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Impression Seal
__NOTOC__ The stamp seal (also impression seal) is a common seal die, frequently carved from stone, known at least since the 6th millennium BC (Halaf culture) and probably earlier. The dies were used to impress their picture or inscription into soft, prepared clay and sometimes in sealing wax. The oldest stamp seals were button-shaped objects with primitive ornamental forms chiseled onto them. The stamp seals were replaced in the 4th millennium BC by cylinder seals that had to be rolled over the soft clay to leave an imprint. From the 12th century BC the previous designs were largely abandoned in favor of amphora stamps. Romans introduced their '' signaculum'' around the first century BC; Byzantine maintained the tradition in their commercial stamps. In antiquity the stamp seals were common, largely because they served to authenticate legal documents, such as tax receipts, contracts, wills and decrees. Indus stamp-seal The Indus stamp-seals probably had a different funct ...
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Minoan Seal-stones
Minoan seals are impression seals in the form of carved gemstones and similar pieces in metal, ivory and other materials produced in the Minoan civilization. They are an important part of Minoan art, and have been found in quantity at specific sites, for example in Knossos, Malia and Phaistos. They were evidently used as a means of identifying documents and objects. Minoan seals are of a small size, 'pocket-size', in the manner of a personal amulet. Many of the images are a similar size to a human fingernail, with a high proportion that of the nail of a little finger. They might be thought of as equivalent to the pocket-sized, scaraboid seals of Ancient Egypt, which were sometimes imitated in Crete. However Minoan seals can be larger, with largest examples of many inches. Minoan seals are the most common surviving type of Minoan art after pottery, with several thousand known, from EM II onwards, in addition to over a thousand impressions, few of which match surviving seals. ...
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Cylinder Seal
A cylinder seal is a small round cylinder, typically about one inch (2 to 3 cm) in width, engraved with written characters or figurative scenes or both, used in ancient times to roll an impression onto a two-dimensional surface, generally wet clay. According to some sources, cylinder seals were invented around 3500 BC in the Near East, at the contemporary sites of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia and slightly later at Susa in south-western Iran during the Proto-Elamite period, and they follow the development of stamp seals in the Halaf culture or slightly earlier. They are linked to the invention of the latter's cuneiform writing on clay tablets. Other sources, however, date the earliest cylinder seals to a much earlier time, to the Late Neolithic period (7600-6000 BC) in Syria, hundreds of years before the invention of writing. Cylinder seals are a form of impression seal, a category which includes the stamp seal and finger ring seal. They survive in fairly large numbers and ...
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Scaraboid Seal
Scarabs are amulets and impression seals shaped according to the eponymous beetles, which were widely popular throughout ancient Egypt. They survive in large numbers today, and through their inscriptions and typology, these artifacts prove to be an important source of information for archaeologists and historians of ancient Egypt, representing a significant body of its art. Though primarily worn as amulets and sometimes rings, scarabs were also inscribed for use as personal or administrative seals or were incorporated into other kinds of jewelry. Some scarabs were created for political or diplomatic purposes to commemorate or advertise royal achievements. Additionally, scarabs held religious significance and played a role in Egyptian funerary practices. Dating and evolution Likely due to their connections to the Egyptian god Khepri, amulets in the form of scarab beetles became enormously popular in Ancient Egypt by the early Middle Kingdom (approx. 2000 BC) and remained po ...
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Lachish
Lachish (; ; ) was an ancient Canaanite and later Israelite city in the Shephelah ("lowlands of Judea") region of Canaan on the south bank of the Lakhish River mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible. The current '' tell'' by that name, known as Tel Lachish () or Tell el-Duweir (), has been identified with Lachish. Today, it is an Israeli national park operated and maintained by the Israel Nature and Parks Authority. It lies near the present-day moshav of Lakhish, which was named in honor of the ancient city. Lachish was first mentioned in the Amarna letters. In the Book of Joshua, Lachish is cited as one of the cities conquered by the Israelites for joining the league against the Gibeonites (). The territory was later assigned to the tribe of Judah according to Joshua 15:39 and became part of the united Kingdom of Israel. Following the kingdom's partition, Lachish emerged as one of the most important cities in the Kingdom of Judah, second only to the capital, Jerusa ...
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LMLK Seal
The LMLK seal appears on the handles of several large storage jars from the Kingdom of Judah, where it was first issued during the reign of Hezekiah around 700 BCE. Seals bearing these four Hebrew letters have been discovered primarily on unearthed artifacts in and around Jerusalem, with some in Northern District (Israel), northern Israel. Several complete jars were found at the ancient city of Tel Lachish, Lachish, where they were buried underneath a destruction layer caused by Sennacherib, who reigned over the Neo-Assyrian Empire from 705 BCE to 681 BCE. While none of the original Stamp seal, stamp seals have been found, some 2,000 impressions made by at least 21 seal types have been published. The iconography of the two- and four-winged symbols are representative of royal symbols whose meaning "Ancient Near Eastern seals and sealing practices, was tailored in each kingdom to the local religion and ideology". Text LMLK—lamedh, mem, lamedh, kaph—is vocalized in the Hebrew ...
