The Palace Glyptic of Nabada . Current Resarch On Glyptic From Greater Mesopotamia

The Palace Glyptic of Nabada

in the 3rd Millennium B.C.

Joachim Bretschneider & Greta Jans

KU Leuven Current Resarch On Glyptic From Greater Mesopotamia

Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels

October 31.10.2013

Lower

Mesopotamia

(historic)

Syrian Jezireh

(cultural/historic)

Syrian Jezireh

(archaeological)

Date B.C. Beydar

Early Dynastic I Early Ninevite 5? Early Jezireh I 2900/2800 -

2700/2650

(I)

Early Dynastic II Ninevite 5/ED II Early Jezireh II 2700/2650 -

2600/2550

II

Early Dynastic

IIIA

Late Ninevite

5/ED III

Early Jezireh IIIa 2600/2550 -

2475/2425

IIIa

Early Dynastic

IIIB

Late ED III Early Jezireh IIIb 2475/2425 -

2325/2275

IIIb

Akkadian Akkadian Early Jezireh IV 2325/2275 -

2200/2150

IV

Tell Brak Tell Beydar

Our research

- all the sealing data from Tell Beydar excavated during the missions between 1995

and 2001

- supplemented with the already published glyptic material from the 1994 (Teissier

1997)

- and the 2002-2006 (Rova 2008) seasons

Some numbers

Number of sealings: 1521

Number of actual seals: 14

Number of different designs: 215

Number of different functions: 12

G. Jans & J. Bretschneider

Seals and Sealings from Tell

Beydar/Nabada

Beydar Monographs 1

Subartu XXVII

XVIII+492 p., 3000 b/w ill. ISBN:

978-2-503-53510-4

1. Tell Beydar

- In General

- The Official Upper City Complex

2. The Glyptic

- Iconography & Style

- Functions of the Sealings

- In Context

Kranzhügel Tell Beydar

The multi-functional Official Upper City Complex

- End of the Early Jezireh IIIb period (=Early Dynastic IIIb period)

- Combines

- representational (Palace Area)

- religious (five temples)

- and economic (storage-workshop) facilities

Isometric depiction - Official Upper City Complex

In white: the representational area In white: the temples

Courtyard

Tell Beydar – The upper city

Granary

Dwelling houses

→

Eastern palace

↓ Official Upper City Complex

with palace and 4 temples →

City gate ←

- Greatest body of glyptic from Northern Mesopotamia uncovered from a well-

stratified context

- Remarkable: 85% of the sealings from Beydar can be attributed to the last

occupation phase of the multi-functional Official Upper City Complex (end of

the Early Jezireh IIIb period)

Temple C

Monumental stairway & Main Street

1. Tell Beydar

- In General


2. The Glyptic



- In Context

1535 sealings and seals

From the 215 designs:

- 181 designs can be ascribed to an EJ IIIb Phase 3b context

- 4 designs to an EJ IIIb Phase 3a context

- 27 designs were found in an EJ II-IIIa context

- 2 designs in an Akkadian context

The late EJ IIIa group at Beydar abandoned the stylistic elements from the early

EJ IIIa collection known up until then and presents new iconographical and

stylistic elements, which will become prominent for the EJ IIIb glyptic of Beydar

and will fully develop into the 'Beydar Style'

- Beydar style is unique for Beydar and can be recognized through traits such as

- smaller overall dimensions

- complex compositions with narrative characteristics

- intersecting registers depicting standardized elements like

kneeling persons, processions and lying figures

Other EJ IIIb designs from Beydar are composed in the Brak Style:

- Combination southern ED III elements with local principles of arrangement

- The repertoire generally consists of

- banquets

- vertical and horizontal rows of detached frontal heads of animals and

mythological creatures, the so-called animal protomes

- animals, often with an eagle or Imdugud bird

- and geometric bands dividing the registers and framing the composition

An important synchronism with Tell Brak is provided by the Beydar design

Heads 01, which seems to be nearly identical with Brak no. 245a.

Brak SS Beydar- Palace

Akkadian Scribe seal

SS Tell Brak

Contest designs

Contest 01 - EJ IIIb





Contest 06 - EJ IIIa













Contest designs: - Majority of all seal designs from Beydar (65 of 215)

- Wide variety of styles and compositions

- 25 two-registered (mostly in miniature style)

Iconographical classification in 12 design groups

Contest 40 (50)

Contest 41 (70)

Contest 42 (59)

Contest 43 (rova28)

Contest 44 (3)

Contest 45 (117)

Contest 46 (159)

Contest 47 (rova31)

Contest 48 (19)

Contest 49 (43)

Contest 50 (rova29)

Contest 51 (89)

Contest 52 (28)

Contest 53 (103)

Contest 54 (rova21)

Contest 55 (rova23)

Contest 56 (rova22)

Contest 57 (rova30)

Contest 58 (154)

Contest 59 (76)

Contest 60 (rova27)

Banquet designs

Banquet 01 - EJ IIIb









Banquet 10 - EJ IIIa












Banquet designs: - 27 designs

- 10 two-registered

(of which 4

miniature style)

Animal row designs

Animal 01 - EJ II?

