiform writing, once this ceased to be used, cylinder seals tended to disappear as well.
14
-Chapter 2-
An analysis of sealing impressions in the Catalogues
The repertoire of images carved on cylinder seals during the Ur III period is not as wide as it was in the preceding Akkadian one and it is basically reduced to three different scene types: presentation scene, contest scene and date-palm altar worship2.
Without doubt, the most common scene carved on Neo-Sumerian seals is the so-called ‘Presentation Scene’; this scene originated previously in the Akkadian glyptic but during the Ur III period it became extraordinarily standardized with very few distinctions. Most of the time it progresses from left to right where the principal figure is placed facing left, and it depicts usually a worshipper proceeding, led by a deity who is generally a goddess, towards a seated figure which can be identified either as a deity or a king3. Even though it is impossible to recognize exactly the identity of the worshipper, it is very likely that he portrays the seal owner whose name is given in the legend. The fact that he is mostly depicted beardless and head-shaven may be connected with a particular practice required at the moment of the presentation ceremony represented in the seal. We do not know whether this ceremony was real or not and if so what this meant: it might have represented the official led in front of the king or the statue of a deity for the acknowledgment of his administrative position, an important moment in his career worth remembering. In case of a symbolic representation, instead the scene might have depicted an imaginary moment during which the worshipper
2 Although this scene was apparently common at Ur (Cf. Colon 1982), there are no examples of it in my catalogues. However, there is a sealing impression (BM 15932a) on an envelope unluckily broken, where a palm-tree is visible. 3 Often, in the scene are also represented some symbols; the most common in the sealing impressions here catalogued appear to be astral symbols: the solar disc and the crescent moon and, especially in tablets coming from Girsu, the lion headed eagle, Anzu which was the symbol of the god Ningirsu, patron deity of the city of Girsu.
15
asked for protection either to a deity4 or to the sovereign. To try to support the latter suggestion, we can take into account different examples of symbolic representations in Mesopotamian art, even though the scale or the media was different, and specifically a parallel of the type of scene described before, can be found within the Ur III period in the Stele of Ur-Nammu where, in the second register, the king is presented on the right of the scene in front of the god Ningal while he is making a libation and then again on the left he is portrayed in front the god Nanna. Obviously though this does not exclude for certain the possibility of the representation of a real moment, considering that in Mesopotamian art, symbolic elements were often parts of a narration scene but in case of an imaginary scene it is interesting to see how cylinder seals could have strengthened their significance using similar symbolic values of more important and possibly more privileged objects.
As far as concerns the so-called ‘contest scene’, it started to be represented as early as the Early Dynastic period and generally it includes one or more groups of contestants, among which there are some human or semi-human figures fighting against animals. It appears that during the Ur III period the two most common semi-human/demon personages present in this scene are: the bull-man, human above the waist and a bull below, and the six-locked hero; the latter was represented, normally, naked except for a triple sash, he was human in appearance with long hair, tied in three curls on each side of his face which is, as for the bull-man, shown facing front5. The animals against which they fight vary but it could be said that the most frequent are: lions, winged lions6 and bulls.
Even though the meaning is still rather unclear, contest scenes are much less common in the Ur III glyptic than the Presentation Scene and possibly they were used on a smaller number of tablets; it is as if
4 It is interesting to notice that even though most of the time the deity portrayed doesn’t have any specific distinguishing features, sometimes it has some elements in its iconography that enable us to name it. For example, in the sealing impression present on the tablet BM 130529, where the goddess is very likely Ištar, or in the sealing impression of the tablet BM 24047 (Fig.7) from Girsu, dragons extend from the shoulders of the god, identifying him with Ningišida (this is an unpublished tablet I have studied but which is not present in these catalogues.) 5 See C. Fisher, 1992. 6 See, for instance, BM 18824.
16
the contest scene, somehow, was less connected with the Neo-Sumerian bureaucratic system.
Regarding the scenes carved on cylinder seals rolled on tablets recorded on my catalogues, I have created a Chart (See Below) to give a general idea of the frequency of occurrences of the different images. Unfortunately though, very often in sealing impressions a large part of the scene is invisible, either because of an intentional choice made by the scribe or because the tablet has been damaged over time; therefore some scenes cannot be categorized with certainty. However, I have labelled sealing impressions with elements that often occur in Presentation Scenes as “Probable Presentation Scene” (to a Deity/King), and given the frequency and regularity of Presentation Scenes throughout the period, I have gathered any sealing impressions that appear to contain a few possible elements from them under the label “Possible Presentation Scene”.
60
18
6
46
3432
68
1
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Nu
mb
er o
f O
ccu
ren
ces
Scene Type
Chart 1: Bar-Chart Representation of Scene Type Occurrences
Possible Presentation Scene
Probable Presentation to a Deity
Probable Presentation to a King
Presentation to a Deity
Presentation to a King
Presentation to a Missing Figure
Presentation to a Standing God
Contest
Palm Tree
17