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Indus Script
The Indus script, also known as the Harappan script and the Indus Valley script, is a corpus of symbols produced by the Indus Valley Civilisation. Most inscriptions containing these symbols are extremely short, making it difficult to judge whether or not they constituted a writing system used to record a Harappan language, any of which are yet to be identified. Despite many attempts, the "script" has not yet been deciphered. There is no known bilingual inscription to help decipher the script, which shows no significant changes over time. However, some of the syntax (if that is what it may be termed) varies depending upon location. The first publication of a seal with Harappan symbols dates to 1875, in a drawing by Alexander Cunningham. By 1992, an estimated 4,000 inscribed objects had been discovered, some as far afield as Mesopotamia due to existing Indus–Mesopotamia relations, with over 400 distinct signs represented across known inscriptions. Some scholars, such as G.& ...
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Bulla (seal)
A bulla (Medieval Latin for "a round seal", from Classical Latin ''bulla'', "bubble, blob"; plural bullae) is an inscribed clay, soft metal (lead or tin), bitumen, or wax token used in commercial and legal documentation as a form of authentication and for tamper-proofing whatever is attached to it (or, in the historical form, contained in it). In their oldest attested form, as used in the ancient Near East and the Middle East of the 8th millennium BC onwards, bullae were hollow clay balls that contained other smaller tokens that identified the quantity and types of goods being recorded. In this form, bullae represent one of the earliest forms of specialization in the ancient world, and likely required skill to create. From about the 4th millennium BC onwards, as communications on papyrus and parchment became widespread, bullae evolved into simpler tokens that were attached to the documents with cord, and impressed with a unique sign (i.e., a seal) to provide the same kind of author ...
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Ancient Near Eastern Seals And Sealing Practices
Two main types of seals were used in the Ancient Near East, the stamp seal and the cylinder seal. Stamp seals first appeared in 'administrative' contexts in central and northern Mesopotamia in the seventh millennium and were used exclusively until the fifth millennium. Cylinder seals appeared first around 3600 BC in southern Mesopotamia and south-western Iran (Middle Uruk Period). They gradually replaced stamp seals, becoming the tool of a rising class of bureaucrats in the early stages of state formation. Even though stamp seals were still produced in the third and second millennia, cylinder seals predominated. In the first millennium, stamp seals made a strong comeback and eventually replaced cylinder seals entirely. Place names and sites *Eshnunna (T. Asmar), *Shaduppum (T. Harmal), *Mari (Tell Hariri), *Sippar-Yahrurum (T. Abu Habbah), *Sippar-Amnanum (T. ed-Der), *Babylon (near al-Hillah), *Kish (T. Uhaimir), *Nippur (T. Nuffar), *Larsa (T. Senkereh), *Isin (Ishan ...
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Brooklyn Museum
The Brooklyn Museum is an art museum in the New York City borough (New York City), borough of Brooklyn. At , the museum is New York City's second largest and contains an art collection with around 500,000 objects. Located near the Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, Prospect Heights, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Crown Heights, Flatbush, Brooklyn, Flatbush, and Park Slope neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the museum's Beaux-Arts architecture, Beaux-Arts building was designed by McKim, Mead & White. The Brooklyn Museum was founded in 1823 as the Brooklyn Apprentices' Library and merged with the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1843. The museum was conceived as an institution focused on a broad public. The Brooklyn Museum's current building dates to 1897 and has been expanded several times since then. The museum initially struggled to maintain its building and collection, but it was revitalized in the late 20th century following major renovations. Significant areas of the collection includ ...
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Horus
Horus (), also known as Heru, Har, Her, or Hor () in Egyptian language, Ancient Egyptian, is one of the most significant ancient Egyptian deities who served many functions, most notably as the god of kingship, healing, protection, the sun, and the sky. He was worshipped from at least the late prehistoric Egypt until the Ptolemaic Kingdom and Egypt (Roman province), Roman Egypt. Different forms of Horus are recorded in history, and these are treated as distinct gods by Egyptology, Egyptologists."The Oxford Guide: Essential Guide to Egyptian Mythology", Edited by Donald B. Redford, Horus: by Edmund S. Meltzer, pp. 164–168, Berkley, 2003, . These various forms may be different manifestations of the same multi-layered deity in which certain attributes or Syncretism, syncretic relationships are emphasized, not necessarily in opposition but complementary to one another, consistent with how the Ancient Egyptians viewed the multiple facets of reality. He was most often depicted as ...
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Indus Stamp-seal
The Indus ( ) is a transboundary river of Asia and a trans- Himalayan river of South and Central Asia. The river rises in mountain springs northeast of Mount Kailash in the Western Tibet region of China, flows northwest through the disputed Kashmir region, first through the Indian-administered Ladakh, and then the Pakistani administered Gilgit Baltistan, Quote: "Kashmir, region of the northwestern Indian subcontinent. It is bounded by the Uygur Autonomous Region of Xinjiang to the northeast and the Tibet Autonomous Region to the east (both parts of China), by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab to the south, by Pakistan to the west, and by Afghanistan to the northwest. The northern and western portions are administered by Pakistan and comprise three areas: Azad Kashmir, Gilgit, and Baltistan, ... The southern and southeastern portions constitute the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The Indian- and Pakistani-administered portions are divided by a "line of con ...
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