Root, Margaret Cool and Dixon, Helen. Forthcoming. “‘Blue from Babylon’: Notes from the...

For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV

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The Adventure of the Illustrious Scholar

Papers Presented to Oscar White Muscarella

Edited by

Elizabeth Simpson

LEIDEN | BOSTON


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Contents

Preface xiii Oscar White Muscarella: Excavations and Publicatons xvi

Introduction 1Elizabeth Simpson

part 1“There is Nothing like First-hand Evidence”

1 Oscar White Muscarella and Sherlock Holmes 23Laurie Adams

part 2Arts and Archaeology: Anatolia

2 The King Has Ass’s Ears! The Myth of Midas’s Ears 49Susanne Berndt

3 The Project to Reconstruct the Early Bronze Age Hattıan Royal Tombs of Alaca Höyük 67

Aykut Çınaroğlu

4 The Lydian Hoard and Its Progeny: Repatriation and the Statute of Limitations 79

Lawrence M. Kaye

5 Labors Lost and Found in Tumulus mm at Gordion 97Richard F. Liebhart

6 A Pithos Burial at Sardis 117David Gordon Mitten

7 Attitudes toward the Past in Roman Phrygia: Survivals and Revivals 124Lynn E. Roller


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Contents

8 The City Mound at Gordion: The Discovery, Study, and Conservation of the Wooden Fragments from Megaron 3 140

Krysia Spirydowicz

9 Monumental Entrances, Sculpture, and Idols at Kerkenes: Aspects of Phrygian Cult East of the K�z�l�rmak 160

Geoffrey Summers and Françoise Summers

10 Of Fibulae, Of Course! 188Maya Vassileva

part 3Arts and Archaeology: Urartu

11 Artifacts Belonging to Queen Qaquli and Mr. Tigursagga from an Elaborately Decorated Quarter of the Ayanis Fortress 215

Altan Çilingiroğlu

12 A Fragment of a Ram’s Head Rhyton Found at Qalatgah, Iran 225Stephan Kroll

13 Toul-E Gilan and the Urartian Empire 230D.T. Potts

14 Some Considerations on Urartian Burial Rites 257Veli Sevin

15 Architectural and Other Observations Related to Erebuni in the Late Seventh/Early Sixth Centuries b.c. 266

David Stronach

part 4Arts and Archaeology: The Near East

16 Neo-Assyrian Views of Foreign Cities: A Brief Survey 279Pauline Albenda

17 The Role of the Petra Great Temple in the Context of Nabataean Archaeology 304

Martha Sharp Joukowsky


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Contents

18 Fibulae in Neo-Assyrian Burials 351Friedhelm Pedde

19 Fibulae, Chronology, and Related Considerations: Marlik Reloaded 360

Christian Konrad Piller

20 A Middle Bronze Stele from Hama and Old Syrian Cylinder Seals 388Barbara A. Porter

21 A Unique Human Head-Cup from the Environs of Tel Qashish in the Jezreel Valley, Israel 406

Irit Ziffer, Edwin C.M. van den Brink, Orit Segal, and Uzi Ad

part 5Arts and Archaeology: The Mediterranean World

22 Back to the Future: Memory, Nostalgia, and Identity in the 12th Century b.c.e. on Paros 423

Robert B. Koehl

23 Liturgy 444Günter Kopcke

24 What Did the Fisherman Catch? 453Mark J. Rose

25 The Weight of Good Measure: A Reassessment of the Balance Weights from the Late Bronze Age Shipwreck at Uluburun 484

Rachael Dealy Salisbury

part 6Arts—Craft—Materials—Techniques

26 Kyme: An Ancient Center of Jewelry Production in Asia Minor 527Özgen Acar

27 Voicing the Past: The Implications of Craft-referential Pottery in Ancient Greece 537

Einav Zamir Dembin


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28 The Neoclassical Klismos Chair: Early Sources and Avenues of Diffusion 564

Ana Gutierrez-Folch

29 The Furniture of the Ramesside Pharaohs 599Geoffrey Killen

30 Excavated Roman Jewelry: The Case of the Gold Body Chains 614Meredith Nelson

31 Ivory Identif�cation 645Anibal Rodriguez

32 Luxury Arts of the Ancient Near East 662Elizabeth Simpson

part 7Issues and Methods

33 The Literature of Loot: Notes on The Lie Became Great and Its Heirs 697

Roger Atwood

34 Oscar the Oracle: On the Publication of Unprovenienced Objects 708

Larissa Bonfante

35 The Illicit Antiquities Research Centre: Afterthoughts and Aftermaths 719

Neil Brodie

36 Illicit Traff�c of Pre-Columbian Antiquities 734Clemency Chase Coggins

37 The History and Continuing Impact of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (nagpra) 747

Emily Field

Contents


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38 Connoisseurship Conundrums and a Visit to Hans Hofmann’s Studio 767

Carroll Janis

39 Blue from Babylon: Notes from the Curatorial Trenches 780Margaret Cool Root and Helen Dixon

40 “Outing” the Old Teaching Collections 809Karen D. Vitelli

41 Figure and Ground: Reading Ancient Near Eastern Sources 818Eva von Dassow

part 8“Leave No Stone Unturned”

42 “Elementary” 841Jeanette Greenfield

Bibliography 859 Index of Terms 979 Authors’ Biographies 1008

Contents

For use by the Author only | © 2018 Koninklijke Brill NV© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, �� | doi �0.��63/97�900436�7�3_04�

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chapter 39

Blue from Babylon: Notes from the Curatorial Trenches

Margaret Cool Root and Helen Dixon

Preamble

Inspired by Oscar Muscarella’s career-long eagerness to go where an-gels fear to tread, this short article offers preliminary remarks on an in-scribed stamp seal in my care from 1978 to 2015 at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology—one that I assiduously tiptoed around for years.1 Its per-petual exile in storage has been prompted by the suspicion that it is a modern forgery—with my consciousness about these matters and the complicity of the art market in the proliferation of fakes raised by Oscar’s scholarship. “Blue from Babylon” is an exploration that I could not have done but for the willingness of then Michigan doctoral candidate Helen Dixon (Near Eastern Studies) to plunge in with me, offering her special-ist expertise in West Semitic material culture and in Iron Age Aramaic/Northwest Semitic dialects. The primary goals here are (1) to present an intriguingly problematic object and to assess the relative value of its vari-ous anomalies and physical and biographical features as indices of sus-pect origin, and (2) to challenge the notion of the ethical legitimacy of publishing it at all. But there is also another agenda. Over the years I have had occasion to visit New York with graduate students working with me at the time. One key element in those trips has been to sit down together with Oscar to talk about issues in archaeological practice and curatorial dilemmas. This short article is by way of simulating on paper one more such cherished conversation.

—mcr

1 km 26830 was displayed in a special exhibition in 1984, but has not been on view since. See Root, The Art of Seals, 37, no. 7 (not illustrated).


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Blue from Babylon: Modern Biography

The Collector-ArchaeologistProfessor Leroy Waterman (1875–1972) directed the University of Michigan’s excavations at Seleucia-on-the-Tigris (about 90 km north of Babylon) in sea-sonal campaigns from 1927–1928 through 1931–1932. It is during these periods of residency in the heart of Mesopotamia that he is assumed to have collected a substantial group of ancient Near Eastern seals. Thirty-two of these seals came to the Kelsey Museum in 1959 as a gift transfer in Waterman’s name from the Semitics Department of the University (the precursor of our current De-partment of Near Eastern Studies).

Waterman’s seals form an impressive representative array of types in stone and shell ranging from late prehistory down into the period of the Achaeme-nid Persian empire. Indeed, the collection as a whole provides a core assem-blage for teaching and display in the museum.2 Notably, several important pre-Hellenistic Mesopotamian seals from Waterman’s excavations of Seleucia provide critical counterpoints of instructive archaeological context, adding scientific value and a sense of the social charisma of a preserved connection to the human condition that his unexcavated and unprovenanced seals cannot.3 So Waterman’s legacy maintains a significant presence at the Kelsey Museum. km 26830—the “blue one”—is an outlier among these ranks in terms of a set of anomalies that begs for a more complicating discourse than a terse entry in a planned scholarly catalogue of seals in the Kelsey (much less a three-line museum display label) can convey (Plates 39.1–39.2).

The Waterman seals apparently came to the Kelsey without accompanying records, such as an inventory, notations on dealers’ names, or any other infor-mation of real use in tracing artifact biographies.4 Furthermore, the university

2 These are substantially enhanced now with the acquisition by gift of the late prehistoric stamp seals from Tepe Giyan, Iran, collected by Ernst Herzfeld. See Root, “Tepe Giyan Lives” and Mallampati, “Archaeology and Collecting: Law, Ethics, Politics,”109–125.

