A cylinder seal and the picture it prints
This stone is less than five centimetres tall and carved in reverse. Roll it across wet clay and it prints a picture as long as you care to keep rolling. Its owner pressed it over the clay that closed a jar or a door, so a broken seal meant someone had opened it.
Based on the original, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the carving shown is Uruk-style, not this seal's own.
Found: not recorded: it reached New York as a private gift in 1983 with no record of where it was dug up.
What it is
A small cylinder of dark bituminous limestone from the Uruk period, about 3500–3100 BC, carved with a ritual scene in front of a temple front. The carving is cut into the stone backwards, the way a stamp is, because the stone is never the picture. The picture is what comes off it.
Cylinder seals appear in southern Mesopotamia around the same time as the first writing, and people kept using them for about three thousand years.
What the clay remembers
Seals were rolled over lumps of clay pressed onto jar stoppers, bundles, tablets and the pegs that fastened storeroom doors. You could open the door, but not without breaking the clay. Excavators often find many more sealings, the broken clay with the picture on it, than seals, because the clay was thrown away where the door was opened and the stone went home with its owner.
Where this one came from
Nobody knows. It has no excavation record, only a gift in 1983. That is common for seals: they are small, easy to carry and easy to sell, and a seal that turns up without a findspot has lost the one fact that would say whose door it locked.
- Collon, First Impressions: Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East (1987)
- Collon, Near Eastern Seals (1990)
- Picture: rendered from our own 3D model, the one on the workbench: a reconstruction, not a record of how it looked.