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The Assyrian Royal Seal Type Again

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

A. R. Millard
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Extract

In 1849 Sir Henry Layard's excavations among the ruins of Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh (the South-West Palace) produced a considerable collection of clay sealings, specimens of which were duly published in A second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh. In his description of this find, Layard discussed a ‘royal seal’, a circular stamp showing the king killing a lion, and mentioned that, on the impressions, the device ‘is frequently encircled by a short inscription, which has not yet been deciphered, or by a simple guilloche border.’ Until now these impressions, preserved in the collections of the British Museum, do not seem to have been illustrated, although Professor Sachs was able to list forty uninscribed examples of bullae and sealings bearing the same motif, fourteen of them showing the guilloche border, in his paper entitled ‘The Late Assyrian Royal Seal Type’.

In all thirteen pieces of clay bearing impressions of inscribed ‘royal’ seals have been located so far in the Museum's collections, including additions made to Layard's original group (Collection no. 51, 9–2) from the excavations of Rassam, Smith, and Budge. They are here presented by courtesy of the Trustees.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , Spring 1965 , pp. 12 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1965

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References

1 London, 1853, Pl. 69. The pieces were found in Room LXI, an inclined passage-way, regarded by Layard as originally fitted with shelves for storing documents, Nineveh and Babylon, London, 1853, pp. 153, 460–462Google Scholar.

2 Nineveh and Babylon, p. 154.

3 Iraq XV (1953), pp. 167–170Google Scholar.

4 Parker, B. H., Iraq XXIV (1962), p. 38, Pl. XXI.I.Google Scholar

5 Ibid.

6 A Guide to the Babylonian and Assyrian Antiquities, 3rd. ed., London, 1922, p. 196Google Scholar; cf. C.A.D. E, p. 60.

7 A. H. Layard, loc. cit. Two of the five impressions of a seal bearing an alphabetic text were published in Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum II, Paris, 1889, no. 52, Tab. VIIIGoogle Scholar. Examination of the originals supports a reading l'tr'zr, ‘Property of Atar-ezer’ rather than l'tr'zh, given by C.I.S.

8 Sachs no. 25, l. 27, restored from K.2729, 1. 24 (J.A.D.D. 646).

9 Parker, B. H., Iraq XXIII (1961), p. 16Google Scholar.

10 Iraq XXIV, p. 39, ND. 7104, Pl. XXII.IGoogle Scholar; Miss Parker pointed to a precursor, the seal of Niqmad of Ugarit, actually a counterpart of the Assyrian Royal Seal type, with a figure about to spear a lion.

11 See n. 6.

12 Iraq XV, Pls. XVIII, nos. 2, 4, 5; XIX, nos. 5, 6. A notable detail of the inscribed seals is that the hem-line of the king's skirt is almost always horizontal, not higher at the front.

13 Greenfield, J. C., J.A.O.S. LXXII (1962), pp. 292–293Google Scholar.

14 Simons, J., Egyptian Topographical Lists, Leiden, 1937, List XXXIV, 4 bisGoogle Scholar; cf. Amin, M. El, Sumer IX (1953), pp. 37–40Google Scholar for Assyrian texts.