3 See, for example, Root, “Hero and Worshiper at Seleucia.” A small but important selection of excavated seals, sealings, and other artifacts of the Early Dynastic and Akkadian periods came to the Kelsey in the 1960s from the American excavations of Nippur through Michigan’s membership in the American Schools of Oriental Research.

4 The Kelsey Museum was not formed as an institutionalized museum per se until 1953—even though the collections that would become part of it were begun in the late 19th century. So it was a very young entity in 1959, without systematic information protocol for logging in dona-tions. See Talalay and Root, Passionate Curiosities, 1–50, 97–102.


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archives have so far yielded up no pertinent letter or other document.5 We do not even know for a fact if these thirty-two seals constitute the entirety of Wa-terman’s collection. The museum accession card for each of the seals, presum-ably initiated at the time of the 1959 gift transfer, incorporates under the rubric “Field or Former Number” a coded set: a “W.” is followed by a Roman numeral (ranging from i to iii); a capital letter (ranging from A to D); and an Arabic numeral (ranging from 1 to 32). There are multiple oddities in the sequence of Waterman numbers matched to accession numbers—enough to make it un-productive to burden this paper with all of them. Selectively: (1) The first seven seals in numerical sequence of accession numbers and previous Waterman numbers do not bear a letter designation after the Roman numeral. (2) The thirteen seals whose numbers contain the letter “B” also bear a lowercase let-ter ranging from a to d. (3) Four seals out of the thirty-two received accession numbers in an entirely different sequence, accounting for the fact that there are gaps in the first accession number sequence (e.g., W.II.7 (km 26810) is fol-lowed by W.III.A.10 (km 26811).6 (4) The Arabic numeral at the end of each set (in the main sequence) coordinates with the numerical sequence of accession numbers assigned to the seals in 1959 (beginning with km 26804). But neither this sequential ordering nor any particular typological or historical dating fac-tor bears any relationship to the artifacts’ ancient biographies or material/cul-tural properties that we have yet been able to glean.

The card for km 26830 bears the code W.III.D.32. Does this end position in the Arabic numeral sequence (as the last in the thirty-two seals that came to the Kelsey) mean that it was Waterman’s last acquisition? Or may it be merely a serendipitous result of a culling from a larger collection that just happened to make km 26830 the last in the line? Why did four of the seals receive acces-sion numbers totally outside the main run? Much of this (and more) remains bewildering. It does seem likely, though, that the range of the Roman numeral and the capital letter codings (and the gaps/apparent oddities therein) indi-cates that more seals were originally part of Waterman’s inventory system. It is also possible, in addition, that features of the code refer to acquisition data such as the identity of a dealer or seller and/or the location of the purchase or harvesting of the seal. Here too, clarity from down in our curatorial trench is elusive at best.

5 Focused combing of the Leroy Waterman Papers housed in the Bentley Historical Library has yielded no information whatsoever relating to the acquisition of seals or other categories of objects. Two very astute, talented undergraduate scholar-sleuths in 2005 and 2008 deserve special thanks for pursuing this project with Root: Meryl Schwartz and Jessie Rob, respectively.

6 These four accession numbers run from 91600 to 91603.



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“Provenance”

Most of the accession cards for the Waterman seals designate “Mesopotamia” under the Provenance rubric, including the card for km 26830. There are some anomalies, however. Two seals have no Provenance designation whatsoever (km 91600 and 91602). One omits “Mesopotamia” and stipulates instead “Iraq” alone (km 26829). Three omit “Mesopotamia” and supply instead “Persia” (km 26808), “Iran” (km 26809), or “Persia?” (km 26810). Three of those that sup-ply “Mesopotamia” follow this by “(Iraq?)” (km 26804, 26805, and 26827). One notes “Mesopotamia or Iran” (km 26813). All this strongly suggests that in some cases at least, Waterman was using “provenance” designations of the vaguest sort—such as are frequently supplied by dealers.

It has in the past been taken for granted that he acquired all his seals (some-how) while excavating at Seleucia. This assumption has carried with it the further assumption that he acquired all of them in the Seleucia site environs (which might include Babylon) or perhaps in Baghdad from a dealer. It is also quite possible, however, that 26830 was acquired not in central Mesopotamia at all, but rather in the Levant near the end of Waterman’s Middle East activi-ties. What Waterman had found at Seleucia, instead of the Sumerian Eden that he was seeking as a Biblical scholar of a certain era, was a site that revolved around intersections of Seleucid and Parthian cultures. He never became intel-lectually gripped by the potential significance of the site. So he began looking for a new project more in keeping with his original interests. In the fall of 1930 (at the outset of the fourth of his five seasons as director of the Seleucia exca-vations) he secured the concession to excavate ancient Sepphoris in Palestine with private funds. He dug there in 1931 for two months. The Great Depression brought the project to an end until much later in the 20th century under dif-ferent auspices.7

Whether Waterman acquired the seal during his time in central Mesopo-tamia or Palestine, the words of a Seleucia team member, Samuel Yeivin, are an important reminder of how ambiguous any record of such circumstances may have been: (1) an object that came to be logged into the archaeological record and thence treated as an excavated artifact, but which was in fact found somewhere in the (remote or close) vicinity of the site and purchased for the excavation, and (2) an object found in the same way that went either into the excavator’s growing personal collection or onward to a dealer who then sold

7 Waterman, Preliminary Report. For an overview of subsequent excavations at Sepphoris, see Nagy, Meyers, Meyers, and Weiss, eds., Sepphoris in Galilee.


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it to whomever—possibly even to the archaeologist who (unwittingly or not) actually bought something that came from his own site.

It will be noted that the volume contains a comparatively large amount of surface finds. These have been secured from our workmen, who picked them up—while walking to or from work—on the surface of our mounds or other mounds in the vicinity of our site … by offering a small compen-sation for such chance finds, the expedition merely chose the lesser of two evils, and prevented—as far as it was humanly possible—the trick-ling out of such finds into the hands of dealers.8

We do not know if Waterman specifically acquired some finds procured in this manner for his own collection either at Seleucia or at Sepphoris. Perhaps those he acquired from big-city dealers are the ones with the anomalous Prov-enance indicators given on the accession cards, where those that simply state “Mesopotamia” signify those that Waterman was sure of because he knew very well where they had been found. Certainly, at Seleucia, enough pre-Hellenistic material has been retrieved archaeologically and logged in (including seals) to make it entirely plausible that additional items came forward as “surface finds,” which came to be owned by Waterman rather than claimed as part of the log of the excavation per se.9 It is also quite plausible that he would have characterized all ancient Near Eastern seals as “Mesopotamian” even if they came straight from Sepphoris in the Galilee.

Two seals in the Waterman collection (our km 26830 and also km 26807) had tiny hand-written notes in their storage envelopes decades ago: “from Bab-ylon.” It was on that basis that each was designated that way in the 1984 exhibi-tion, “The Art of Seals,” at the Kelsey Museum.10 Somehow over the years and in the course of multiple upgrades of the museum’s storage facilities and stor-age packing of all our collections, these two little paper notations have been lost—even though we always make every effort to preserve the link between any such free-floating documentation and the artifact to which it refers.

8 Yeivin, Objects from Seleucia, 3. See Muscarella, “Unexcavated Objects,” 164, on conse-quences of the practice of purchasing genuine objects from local workers at a site under excavation.

9 There is nothing either in Waterman’s archive (Waterman, Leroy Waterman Papers) or in the excavation records gleaned to date to provide any hint about this. The excavation records are held in the Kelsey Museum.

10 Root, The Art of Seals, 37, cat. nos. 7 and 6 respectively.



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Just what value should be attributed to these notations is difficult to assess, given the vagueness of the entire collection around the notion of provenance or place/circumstances of acquisition. Theoretically, the rarity of these nota-tions might suggest that they actually meant something significant and spe-cific about these two seals. But for all we know, many more of the seals were once accompanied by tiny notes, which had already been lost prior to 1984.11 We will return to the issue of provenance later, in the context of our presenta-tion of the complexities of the seal as an artifact.

Blue from Babylon: Features and Questions of Authenticity

The accession card for km 26830 stipulates “modern?” at the Period rubric. The physical and iconographical/inscriptional features of km 26830 laid out below combine to signal its alliance to a West Semitic production environment. If it is a genuine ancient artifact, it was manufactured sometime between the mid-7th and the early 6th centuries b.c.e. (Plates 39.1–39.2). In this case, it probably originated in a production center in Syria or farther west; but it may have been used in central Mesopotamia in antiquity, whence it was eventu-ally recovered and then ultimately acquired one way or another by Waterman while he was working at Seleucia (explaining the “from Babylon” notation).12 If it is a forgery, it still remains most probable that it was produced in western

11 Interestingly, the other seal that in 1984 still had a “from Babylon” notation associated with it (km 26807) is a chalcedony ovoid stamp seal bearing a Neo-Babylonian type cult scene. Like km 26830, it is one of those listed simply as from “Mesopotamia” on its acces-sion card. Its Waterman code number is W.II.4. Since the km 26830 code is W.III.D.32, the system does not seem to have a clear bearing on the “from Babylon” factor or on cultural iconographical/stylistic factors that do connect these two seals. If it did, we would expect these two seals to share some code points (see below on the iconography and style of km 26830).

12 Stamp seals of apparent West Semitic origin have been excavated at Nimrud: e.g., Park-er, “Excavations at Nimrud, 1949–53: Seals and Seal Impressions,” 107 and plate XVIII:4 (ND.3201) and 107, plate XVIII:1 (ND.858—a faience scarab); and Parker, “Seals and Seal Impressions 1955–58,” 29 and plate X:2 (ND.5255—a stone scaraboid with an Ara-maic inscription and a four-winged figure with Egyptianizing headdress). Only one in-scribed West Semitic stamp seal in Berlin is catalogued by Jakob-Rost as excavated: Die Stempelsiegel, 62–63 (cat. no. 186—a non-figural scaraboid of limestone from Babylon, Merkes 27).


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reaches—wherever Waterman actually acquired it.13 The remainder of this pa-per explores our scaraboid with concerns about authenticity at the forefront.

At this juncture it is crucial to note three particular admonitions articulated powerfully by Oscar Muscarella. Our efforts in the pages to follow will be tem-pered by all three. First, he has urged that,

… every unexcavated object, obviously especially those that are strange and suspicious, must not be questioned “Why is it a forgery?” but rather “Why is it genuine?”14

This challenge is much more than a clever rhetorical flourish; and we take its point seriously. That said, we have chosen to present more inductively the vari-ous aspects of the problems that the Kelsey seal poses with a transparent ap-preciation of the multiple complexities it offers regarding its authenticity. The rationale is partly that the saga of attempting to assess the factors presented by this object are instructive on many counts elucidated so compellingly in Muscarella’s publications. To consign the seal a priori to the category of forgery without first putting it through its paces would be to sideline many interesting issues. We will strive nonetheless to pay heed to the spirit of our first Mus-carella mandate.

Secondly, Muscarella has decried the curatorial tendency to exercise deep scholarly analysis of the features of unprovenanced (and therefore, by defi-nition, suspect) artifacts “as if they were genuine.” Such exercises, he argues, establish a record of data on artistic and cultural practice built on specious evidence (based on suspect material) that then becomes reified as a standard against which other artifacts will be compared and assessed. We thoroughly applaud this admonition. To a degree, we operate here accordingly—even though this means circumscribing iconographical and stylistic analyses be-cause of the extraordinary imbalance between excavated and unexcavated seals of comparable type. The issues our seal presents are significant enough that we hope readers will agree that the effort to eschew full-throttle analysis in favor of a review of the problematics is worthwhile.

13 Muscarella, “Unexcavated Objects,” 164, discusses some mechanisms whereby forgeries pass through channels even from workshops at a great distance and into environments (such as Baghdad) where the naïve collector might expect to find illicitly retrieved antiq-uities but not, perhaps, fakes. See also commentaries in Muscarella, “Excavated and Unex-cavated,” and The Lie Became Great. Banks, “Spurious,” records the free-flowing movement of forged Mesopotamian antiquities already at the turn of the last century.

14 Muscarella, “Unexcavated Objects,” 169, reiterated in “Unexcavated Objects—Addendum,” 7, n. 5.



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Thirdly, Muscarella urges that scholars work from excavated bodies of ma-terial outward in the construction of webs of analytical comparanda for any artifact.15 Only in this way can we reverse the curatorial tendency described above—by going directly to excavated evidence as comparanda for both unex-cavated and excavated material. The goal is thus systematically to relegate sus-pect evidence to an inferior (or very carefully delineated) evidentiary category if indeed it is used at all. There are terrible problems here with West/Northwest Semitic seals, particularly inscribed examples. A huge percentage of these ob-jects upon which standards of analysis have been based are unprovenanced.16 This is especially vexing since epigraphical and paleographical investigations (largely built upon evidence from such unprovenanced artifacts) have driven and predetermined interpretation of other features.17 Even in areas of glyptic research where excavated seals are available, there is a tendency in some quar-ters to persist in old ways, giving unprovenanced objects equal or even greater weight than excavated and culturally informative examples.18 With the Kelsey seal, as we shall see, an attempt to privilege excavated comparanda—and even to avoid using unprovenanced material as comparanda completely—runs us up against a remarkable discovery, which raises a host of questions.

Shape, Condition, Materialkm 26830 is a scaraboid with a flat seal face and an unarticulated back that is smooth and slightly domed.19 The seal is unperforated—a feature we will return to below. Its dimensions seem about average for scaraboids of the first millennium b.c.e. and would have been appropriate for a substantial but not outsize gold ringset.20 Its condition is good, with a minor surface abrasion and a small chip on the left edge of the seal face, perhaps indicating scars from the removal of a finger-ring mount at some point ancient or modern.21

15 Muscarella, “Unexcavated Objects,” 166–167.16 Uehlinger, “Introduction,” xxi, n. 48; Sass, “Pre-exilic Hebrew Seals,” 245–246. See also Bu-

chanan and Moorey, Catalogue, 14–15.17 Uehlinger, “Introduction,” xi–xxi, on the history of this epigraphic-based approach; 261 for

a statement urging a more integrative approach.18 Garrison, Review of P.H. Merrillees, 151.19 It conforms to Keel’s Type iv: Corpus—Einleitung (1995), 63–64, on the scaraboid as a seal

shape in the Palestine/Israel context; figure 84 for his Type iv.20 km 26830 measures 2.5 cm × 2.1 cm × 0.5 cm. and weighs 5.22 grams. Although weights of

stamp seals are seldom noted, weight seems a potentially useful element of comparative physical data moving forward.

21 Scaraboids, with their low, unarticulated backs, would seem well suited to finger-ring set-tings. Some excavated evidence validates this surmise. See, e.g., Mitchell and Searight, Stamp Seals 3, 114 (no. 274), for the impression of a scaraboid with its ring mount clearly


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The seal is a dusky dark blue with light blue manifestations.22 The museum accession card describes km 26830 as made of “dark blue glass paste.” This characterization of the fabric reflects only what was assumed about the seal in 1959 or before—carrying with it ambiguities of terminology especially preva-lent until very recently. Terms such as “glass,” “glass paste,” “faience,” “frit,” and “Egyptian Blue” applied to ancient seals have been used variously and with varying degrees of refinement in academic literature—to the extent that un-less a particular publication clearly defines the parameters of meaning, the terms are of little analytical value.23 Based on a first-level visual and microscop-ic examination carried out in 2012, without the aid yet of more sophisticated techniques for determining material and composition, km 26830 appears to be made of a blue frit.

We use this term as Tite and Bimson advise in their recent attempt to deal systematically with these definitional issues relating to ancient composites. For them, “frit” describes a “sintered, polycrystalline high silica material which is coloured throughout and has no glaze covering.”24 The Kelsey seal has been fired—but at a far lower temperature than would be needed for a “glass.” Indeed, it shows no evidence of vitrification. It does display, however, to the naked eye under fiber-optic light, distinctive sparkly, fine-grained crystals con-gruent with a frit. Four tiny, perfectly cylindrical holes in the surface of the seal face appear to be the result of air bubbles—making it likely that we are looking at vitreous material rather than stone. Based on investigation of these holes with the magnification so far available, the seal appears to be blue all the way

visible in the impressed image: here on an uninscribed clay bulla from Nineveh. But most excavated original mounts have been found separated from their seals already in antiq-uity. Both scarabs and scaraboids frequently acquired modern mounts of various types in the 19th century, so multiple opportunities existed for the scarring of km 26830 along its edge.

22 Pantone Scale P 303U; lighter shades toward P 299U.23 See Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials, 166–169. Here the complexities regarding

designations of faience, glass paste, etc., in the classification of Mesopotamian artifacts are laid out clearly. From the perspective of the Egyptian evidence and similar confusions of terminology, see Nicholson and Henderson, “Glass,” and Nicholson and Peltenburg, “Egyptian Faience.” Our profound thanks to then Kelsey conservator Claudia Chemello for her initial analyses with a Bausch & Lomb microscope, her research input on issues of materials analysis, and her follow-through with additional tests in an outside lab. Thanks also to Caroline Roberts, then Samuel H. Kress Conservation Fellow at the Kelsey Museum, for her engaging contributions to the initial phase of this investigation.

24 Tite and Bimson, “Identification of Early Vitreous Materials,” 81.



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through (which is the case with a frit object, according to Tite and Bimson’s definition) and exhibits a crystalline structure deep into the body.25

Does the informed (if still tentative) designation of km 26830 as a frit arti-fact help place it in a specific production milieu? Does this designation yield notable correlations with other seals in terms of shape, style, iconography, and inscription? Because of the terminology issues mentioned above, it is impossi-ble to construct a definitive body of comparative seals in an attempt to answer these questions. Even when we limit comparanda to artifacts from controlled excavations, this does not guarantee controlled usage of these otherwise prob-lematic terms.26

Nevertheless, a general trend is clear: seals in the Western Asiatic orbit de-scribed as being made of “frit,” “Egyptian Blue” (which is closely allied to “frit”), “faience,” “glass,” and “glass paste” are relatively common for the Levant and less so for central Mesopotamia. Those that do appear in central Mesopota-mian contexts tend to reaffirm the West Semitic connection in seal form and/or style/iconography.27 When we attempt to refine this discussion in terms of definitional distinctions between glass and various types of composite

25 Ms. Chemello has retrieved bits of what seems to be wax embedded deep in these air holes. This substance appears to be residue from an impression-making process many years ago, perhaps long before arrival at the Kelsey.

26 Thus, information supplied in catalogues of seals from excavated sites that might be ex-pected to yield the most noteworthy comparanda is only as useful as is the degree of em-ployment of systematic materials analysis, with precise reference to a stipulated standard for terminology. In many cases, ambiguities will remain for the foreseeable future. Adding to this problem, there is the potential for scholarly categorizations that dissociate seals of composite material found (and perhaps made) in Western Asia from that region simply on the basis of presumptions about the technology. Moorey notes that Buchanan decided not to include any of the scarabs and scaraboids made of “faience” that presumably ema-nated from the Levant in his catalogue of the Near Eastern stamp seals in the Ashmolean Museum, because he determined that they were “best considered with their counterparts in Egypt.” See Buchanan and Moorey, Catalogue, 37.

27 Jakob-Rost, Die Stempelsiegel, catalogues several such stamp seals from the excavations of Ashur and Babylon that are made of composite materials and bear some Levantine/Egyp-tianizing formal features: e.g., cat. no. 167—a “faience” stamp seal from Ashur; cat. no. 234—a “glass paste” scaraboid from Ashur; cat. no. 383—a “frit” stamp seal from Babylon, Merkes; cat. nos. 384 (scaraboid), 385, 393, and 396—stamp seals of various forms from Babylon, all described as made of “blue paste.” From Nimrud, see Parker, “Excavations at Nimrud, 1949–1953,” 106 (ND.3301—a “faience” cylinder with a Mesopotamian crescent moon symbol and an Egyptian ma’at feather and a cobra, which is considered surely a Syrian product); 107 (ND.3598—a “faience” cylinder seal which Parker compares to a “fa-ience” cylinder seal from Nimrud and two from Ashur; and ND.858—a “faience” scarab).


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materials, we are, however, back to the old problem. Keel stipulates that Type iv scaraboids from his corpus of excavated or site-associated stamp seals from Palestine/Israel are occasionally (“zuweilen”) made of “glass” as well as other material.28 Exactly what the quantitative “zuweilen” and the descriptive “glass” really mean for him is not clear—since perforce he had to depend on informa-tion supplied from myriad, often vague sources for his mammoth documentary project.

Gubel remarks that “examples of individual groups of Phoenician seals such as the `Egyptian blue’ production are invariably uninscribed.”29 This statement might be interpreted to suggest that the Kelsey seal is an outlier and thus a probable forgery, since km 26830 is an inscribed frit scaraboid. But how fine a distinction is Gubel drawing here between inscribed “Phoenician” seals as a micro-corpus and inscribed West Semitic seals more broadly? And since he is not basing his analysis on excavated material, should we be paying close atten-tion to this generalizing comment in any case?

In sum, there seems to be nothing about the material properties of our seal in conjunction with its formal properties that necessarily speaks “forgery”; but there are indications on the basis of its material that the seal (whether forged or genuinely ancient) is likely to have been made in the West Semitic sphere. Enough excavated material exists, furthermore, to keep open the possibility that the Kelsey scaraboid (if authentic) could very plausibly have found its way to central Mesopotamia through active ancient use.

StyleThe seal template for km 26830 may have been fired in a mold, as the tiny air holes seem to validate. But the figural design and the inscription indicate incised and drilled work. Linear cuts embellish the garments of both figures, lending engraved surface texture to a very well-made object. Secure use of a drill to create the globe forms (discussed below) reinforces the look of a crisply worked carved artifact, which yields excellent impressions.30 Stylistically, our seal appears to be a hybrid of the abstract cut-and-drilled fashion of many Neo-Babylonian type seals depicting scenes of worship. Here, however, the

28 Keel, Corpus der Stempelsiegel-Amulette—Einleitung (1995), 64.29 Gubel, “Iconography,” 110.30 Compare, for instance, among many examples we could cite, a four-faced stamp seal of

limestone from Babylon (Jakob-Rost, Stempelsiegel, cat. no. 260 and plate 5).



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abstraction has been modulated toward the more robust, modeled-style seals from the same milieu.31

Composition and IconographyIn its impressed image (Plate 39.2), the Kelsey seal displays a Babylonian-type worshiper with a beard wearing a long dress standing in profile at right, look-ing left toward a female divinity wearing a tall polos with crowning globe. The divinity, facing right, is seated on a throne with a row of seven globes (some-times called dots) running down its high back. Between and above this figural group is an eight-pointed star, rendered by a central globe and eight radiating spokes, each terminating in a small globe or dot. Between the lower bodies of the figures is an ankh sign. A line runs under this entire scene (visible more clearly on the actual seal), demarcating the exergue. The feet of the worshiper and the feet of the footstool and throne of the divinity rest directly on this ground line, while the ankh sign hovers slightly above it.

The worshiper extends his outer arm up and forward toward the seated di-vine figure. His other arm extends out at waist level. Both hands are cupped open, facing upward. The divine figure extends her further arm up and toward the worshiper so that their hands touch. Her outer arm extends forward from waist level, not quite meeting the extended lower hand of the worshiper but with their two lower arms completing, nonetheless, an essentially triangular composition of arms, with its apex pointing to the star.

The scene on the Kelsey scaraboid utilizes a recognized composition in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian glyptic: a standing worshiper before a seated or standing anthropomorphic divinity with or without a cult symbol in between and an astral symbol in the field above.32 While the basic idea is replicated on

31 Most of the seals published by Jakob-Rost in the cut-and-drilled category were purchased; but several good examples are excavated: e.g., Jakob-Rost, Stempelsiegel, 78–79 (cat. nos. 274 and 275—both from Babylon). The perpetuation of the production of this style (as well as the more modeled style) into Achaemenid times is well documented now via seals impressed on the Persepolis Fortification tablets—where a major corpus of such seals is incontrovertibly genuine, even though we cannot speak to the material of their matrices. See Root, “Pyramidal Stamp Seals,“ and Garrison and Root, Seals 2.

32 For stamp seals, see, e.g., Mitchell and Searight, Stamp Seals 3, 37–38, cat. no. 13d (four different seals impressed on bullae from Khorsabad). The composition of two figures framing a substantial central element is more suited to cylinder seals. For examples on cylinder seals retrieved as impressions from Nimrud, see, e.g., Herbordt, Neuassyrische Glyptik, plate 2:1–3, 5, 7–9. Numerous additional examples are published from the British Museum collections, inter alia, although they tend not to come from excavations: e.g., Collon, Cylinder Seals 5, cat. nos. 233, 244, 245, 248–252, and 254.


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West Semitic seals, specialist opinion considers that it is unusual, though not unattested, in West Semitic production to display an anthropomorphic deity as the adorant’s focus. This may well be true, but these discussions are based on indiscriminate use of excavated v. unexcavated data, with unexcavated seals forming the great preponderance of the evidence.33

The enthroned figure on our seal conforms to representations of Ishtar (the goddess of love and war) in Mesopotamian art. The seven dots or globes along the throne signify her astral associations. The fact that there are seven shown here could be a direct reference to the Pleiades specifically and to the Meso-potamian Sebittu (seven gods).34 It is perhaps more likely, based on a review of numerous excavated examples, that the number seven here is fortuitous, meant more generically to evoke the astral sphere. The numbers of such as-tral globes vary widely on excavated Assyro-Babylonian comparanda of the first millennium b.c.e.35 In the iconographical program of the Kelsey seal, the eight-pointed star is another signifier of Ishtar. Close parallels for the style of the rendition are found among others in seals known through impressions at Nimrud and Nineveh, both cylinders and stamps.36

An interesting cylinder seal (pfs 129) impressed on four Persepolis Fortifica-tion tablets between 506 and 502 b.c.e. presents an elaborate scene evoking Neo-Babylonian imagery in archaizing stylistic mode. The core composition depicts a standing worshiper before a goddess on a globe-studded throne, a Mesopotamian-type standard between them, and an eight-pointed star in the field above the group (Figure 39.1). Stylistically it is a hybrid that is not strictly in the Babylonian cut-and-drilled tradition in the manner of many stamp seals

33 Bordreuil, “Répertoire iconographique,” 86; Ornan, “Mesopotamian Influence,” 60; Ueh-linger, “Northwest Semitic Inscribed Seals,” 263–265.

34 Black and Green, Gods, Demons, 169–170, for the eight-pointed star as a symbol of Ishtar. The star rendered differently was also a symbol of the god of light and justice, Shamash. But in this context, Ishtar is intended. In Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian art, the seven globes or dots are most typically arrayed either as two rows of three with the seventh as the point of an arrow formation. Variants as a simple line or as a circle/rosette also occur—primarily earlier.

35 Securely excavated evidence from Nimrud and Nineveh alone includes Mitchell and Searight, Stamp Seals 3, 57, cat. no. 81 (Nimrud 2346) and 69, cat. no. 120 (Nineveh 362; Herbordt, Neoassyrische Glyptik, plate 2:1 (Nineveh 95), plate 2:8 (Nineveh 3), plate 2:9 (Nineveh 32), plate 14:1 (Nimrud 138), and plate 14:4 (Nimrud 117). See also, Collon, Cyl-inder Seals 5, e.g., cat. nos. 135 (ex-Layard, on Lady Layard’s necklace), 136–137, 141 (ex-Layard), and 232, for a range of the imagery on unexcavated cylinder seals.

36 See, for example, Mitchell and Searight, Stamp Seals 3, 56, cat. no. 150 (Nimrud 2325); 113, cat. no. 271 (Nineveh). This format of central dot with eight spokes terminating in dots visually elides with another symbol of Ishtar: the eight-petalled rosette.



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Figure 39.1 pfs 129. Cylinder seal impression, composite drawing from occurrences on four Persepolis Fortification tablets.Courtesy of Mark B. Garrison and Margaret Cool Root and the Persepolis Seal Project.

Figure 39.2 km 26830. Drawing of the inscription as it appears on the seal face of km 26830, digitally rendered by H. Dixon. The largest letter (samek) is 0.35 cm high × 0.20 cm wide.


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with Babylonian worship imagery used in this archive. This demonstrates one of the ways in which the tradition of the core motif maintained its fluency and achieved fresh application in various environments across the vibrant trans-cultural spectrum of the first millennium b.c.e.37

On km 26830, the ankh that is substituted for a Mesopotamian cult symbol or apparatus is redolent of meaning as an insignium of life in its original Egyp-tian context. As an icon in Western Semitic glyptic it is well attested on scarabs and scaraboids—but typically in different compositional formats than the one we see here. Although comparanda exist for this prominent central placement, they are rather rare and not from excavated examples.38

The InscriptionAn alphabetic inscription in nine letters is distributed on our seal so that eight letters fill the exergue, with the last letter (the aleph) placed above the ground line, directly behind the legs of the worshiping figure (Figure 39.2). This place-ment of the aleph positions it with the cluster of symbols punctuating the representational composition. The entire inscription is rendered so that it is legible on the seal itself, but is displayed in reverse in impressed image. Al-though the inscription is clearly carved, several of the letters are ambiguous or problematic, as is often the case in Iron ii–iii period lapidary scripts. Upon initial examination, the inscription on KM26830 seems to read: l[y/h?]wrw.sgn)—tentatively understood as “belonging to Yuru (or Huru), the officer.”

The short vertical line near the center of the inscription is a word divider separating the previously unattested personal name (Yuru/Huru) from his title (sgn, probably vocalized sigan or səgan). This word divider is rare on seals. While the initial lamed preposition (starting from the right in Figure 39.2) is clear, the first letter of the name may be read as a yod (with its expected horizontal tail perhaps cut off by the lower edge of the seal) or as a he.39 The second and fourth letters of the name are the same; here they are read as early

37 Garrison and Root, Seals 2. pfs 129 occurs on pf tablets 73, 74, 75, and 2011 (as per refined concordances produced by the Garrison and Root Persepolis Seal Project). pfs 129 was used by an official operating at a high level with the procurement and disbursement of livestock and hides at the Persepolis court.

38 E.g., Bordreuil, Catalogue, 30, cat. no. 18 (ex-Seyrig)—an inscribed stone scaraboid pre-senting a heroic combat encounter with a sizable ankh between hero and lion. See also below, The Inscription.

39 That is, a rare two-bar form of the he known from examples in Hebrew (Diringer, Inscrizio-ni, plate xix:23), Ammonite (Avigad, “Slave-Wife,” 125 and 129, n. 3), Edomite (Glueck, “First Campaign,” 12), Moabite (Diringer, Inscrizioni, plate xxii:15), and Phoenician (Avigad, “Votive Seals,” 249–250), which have been dated to the 7th–6th centuries b.c.e. (Avigad “Votive Seals,” 249).



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(or archaizing) forms of the waw.40 The third letter of the name seems a clear resh with a closed head and long, straight vertical stroke.

After the word divider, the samek is the tallest letter of the inscription. In its earlier classical form, the samek is found in inscriptions from the Iron ii period.41 On the Kelsey seal the short vertical stroke of the letter places it in the 8th or early 7th century b.c.e. according to standard paleographic opinion.42 The two following letters appear similar in shape, breadth, and stance to an early Phoenician form of the gimel. The well-known seal inscription formula l + pn + office / title indicates that we may expect a professional title or hon-orific of some sort. A good candidate for this on km 26830 is sgn. This is a title with a long and varied history of Semitic usage, including references in biblical texts,43 Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian documents,44 several Aramaic ritu-al texts from Persepolis,45 Aramaic notations from the Bīt-Murašû cuneiform archive,46 papyri from the necropoleis of North Saqqara in Egypt,47 and in the

40 They are not unlike some 6th–5th century forms of the taw, especially in Egyptian Aramaic.

41 In the 7th–5th centuries the samek with a Z-shaped head is favored in Aramaic inscrip-tions: Herr, “Paleography,” 59.

42 Herr, Scripts, 39: “the samek, with its shaft rising only to the bottom horizontal, is limited from the M 8th to the E 7th c.”

43 Including a number of biblical texts, where it can refer to a foreign prefect (Isaiah 41:25), a prefect of Assyria or Babylonia (Ezekiel 23:6, 12, 23; Jeremiah 51:23, 57; Daniel 3:2, 3, 27; 6:7), to the King of the Medes (Jeremiah 51:28), to petty rulers or officials in Judah (Nehe-miah 2:16; 4:8, 13; 5:7, 17; 7:5; 12:40, 13:11; Ezra 9:2), or to Daniel (Daniel 2:48).

44 The Neo-Babylonian term sagānu, “governor,” comes from this Aramaic term, and the Akkadian title šaknu(m) (from the verb šakānu “to put/set/appoint”), used in the Neo-Assyrian empire as one of a handful of interchangeable terms to refer to the governor of a province, is also related. In the Babylonian, Middle Assyrian, and Neo-Assyrian dialects, šaknu(m) carried the sense of “governor,” with šaknu māti referring to a “provincial gov-ernor.” Interestingly, the term šaknu was also used as an adjective with a wide semantic range; the term could be used to describe someone who was “equipped (with)” a seal, for instance.

45 See Bowman, Ritual Texts, texts 2:2, 3:2, 7:2, 11:2, 12:2; 13:2; 14:1, 15:2, and 18:1. These texts, written in ink on ritual vessels for use in the Persian court, include mention of “the name and title of the segan [translated “deputy” throughout the volume], who [according to Bowman’s interpretation] was located beside the celebrant during the ceremony” (Bow-man, 19).

46 One late Achaemenid endorsement on a cuneiform tablet from Ellil-ašābšu-iqbi includes a receipt for the payment of tax by one bl)ṣrš sgn. Cf. text 200: Zadok, “Representation,” 575.

47 See the 4th (?) century text, numbered 102a, line 3 (Segal, Aramaic Texts). In fact, the occur-rence there is read [s]gn sgn) by Segal, perhaps to be translated “deputy of the governor.” As far as we are currently aware, this construction does not occur elsewhere. This Saqqara


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Samaria Papyri.48 Although reading the eighth letter as a nun requires positing a highly irregular size and horizontal stance for this letter (as well as, perhaps, a third horizontal stroke cut off by the edge of the seal), this hypothesis solves the problem that a reading sgg) yields no known office or other meaning. The final letter of the inscription (placed above the exergue) is consistent with the late-8th through mid-7th century b.c.e. form of the aleph.49 It represents the emphatic ending -a), a dialectical feature that marks the inscription definitively as Aramaic.

