Seals and their impressions on clay play an important role in my novel Priestess of Ishana. Seal impressions serve as a sort of signature or personal mark. When I was coming up with the plot, I checked with a historian of the Hittites. I asked her whether someone might have created counterfeit seals to commit crimes. There isn’t direct evidence, but she thought it extremely likely. I went with that.
An old, really old, seal impression
Hence this article in Archaeology News Network intrigued me. It’s about a particularly old seal impression—7,000 years old—excavated in Israel. The clay fragment, called a “bulla” by archaeologists, measures less than a centimeter. It underwent careful analysis to determine whether it really was a seal impression.
Why did that matter? Because it is the oldest evidence in Israel of this kind of “business” use of seals. