Overview

Where the Egyptians have wall paintings, the ancient Near East has cylinder seals as the main source of illustrative material, covering a range of subject matter and periods not covered by relief sculptures. The seals are particularly attractive, and the inscriptions are rare examples of personal prayer from the ancient world. This volume continues the story of the cylinder seal styles of the second millennium BC beyond Babylonia in this internationally recognized series documenting the British Museum's cylinder seals collection. The Isin/Larsa and Old Babylonian Periods of the early 2nd millennium BC merited a whole volume (Volume III), as did the succeeding Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian periods of the 1st millennium BC (Volume V) and the Pre-Achaemenid and Achaemenid periods of the 1st millennia BC-AD in Iran (Volume VI). However, between 2000 and 1000 BC whole series of regional glyptic styles were developed in various autonomous kingdoms and city states. Each of these has merited its own chapter or section within this current volume, with its own selection of photographs and catalogue entries. As the seals featured in this volume came from a number of different sites, they reflect a greater variety of styles than is the case with the single-period or single-origin groups of seals treated in the previous catalogues. There was also a greater exchange of seal-cutting expertise between the various kingdoms, and it is possible to make tentative suggestions as to seals possibly cut by the same craftsman.

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Edith Porada (1912-1994) was born in Vienna, where she grew up and obtained her doctorate on the Akkadian cylinder seals of Ancient Iraq in 1935. She moved to New York in 1938. During the next decade she catalogued the seal impressions from Nuzi near Kirkuk in Iraq (1947) and wrote the important two-volume Corpus of the Ancient Near Eastern Seals in the Pierpont Morgan Library Collection (1948) as curator of that collection. From 1958 until her death she taught at Columbia University in New York. In the 1980s she was asked to write the present volume and worked on the seals every summer in the British Museum. Dominique Collon obtained a Post-Graduate Diploma in Western Asiatic Archaeology from the Institute of Archaeology in London. In 1968 she was invited by Edith Porada to study at Columbia University in New York for an MA (1969) and Phd (1971), the latter on The Seal Impressions from Tell Atchana/Alalakh (1975). In 1983 she became a full-time curator at the British Museum and retired as Assistant Keeper of the Department of Middle East in 2005. She has taken part in archaeological fieldwork at numerous Near Eastern sites. She has published over 250 articles and three catalogues of the cylinder seal collections at the British Museum. The present one, co-authored with Edith Porada, is the last in the series.

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