Based on the inscription alone, any narrowly delineated date we suggest for our seal must be offered only hesitantly. In Aramaic, the lapidary scripts tend to preserve older forms of the letters relative to inscriptions in other me-dia.50 On seals in particular, the constraints of iconography, space, and materi-als often interfere with legibility or letter form. That said, the letter forms of this inscription are consistent with Aramaic lapidary script of approximately 750–600 b.c.e.

The inscription, as already noted, is rendered so that it is legible on the seal itself, but is displayed in reverse in impressed image. The majority of North-west Semitic seals are carved “backwards” so that the seal impression will produce the legible text. There are, nevertheless, numerous examples that correspond to the orientation of the text on our seal.51 Until it is possible to investigate the issue with reference to a substantial compilation of inscribed

papryus comes from the Animal Necropolis site at North Saqqara, where a large number of Aramaic texts were excavated between 1966 and 1975. The corpus includes 228 Aramaic papyri texts and four Aramaic ostraca (in addition to 21 other, Phoenician ostraca).

48 These mid- to late-4th-century documents (fragments of legal and economic papyri) were preserved in a set of caves in the Wadi Daliyeh, located 12 km north of Jericho. The texts are “mostly contracts of slave sales, together with a few other legal documents … [which] represent the transactions of a Samaritan elite,” (Cross, “Personal Names,” 86). Samaria Papyrus 8 “records the sale of slaves concluded in the presence of a certain פתח and an-other person of lower rank [one)sytwm], referred to as סגנא” (Eph‘al, “Changes,” 117; cf. Gropp, “Samaria Papyri,” text 8:12; plate xxxvii, 36:33). Papyrus 14 also includes mention of one hnn sgn). Cross translates the office as “prefect” in “Personal Names,” 86.

49 See Herr, “Palaeography,” 60. His examples include the orthostat fragment of Barrekub (Donner, “Orthostat Fragment,” 74), Nerab i (Cooke, Text-book, no. 64), and the Ashur dockets (Lidzbarski, Altaramäische, plates 1–6).

50 “… the lapidary script occasionally tends to preserve very archaic forms, such as the clas-sical alef, waw with a concave head (or occasionally with a tick at the left extremity of the head), mem in its undeveloped form, and kaf and ṣade of early form.” Naveh, Development, 54.

51 Seven of the 56 Aramaic seals in the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Louvre, and the Musée Biblique are carved in this “irregular” manner: Bordreuil, Catalogue, cat. nos. 90, 99, 103, 115, 135, 136, and 140.



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Northwest Semitic seals made up solely of excavated examples, we must de-fer further quantitative assessment. It is nevertheless worth noting that exca-vated seals inscribed “backwards” like km 26830 are definitely attested in the wider ancient Near Eastern arena. Furthermore, there are various reasons why this may have occurred in ancient production—ranging from the error of an illiterate seal carver and/or the similar ignorance of the purchaser to meaning- laden intentionalities such as the desire to showcase the prestige of the in-scribed seal as artifactual matrix and/or to focus upon amuletic properties of the matrix as the primary object as opposed to impressed images of it in workaday contexts.

The accession card for km 26830 is unusual for its inclusion of “modern?” at the Period rubric, and for a note in the Remarks section: “Genuineness de-pends on readability of inscription.” On the basis of the analysis above, there is nothing inherent to this inscription that either flags the seal as a modern forgery or proves its authenticity. We have seen, however, that most of the pub-lished inscription comparanda derive from the vast body of unexcavated West Semitic seals. This leads us to an artifact we have withheld so far—one that of-fers a superb comparandum for many (but not all) features of the inscription, the composition, the style, and the iconography of km 276830. This is an un-excavated scarab formerly in the collection of Sir William Hamilton, acquired by the British Museum in the 18th century (Plates 39.3–39.4). Studied in the spirit of Oscar Muscarella’s mandates—rather than merely accepted as a gold standard by which other unexcavated objects can be compared uncritically for authenticity—this scarab poses multiple challenges as we attempt to assess the probable status of the Kelsey scaraboid.

Comparandum Conundrum: British Museum 48508

Inscription, Composition, IconographyThe scarab became part of the British Museum collections in 1772—well be-fore the boom in the forgery of ancient Mesopotamian seals had begun to cre-scendo in the late 19th century.52 Significantly for us, it has a long history of

52 Muscarella, “Unexcavated Objects,” 154–155, for an important overview of literature on the history of forgeries of Near Eastern antiquities, without which we would not have known where to begin. Banks wrote in 1904 that “Four-fifths of all the antiquities offered for sale in Baghdad are spurious: “Spurious,” 60. In 1887, Ménant, “Forgeries,” 14–15, wrote that forgeries of Assyrian and Babylonian art had only just begun and that in the very early years of the exploration of Nineveh it remained more lucrative “to steal from the excavations than to imitate.”


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illustrated publication going back to the 18th century and reaching forward to the major late-20th-century interpretive studies of inscribed West Semitic stamp seals.53 The imagery and inscription on this scarab offer startlingly close parallels for the Kelsey seal, as is readily seen from Plates 39.1–39.4 here— despite the obvious and critical fact that the two seals display representation and inscription in mirror image of each other. Comparison of the two inscrip-tions is perhaps the item of most interest to specialists in West Semitic glyptic and epigraphy. For our broader readership here, it must still come first, since the bm seal clarifies elements of the Kelsey inscription and also validates the primacy of the bm seal in any chain of production relationship (be it ancient or modern) connecting the two artifacts. Our aim here is not to offer a full review of the British Museum artifact—but only to focus upon insights it pro-vides relative to the Kelsey seal and its status.

bm 48508—The InscriptionThe letters on bm 48508 are placed exactly in the same positions on the seal face (though reversed) as those on km 26830—with the distinctive position-ing of the aleph up above the exergue behind the worshiper. But important paleographic cues in the bm inscription resolve what were posed earlier as questions raised by the km seal: the unattested personal name and the prob-lematic letter forms. The fourth letter from the left in the inscription on the bm seal face presents a larger, slightly open head and a shorter vertical stroke. This enables the personal name on the scarab to be read clearly as hwdw, or Hudu. Hudu is a well-attested Hebrew54 and Aramaic55 hypocoristic name formed

53 A collections database search at http://www.britishmuseum.org/ for accession number 48508 yields information on the early publication history of the object. It was illustrated in the 1797 catalogue of the Cabinet de Mon. Paul de Praun, where is it is described as having formerly been in the collections of Baron von Stosch and the Duca di Noia. More recently, it has enjoyed ongoing citation as an unchallenged standard: e.g., Bordreuil, “Répertoire iconographique,” 86, and Ornan, “Mesopotamian Influence,” 60. Its very early date of appearance has precluded any discussion of possible issues of authenticity. Ad-mittedly, while classical gems were being imitated already during the early modern pe-riod, this is not known to have been a practice for ancient Near Eastern material before the excitement generated by excavations of the 19th century began to create a significant market demand. Further research on this is well beyond our scope here.

54 From Hebrew inscriptions, see Hestrin and Dayagi-Mendels, Inscribed Seals, Nr. 69; Law-ton, “Israelite Personal Names,” 337. In biblical texts, see, for instance, Hôd (1 Chronicles 7:37), Hôdawyāh(û) (Ezra 2:40), and Hôdiyyāh (1 Chronicles 4:19; Nehemiah 8:7, 9:5, 10:11, 10:14, 10:19).

55 Known from Egyptian-Aramaic: Cowley, Aramaic Papyri, texts 12, 4; 22, 39; 34, 3; and 42, 6; Kornfeld, Onomastica Aramaica, 47; Grelot, Documents araméens, 472. On hwdyh, see also

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from the causative stem of the verb ydy, a verbal root with a semantic range of blessing and thanksgiving.56 The seventh and eighth letters from the left of-fer additional instructive differences. The seventh letter features a more acute angle at its apex, and a narrower breadth, making it a clear pe. The eighth let-ter has a horizontal stroke entirely missing from the km seal, which closes its head and allows the reading spr’, “the scribe.” The reading offered on the basis of the Kelsey’s seal inscription alone, namely “belonging to Yuru (or Huru) the səgan,” must now be reconsidered in light of bm 48508. It is logical to expect that the bm scarab, featuring the more subtle textual features and offering a well-attested name, should be postulated as the primary artifact whence the Kelsey seal derived under some circumstance ancient or modern. If so, we may postulate that the Kelsey seal inscription was some form of slightly flawed imi-tation based on the bm scarab prototype: an imitation intended to signal (if not to replicate quite accurately) the text “belonging to Hudu, the scribe.”

bm 48508—Shape, Condition, MaterialThe British Museum seal differs from the Kelsey scaraboid in three impor-tant physical features that we are able to comment upon at present. (1) It is a scarab with an articulated high beetle-back, rather than a scaraboid. (We cannot assess its condition, nor do we know if it is perforated.)57 (2) It is the second-largest recorded West Semitic stamp seal of any form, with a seal face approximately twice the size of km 26830.58 And (3) it is made of green jasper. This very hard stone carried great prestige in the ancient Near East. A jasper mountain (Mount Limur) is referred to in Mesopotamian texts, but its loca-tion has not been identified. The source for the stone derived from this Mount Limur “is likely to be west of Assyria in the Syro-Anatolian area.”59

Cowley, Aramaic Papyri, 1, 9; 2, 2; 3, 2; 10, 22 (as son of gdlyh); 19, 10; 20, 18 (as son of zkwr, son of ’wšyh); 22, 3 (as son of zkr); 22, 112.127; 44, 2; 46, 11.16; 65, 18.