Animal 02 - EJ IIIb

Animal 03 - EJ IIIb

Animal 04 - EJ IIIb

Animal 05 - EJ IIIb

Animal 06 - EJ IIIb

Animal 07 - EJ IIIb

Animal 08 - EJ IIIb

Animal 09 - EJ IIIb

Animal 10 - EJ IIIb

Animal 11 - EJ IIIb

Animal 12 - EJ IIIb

Animal 13 - EJ IIIb

Animal 14 - EJ IIIa

Animal 15 - EJ IIIb

Animal 16 - EJ IIIb






Various 02 - EJ IIIb

Various 03 - EJ IIIb

Animal rows: - 23 designs

- Majority: two-registered

- Majority: miniature style

Eagle 1 (1)

Eagle 2 (2)

Eagle 3 (31)

Eagle 4 (23)

Eagle 5 (rova14)

Eagle 6 (rova13)

(Lion-headed) eagle designs - 6 designs

Heads 1 (27)

Heads 2 (14)

Heads 3 (152)

Heads 4 (100)

Heads 5 (107)

Heads 6 (58)

Heads 7 (86)

Heads 8 (61)

Heads 9 (rova44)

Heads 10 (15)

Detached heads:

- 10 designs

Herding 1 (138)

Herding 2 (rova19)

Herding 3 (85)

Herding 4 (74)

‘Herding’ designs - Consist of a row of animals & a person

- Herding 4: mixture of different elements

Protomes 1 (9)

Protomes 2 (41)

Protomes: - 2 designs

- fragmentary animal bodies in profile mostly forming a stereotype

composition

Row 1 (12)

Row 2 (111)

Row 3 (99)

Row 4 (83)

Row 5 (64)

Row 6 (82)

Banquet 22 (65)

Row of figures: - 7 designs

Geometric 1 (145)

Geometric 2 (120)

Geometric 3 (36)

Geometric 4 (rova45)

Geometric 5 (95)

Geometric 6 (26)

Geometric 7 (84)

Geometric 8 (44)

Geometric 9 (97)

Geometric 10 (75)

Geometric 11 (143)

Geometric 12 (106)

Geometric 13 (17)

Geometric 14 (158)

Geometric 15 (162)

Geometric 16 (155)

Geometric 17 (57)

Geometric 18 (98)

Geometric 19 (144)

Geometric 20 (157)

Geometric 21 (rova48)

Geometric designs: - 25 designs

- Roughly 3 groups:

lattice, chevron &

lozenge/diamond pattern

Boat designs

Boat 01 - EJ IIIb

Boat 02 - EJ IIIb

Boat 03 - EJ IIIb

Boat 04 - EJ IIIb

Boat 05 - EJ IIIb

Boat 06 - EJ IIIb

Boat 07 - EJ IIIb

Boat 08 - EJ IIIb

Boat 09 - EJ IIIb

Boat 10 - EJ IIIb

Boat 11 - EJ IIIb

Boat 12 - EJ IIIb

Boat 13 - EJ IIIb

Boat 14 - EJ IIIb

Boat designs: - 14 designs

- Rather unfamiliar

to the Northern

repertoire

(except for a

few examples

from Brak)

- And now Beydar

In Beydar: 2 categories: - 1e: Recurring elements like the plough, a lion, a jar, a (naked?) person, a human

headed protome at the prow, horned kneeling figure inside the boat & a

kneeling horned figure behind the boat

Myth of the journey of the Shamash through the underworld?

