The emergence of cylinder seals in southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BCE was a new technology vital to temple accounting. During the proto-literate period the type of information carried by the seals and their impressions changed; as this happened the first numerical notations and inscribed “proto-writing” emerged. Assyriologists have examined the development of the numerical systems and “proto-writing,” while art historians and archaeologists examine the meaning and function of seal imagery. This chapter analyzes Uruk seal imagery in conjunction with numerical and “proto-writing” technologies to reveal the interconnectedness of seal and inscription as a larger accounting system. It is concluded that the introduction of numerical and ideographic signs occurred simultaneously with a change in the symbolic value of seal imagery, and that the meaning of seal imagery was linked to commodity recording and carried clues regarding social connotations.

Seals as administrative tools have their origin in the sixth millennium BCE in the Syro-Mesopotamia heartland of the Tigris and Euphrates valley. Beginning as stamp seals, cylindrically shaped seals were invented at the same time as proto-cuneiform writing, in the middle of the fourth millennium BCE. While the site of their invention is still uncertain, the cylinder seal continued to be closely associated for the next 3,000 years with all of the cultures that adapted cuneiform to represent their spoken language. This introductory overview of seals and sealings in greater Mesopotamia will begin with a brief summary of the history of scholarship. It will present a summary of the iconographic, stylistic, and functional evolution of Mesopotamian glyptic through the middle of the second millennium BCE, placing emphasis on the changing roles of seals within the administrative system. It will end with several case studies of how seal iconography and style served as a medium through which long-distance cultural interaction was manifest across the larger ancient Near East extending from Egypt to the Indus and from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia. Hybrid styles and iconographies served to connect a vast and highly interconnected world, and they serve today to help us reconstruct that interaction.

Aegean scholars have recently completed fifty years of glyptic codification with the Corpus der minoischen und mykenischen Siegel (CMS), which means that virtually all Aegean seals and sealings are now recorded and classified. Originally, the study of Aegean glyptic focused almost exclusively on seals as art-historical documents, while the Corpus now encourages both systematic studies of glyptic chronology and a more refined analysis of technical developments. Another area of research especially pertinent to the pre- and proto-literate Aegean is the function of seals as “badges” for specific socio-economic groups. There is furthermore a pronounced shift to the study of the use of seals and the role of sealings in palatial economic and administrative systems. The research pendulum is swinging once again with a new emphasis on the amuletic and magical properties of seals, gender-specific seal iconography, and the activities of particular glyptic groups.

This chapter introduces Indus seals, and provides a chronological overview of seals in the various phases of Indus civilization. It then addresses various aspects of Indus seals, including inscriptions, the photographic Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions, seals as badges of authority and amulets, seals as administrative tools, and seal manufacture. As such, the chapter provides a brief but thorough introduction to the more detailed studies that comprise the rest of this section.

Sealing technology first appears in Egypt around 3600 BCE during the Naqada II period of the Predynastic. Thereafter, the use of seals undergoes a lengthy evolution, responding to the shifting structure of the country’s political system, as well as changes in cultural, religious, and artistic traditions that spanned some three millennia. This chapter will provide a comprehensive, typological overview of the evolution in seal forms (including cylinders, stamps, scarabs, and other specialized seal forms) and iconography, and discuss continuities and discontinuities that characterize Egyptian sealing traditions. Here we will examine the evolving modes of seal usage, both as administrative tools and as artifacts that expressed a wider suite of religious and cultural aspects of Egyptian society. Particularly valuable in the Egyptian record is the rich textual source material which illuminates the ways seals and sealing systems related to functioning administrative systems. The following discussion will enmesh the physical evidence within a selection of relevant ancient documentary sources. This review of sealing traditions in Egypt will include a case study. In the context of the present discussion the Abydos case study will be used to illustrate methodologies and issues in the recovery, analysis, and interpretation of seals and sealings in the Egyptian archaeological record.