56 Hoftijzer and Jongeling, Dictionary, vol. 1, p. 439: “to acknowledge/attest,” “to return thanks,” etc. On interpreting the verbal form of this name, see Kornfeld, Onomastica ara-maica, 47; Maraqten, Personennamen, 155.

57 It has not yet been possible to examine the scarab first hand.58 bm 48508 dimensions: 4.5 cm × 3.2 cm × 2.7 cm. Its weight is unknown to us.59 Buchanan and Moorey, Catalogue, 72. Egypt may also have been a source for the green

jasper used to make some West Semitic scarabs/scaraboids. See Keel, Corpus—Einleitung (1995), 143–144, on problems of the term green jasper and the relative rarity of the stone. He notes (p. 144) two excavated scaraboids of green jasper bearing Persian motifs: one from Tell Keisan and one from Samaria.


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Multiples and “Copies”—The Ancient AngleMuscarella has, with justification, warned that the existence of multiples of unexcavated objects is one clear sign of a probable forgery.60 This admonition was not intended to suggest that multiples and sets in antiquity were non-existent. Yet it remains important to weigh the value of this idea in various contexts and to discuss it with reference to useful examples of ancient practice that are discernible through excavated data. Different types of material raise different issues.61 For seals specifically, several points emerge.

Closely similar (though smaller) ancient “copies” of large prestigious scar-abs in hard stones including green jasper are noted in the literature as prod-ucts occasionally mold-produced as a series in cheaper materials—“glass” and composites.62 Conceivably the Kelsey seal is an ancient-made artifact of this sort, based upon the high-end British Museum seal but not intended to pass for it in an illicit sense. The fact that it is inscribed with a formula that gives the name and title of a personage could mean that it was produced as part of a series dependent upon the original deluxe Masterwork—a series intended to supply minions of Hudu the Scribe with seals to be used in various locales on his behalf. In this scenario, clear connection with the Masterwork combined with clear formal distinctions from it would conceivably have been important and necessary.

The most relevant comparison here is with the Neo-Assyrian royal seals. This series is not the only one documented through impressed images of of-ficial seals from excavated court contexts of the Assyrian empire, but it is the best-known.63 It comprises a sequence of stamp seals documented through multiple impressions on excavated clay artifacts across several generations. Only a subset actually incorporates the name of the reigning king; but all the

60 Muscarella, “Unexcavated Objects,” 165–166; “Excavated and Unexcavated.”61 Gunter and Root, “Replicating,” esp. 9–12, work with this issue in reference to a set of

unexcavated inscribed precious metal vessels of the Achaemenid court, playing devil’s advocate a bit through explications of numerous types of documentation of excavated vessels in multiples.

62 Boardman, Archaic Greek Gems, 21. Buchanan and Moorey (Catalogue, 39) cite a stone seal from Zincirli (Andrae, Kleinfunde von Sendschirli, 160, plate 38e) comparing it to a “re-markably similar scaraboid in blue glass” uncovered by ploughing at Hassanbeili (Andrae, Kleinfunde von Sendschirli, 160, plate 38k; Jakob-Rost Stempelsiegel, 58–59, cat. no. 173). These seals are indeed quite similar; but the published photographs and related informa-tion supplied are not adequate for precise comparative assessment.

63 Of these, another example is the Sennacherib series of the king under a sunshade pre-ceded by a rearing horse, known in close variations from 25 Nineveh bullae: Mitchell and Searight, Stamp Seals 3, 103–104.



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seals deploy a consistent iconography of the ruler in heroic combat with a rear-ing lion. In none of the recorded examples is the motif displayed in reverse (as is so distinctive a differentiation between the British Museum scarab and the Kelsey scaraboid). The presence or absence of a seal inscription ringing the core image and (where present) the change in the royal name of the inscrip-tion over time are factors of differentiation. Otherwise, the main variable relat-ing to iconography is the presence or absence and/or the form of an encircling device.

There are, however, additional variables that relate to the physical features of the seals as matrix artifacts irrespective of iconographical content: (1) depth of engraving, (2) seal face surface (flat or convex), and (3) size of the seal face.64 The size variability within seals of Sennacherib ranges, for instance, from a diameter given as 1¼” at the large end to a diameter given as 5/8” at the small end. Differentials in seal face taxonomy mean differences in seal matrix form. In other words, the multiples are not necessarily replicating the exact seal shape of the Masterwork matrix (even though the seal faces of all of them are round in contour). Thus, these legitimate knock-off seals could look different in many ways in matrix form. From the excavated seal impressions we cannot know the material differentiations. But comments on variables of seal carving depth suggest that some were better crafted than others.65 A series of multi-ples of first millennium b.c.e. seals attesting royal property is also known from Tell ed-Duweir, Palestine, moving us into the West Semitic orbit of our topic.66

There are other examples of excavated ancient multiples that are instruc-tive in lesser degrees about the Kelsey seal specifically. They are perhaps more pertinent as general qualifications of Muscarella’s warning about multiples as signals of lurking forgeries in the realm of the unexcavated. Some interesting cases of multiple seals of intentionally closely similar appearance can now be documented on the Persepolis Fortification tablets of the Persian empire. In terms of an inscribed seal-in-multiples used in an official capacity, pfs 66*a, pfs 66*b, and pfs 66*c are noteworthy. These comprise a set of three nearly identical inscribed seals deployed consistently and solely in the ratification of flour disbursements for the royal table in Persepolis. Evidence currently

64 Sachs, “Assyrian Royal Seal Type,” 169. See also Millard, “Royal Seal Type Again.” More re-cently, Mitchell and Searight, Stamp Seals 3, 33–36, 41–42, 46–48, 77–78, 82–83, and 96–102, plus the composite visual array of examples at 294–395, all to scale.

65 Root, “Cylinder Seal from Pasargadae,” on a range of information available from excavated seal impressions versus excavated seal matrices.

66 Mitchell and Searight, Stamp Seals 3, 242–245 (cat. nos. 798–806).


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available indicates that they were used sequentially rather than simultane-ously. But the three versions appear on tablets in the Garrison and Root re-search corpus in a chronological sequence that arcs across only five years. It is entirely possible that even a slightly larger sample of occurrences of one of the seals would show that their usages overlapped chronologically. Although this must for now remain speculative, it seems plausible that the three seals were in simultaneous operation, on the basis of the precedents of earlier imperial practice at the Assyrian court.67

Another example, this one relating to an elite member of the administra-tive/social elite of Persian society, involves a pair of personal seals belonging to Ašbazana (the Aspathines of Herodotus). In this particular instance it seems that we are looking at sequential seals commissioned by the same personage after one was lost or severely damaged, rather than multiples meant to be used simultaneously for pragmatic administrative reasons.68 Finally, note the exam-ple of two seals of a man named Matukka, who used two seals simultaneously in Persepolis as glimpsed through the Fortification tablets. Matukka deployed two stamp seals, pfs 139s and pfs 1428s, in the same month of 499 b.c.e. in the same administrative endeavors (Figures 39.3–39.4).69 Here the style and ico-nography are very closely similar. But the imagery on the one seal is reversed on the other. Thus, as legible images they look in a certain way “the same” but they are clearly not meant to be mistaken for one another.

We have shown above that there are excavated ancient precedents for vari-ous manifestations of seal multiples that lend plausibility to the proposition that km 26830 is an ancient knock-off of bm 48508 meant to serve some legiti-mate purpose in the social system in which Hudu the Scribe operated. Now we shift to an alternative proposition: Is the Kelsey seal a modern forgery of an an-cient seal—specifically of the British Museum scarab? For the sake of discus-sion we will presume that bm 48508 is genuinely ancient. Its long history and its well-informed inscription make this highly likely, although its extraordinary size take it toward Unikum status—another warning sign of potential forgery that Muscarella alerts us to.