Wagon designs

Wagon 01 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 02 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 03 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 04 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 05 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 06 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 07 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 08 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 09 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 10 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 11 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 12 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 13 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 14 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 15 - EJ IIIb

Wagon 16 - EJ IIIb

Wagon designs - 16 designs

- Majority: 2 registers

intersecting in the centre

- Some recurring elements:

- the presence of a plurality

of figures standing in a row

- 2 different wagons in 1 design

- a kneeling figure underneath

the pole or the head of the

draught animal

„Rituel de Haute Syrie“ (P. Amiet) Bretschneider in Festschrift für Erika Bleibtreu, LIT Verlag, Vienna 2013

Miniature style

1. Tell Beydar

- In General


2. The Glyptic



- In Context

Door peg 13%

Other peg 28%

Jar 27%

Languette 20%

Label 4%

Basket 1%

On wood 2%

Jar stopper 3%

On pot 1%

Other 1%

Functions

Different functions

F-Field

Function

Sure

Probable

Peg

247

198

Jar

168

53

Tongue-shaped sealing

70

25

Label

21

4

Jar stopper

18

2

Wood

11

0

Basket

9

2

Sherd

7

0

Door bolt

3

0

Reed

1

0

Seal

6

0

583

288

Function

Sure

Probable

Tongue-shaped sealing

38

6

Peg

2

0

Jar

0

2

Jar stopper

0

1

Seal

1

0

41

9

F field I Field

Peg sealings (261) used to seal doors and containers (trunk or box)

Door bolt sealing (2)

- Doors can be closed in different ways

- Most common system in Beydar used peg and string

- But a few examples demonstrate the bolt

-Both systems: different basic principle

- Bolt is an actual locking technique

- while peg and string are used as means to fix a sealing.

Jar sealings (174) - Attached to the shoulder of a jar

- Show the impressions of the covering – textile or leather – and of the string or

thongs securing this covering around the neck of the jar.

- In Beydar: majority of jars were covered with textile.

Jar sealings – textile visible

Tongue-shaped sealings/Languettes (127)

Tongue-shaped slices of clay with a smooth reverse (frequently showing clear

fingerprints) and an even obverse usually impressed carefully with only one seal

rolling.

Their reverse demonstrates a total lack of string impression or any other kind of

imprinted object or surface.

Tongue-shaped sealings: use

- Roger Matthews: test strips for cylinder seals, used in order to be able to see what

the design looked like once imprinted

- As a means of identifying seal impressions on incoming goods or

- Cylinder test rollings prior to sealing in some other capacity

- Donald Matthews: possibly used as mini-documents given in return for work, to

be exchanged for rations or other forms of payment, or perhaps as means of

identification of messengers

- Adelheid Otto: langetten placed on top and/or on the sides of a clay calotte-

shaped jar covering

Basket sealings (9)

Jar stoppers (18)

- Jar stoppers differ from other types of clay sealings:

- the sealing itself serves as a lid or covering over the contents of a container

- so that the stopper can be removed without being broken and then

replaced if required

- Different shapes

Exceptional jar stopper 32907-M-4:

Entire surface of this mushroom-shaped stopper is covered with rollings (contest

scene)

Labels (24)

- Different names for this type of sealing: docket, bulla, tag or label

- Ovoid sealings, usually with three or four sides, attached to a length of string,

leaving a hole on either short side. When broken, the impression of the string is

visible along the long axis of the sealing

- Any evidence of adhesion to other surfaces is lacking

- Moulded around lengths of string attached to various objects, some portable,

some not

Labels

In Beydar, almost all labels

have an inscription

Sealimpressions on jars (7) - Cylinder seals rolled onto jars – mostly on the shoulder or the rim – before

firing.

- This practice does not involve the actual ‘sealing’ of the container’s content or

of a room.

-Only intended as decoration or (also) another function, like

- a guarantee for certain quality on a restricted number of the total

production

- an indication for products to be consumed on special occasions or

- a mark for different categories of material.

In Beydar: 7 sealings on pottery.

Interestingly, all eight sherds all show the impression of one and the same seal,

Herding 04.

1. Tell Beydar

- In General


2. The Glyptic



- In Context

The information obtained from specific designs and the sealings’ function can be

completed with contextual data.

The 3 parameters – design, function and context - can be correlated and lead

to a range of suppositions concerning - nativeness

- disposal and discarding of sealings

- administration and

- chronology

Plan of the Official Upper City Complex with amounts of glyptic finds

Correlation design – function

- Discrepancy between the wagon and boat sealings on one hand and the

contest and banquet scenes on the other hand:

Contest & banquet scenes: primarily impressed on jar sealings & languettes

↕

Wagon & boat designs: mainly rolled on (door) peg sealings & labels

Wagon designs

- High percentage of door peg sealings depicting wagon designs: strengthens the

iconographic (and contextual) arguments that these designs are native to the

Beydar administration

- Restricted distribution of wagon scenes: confirms the interpretation of these

designs being exclusive to the core ‘Palace Administration’

- Head of the Palace administration: possibly the individual using design Wagon 01