67 Root, “Legible Image,” 110 and figures 24–25. Garrison and Root, Seals 2. pfs 66*a: used on two tablets in 501 b.c.e., pfs 66*b: used on two tablets in 502 b.c.e.; pfs 66*c: used on one in 498 and one in 497 b.c.e. So far, work on additional tablets in the archive beyond the Garrison and Root corpus has not revealed another occurrence of any version of pfs 66*.

68 Garrison, “Seals of Ašbazana”; Garrison and Root, Seals 2.69 Garrison and Root, Seals 1, cat. nos. 222 and 230 respectively.



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Figure 39.3 pfs 139s. Impression of a stamp seal of Matukka, composite drawing from occurrences on two Persepolis Fortification tablets.Courtesy of Mark B. Garrison and Margaret Cool Root and the Persepolis Seal Project.

Figure 39.4 pfs 1428s. Impression of a stamp seal of Matukka, drawing from occurrence on one Persepolis Fortification tablet.Courtesy of Mark B. Garrison and Margaret Cool Root and the Persepolis Seal Project.


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Multiples and “Copies”—Modern Modus OperandiIn 1957 Edith Porada reported that modern forgers had produced multiple cop-ies of the cylinder seal of Matruna, daughter of King Aplahanda of Carchem-ish.70 The Masterwork itself had not been excavated; it had apparently been “found at Ras Shamra” in 1928, before Schaeffer began his excavations of the site. It has, however, been presumed genuine. The secondary series of forger-ies must have been produced soon after the appearance of the one from the Ras Shamra environs. This story is the antithesis to the evidence we have as-sembled above that attests excavated examples of authentic seal multiples—including multiples of inscribed seals owned by specific notable personages and/or offices. Porada’s brief note includes no illustrations or descriptions that enable us to comment more precisely on the nature of the copies in relation to the original cylinder seal. But it is a well-known practice for modern forg-ers of seals to work off an impression of the original seal—thus producing a reverse-image imitation. The two seals of Matukka (Figures 39.3–39.4) show that reverse-image copying could and did occur with ancient seals at the be-hest of the patron. But this does not dispute the modern forger’s practice.71

It is easy to see how the Kelsey scaraboid could have been produced as one of a modern series of fakes after the British Museum Masterwork—whether that Masterwork is genuinely ancient or an elaborate fabrication of early mod-ern times. Wax impressions were routinely made of ancient gemstones begin-ning in the Renaissance and were widely circulated. The circulation of study collections of cast impressions of ancient Near Eastern cylinder and stamp seals held in the British Museum became popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The reverse presentation of the Kelsey seal’s imagery and inscrip-tion sing out as indices of forgery here. Similarly, the reduced size of the Kelsey seal and its simple mold-made scaraboid shape add plausibility to its status as a forgery even though they are not proof of it, and even though there are ancient precedents for such phenomena for secondary genuine copies. A final indicator is the lack of perforation. Perforations posed difficulties for many an ancient seal carver, and they have continued to plague modern fabricators.72 It may be that with scaraboids forgers have frequently opted to avoid the perfo-ration entirely since its lack could be explained as obviated by a now-missing ancient ring mount. Because so many published scaraboids comparable to km 26850 are unexcavated and some publications do not note information on

70 Porada, “Forged North Syrian Seals,” 143.71 See Banks, “Spurious,” 60–61; Muscarella, “Unexcavated Objects,” 165; Collon, First Impres-

sions, 94.72 Banks, “Spurious,” 61; Collon, First Impressions, 94.



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perforation, it is difficult to be definitive on this point. But two excavated West Semitic scaraboids of analogous size that we have noted earlier are perforated, whereas two others that are unexcavated are not perforated.73

The Kelsey scaraboid presents a high quality of figural carving—arguably more robust and compositionally dynamic than that of the British Museum scarab, even as both are faithful to certainly genuine stylistic prototypes in their diverging nuances. Note, for instance, that the converging hands of the two figures on the scaraboid, creating a triangular presentation pointing to-ward the star, is lacking on the larger scarab, where the two figures are farther apart and less substantial in carving style. Although there are idiosyncracies in the paleography of the inscription on the scaraboid, these are not in and of themselves indices of a forgery. If, on the one hand, it is a modern forgery, km 26830 is an extremely competent one. If, on the other hand, it is an ancient multiple of bm 48508 made for use by Hudu or his surrogates for business pur-poses, these idiosyncracies are well within the margin of acceptability.74

Should We or Shouldn’t We?

Since km 26830 is not an excavated artifact, and we cannot even prove its au-thenticity beyond any reasonable doubt, we have not made our decision to study and publish it lightly. To be sure, it was legally gifted to the museum elev-en years before the 1970 unesco convention. Thus it is “clean” in that limited sense.75 Nevertheless it would be reasonable to take the position that this arti-fact should not be offered the distinction of any academic attention.

We have considered two valid but potentially conflicting ethical concerns here. On the one hand, “legitimizing” unprovenanced artifacts in the public sphere is “a process that perpetuates the illegal sale of antiquities and the

73 Perforated: Parker, “Seals and Seal Impressions 1955–58,” 29 and plate X:2; (Nimrud 5255); Jakob-Rost, Stempelsiegel, 62–63, cat. no. 186 (Babylon). Unperforated: Bordreuil, Cata-logue, 30, cat. no.18 and 62, cat. no. 67.

74 For instance, the successive seals of Ašbazana applied to Persepolis tablets both bear an inscription that omits the final syllable of the owner’s name, whereas the final syllable is always present on the tablet texts referring to this elite personage. Garrison, “Seals of Ašbazana,” 130. See Root, “Cylinder Seal from Pasargadae,” 184–185, for discussion of fig-ural carving errors on seals that nevertheless were put into active use.

75 See, for instance, the Statement of American Schools of Oriental Research Policy on the Preservation and Protection of Archaeological Resources, III.B.


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continued plunder of archaeological sites.”76 On the other hand, museums (even university museums) have shifted their priorities over the course of the last thirty years “from being about something to being for somebody.”77 They have been expected to justify their existence and insure their financial survival through efforts to connect the public with their collections. The problems as-sociated with unexcavated objects put museums around the world in a kind of double bind. They have the responsibility to care for their collections and to make discourse about them accessible to their constituent publics. Yet insti-tutional awareness of the insidious role that display and publication of such material can play in establishing market value for auction items, and so on, presents a quandary.

Choosing to study and publish this particular seal will probably not directly encourage forgeries, price inflation, or archaeological looting. Conversely, choosing not to publish the seal would not doom the Kelsey Museum to a fu-ture of oblivion. It holds much excavated material that continues to be the prominent focus of research and exhibition energy. If the study of km 26830 meant the expenditure of resources on it at the expense of excavated bodies of artifacts in our care, this would be a matter for institutional concern. But so far, our analyses have not done that, and, in fact, the discussions generated in-house around this object have been enlightening and engaging in relation to excavated bodies of material under curatorial purview. Moreover, our external constituencies are keenly interested in issues of the potentials and limitations of scientific analyses in the detection of forgeries, as well as in transparency on matters such as collections histories and the attendant historiographic revela-tions that frequently emerge.

Here, we follow Rollston and Nakarai’s recent suggestions for handling un-provenanced Near Eastern objects.78 They mandate principles of Separation, “Flagging,” Relegation, and Categorization in order to keep such artifacts from being weighted too heavily in reconstructions of the past. In that spirit, we have focused on the problematics of the Kelsey scaraboid. In doing so, we are, after all, investigating an artifact that is intimately connected to Leroy Water-man’s professional biography and legacy—and thence to the operational mi-lieu of the University of Michigan excavations at Seleucia and Sepphoris.

76 Once more we highlight Garrison, Review of Merrillees, 151, as he explores the problems that arise when presenting museum collections of purchased objects (or other objects with dubious, incomplete, or reconstructed provenance) as the data upon which histori-cal and taxonomical frameworks are constructed.

77 Weil, “Being about Something.”78 Rollston and Nakarai, “Forging History.”



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Plate 39.1 km 26830. Blue scaraboid, apparently of frit: obverse. Accessioned 1959 from the collection of Leroy Waterman. Provenance unknown. 2.5 cm × 2.1 cm × 0.5 cm.

Photo courtesy of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.

Plate 39.2 km 26830. Impression: Kelsey Museum 1984. Photo Courtesy of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology.


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Plate 39.3 bm 48508. Green jasper scarab: obverse. 4.5 cm × 3.2 cm × 2.7 cm. Accessioned in 1772 from the collection of Sir William Hamilton. Provenance unknown.

Photo ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

Plate 39.4 bm 48508. Impression: adapted from Avigard and Sass, Corpus, 282, no. 754.

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