Wagon 1

largest (3.7 cm high) and most multifaceted scene with a narrative character

Ishqi-Mari

Nativeness

Depending on a sealing’s function and context a design can be attributed as native

to a site or not

For Beydar: 37 designs are certainly native

Storage process

Different phases in the storage process of clay sealings

- the rolling or stamping of the clay sealings on the containers or doors

- the gathering of the sealings as they are taken off the objects to which

they had been fixed

- they are kept in a container or in the corner of the room or on a shelf =

temporary disposal

- storage in a proper archive room and

- finally the sealings are discarded

In Beydar – examples of:

- Temporary disposal: corner in a room, installations, a dead-end of a corridor,

…

- Final disposal: ‘toilet’ installations and large joints between different buildings

The Joints

- in between the double walls in the eastern part of the Palace Area

- Contained 515 sealings

- Remarkable: the majority of the 30 different sealing designs discarded inside

the Joints are exclusive to the Palace Area

- The overwhelming majority (95%) of the identifiable sealings inside the Joints:

peg or door peg sealings

The Joints were used as a place for final discarding of the sealings, but this

was not the most easy location for doing so, because the joints were

difficult to reach

The care, with which the sealings were disposed off, could be evidence of

the fear of fraudulent reuse

- separation line dividing the sealing designs in the administratively unified

Palace Area from the area in the South

- most of the designs appear only in one specific area, indicating certain

administrative units were overlooked by only one official or organisation

specializing in one location

Besides the Joints, the Eastern Row of Rooms

produced a large amount of sealings

- With a total of 363 exemplars

- With 22 different designs

- Scattered on and around a platform in room 32912.

- Large amounts of jar sealings (126) and the languettes (48)

Three possible hypotheses for this room:

→ used as a checkpoint for incoming goods

→ or as a checkpoint for outgoing goods

→ or it was used as a checkpoint for temporary sealing disposal

5 main ‘managers’

- 5 native designs are present in exceptionally large quantities in the Official

Upper City Complex: Banquet 02, Contest 15, Contest 44, Wagon 01 and

Wagon 06

- These 5 designs occur only in the Palace Area

→ Hypothetically, the officials utilizing one of these 5 designs could be identified

as one of the 5 main 'managers' of Nabada, as mentioned in the Beydar

tablets.

- Wagon 01 and 06 are the only wagon designs from Beydar showing war

iconography

- Together with the 2 contest designs

→ it can be inferred that the 5 leading officials: had a preference for contest and

war related motives

Synchronism

Tell Brak – Tell Beydar

An important synchronism with Tell Brak is provided by the Beydar design

Heads 01, which seems to be nearly identical with Brak no. 245a.

Brak SS Beydar- Palace

Akkadian Scribe seal

SS Tell Brak

Tell Beydar Tell Brak

Palace

IIIb Heads 01

older and younger

archive

Brak

Style

Beydar

Style

ED

Glyptic

No Akkadian

glyptic

Temple

Oval

Brak Style

ED Glyptic No Akkadian

glyptic

SS

Complex

Heads 01?

Brak Style

Akkadian

Scribe seal

Manishtushu?

Tell Beydar Mari

Wagon 01

Beydar Master

Seal

Ishqi-Mari

seals

Brak SS Complex Sealing Heads 1 Beydar

Publications

Jans G. & Bretschneider J., Seals and Sealings of Tell Beydar/Nabada (Seasons 1995-2001). Subartu XXVII,

Turnhout Brepols, 2011 (2012).

Bretschneider J., Was ich nicht erklären kann, das sehe ich als kultisch an: Gedanken zu den Syrischen Siegeln

der Gruppe "Rituel de Haute Syrie", in: Selz G. & Wagensonner K. (eds.), Orientalische Kunstgeschichte(n),

Festschrift für Erika Bleibtreu, LIT Verlag, Vienna, 2013.

Bretschneider J. & Jans, G. , Checkpoint Room 32912. Inspection of Incoming Goods, Outgoing Wares or

Temporary Disposals in the Early Jezireh IIIb Official Upper City Complex of Tell Beydar?, in: Quenet P. &

Al-Maqdissi M. (eds.), “L’Heure immobile” Entre ciel et terre. Mélanges en l’honneur d’Antoine Souleiman,

Subartu XXXI, Turnhout Brepols, 2012, 9-20.

Bretschneider J. & Jans G., Van Palais tot Puinhop, EOS 11 (2012), 88-91.

Bretschneider J. & Jans G., Tell Beydar en Syrie: L' organisation dans un palais il y a 4500 ans environ,

Archéothéma 25 (2012), 80-84.

http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowAuthor.aspx?lid=148807







The Palace Glyptic of Nabada . Current Resarch On Glyptic From Greater Mesopotamia

Documents

Transcript of The Palace Glyptic of Nabada . Current Resarch On Glyptic From Greater Mesopotamia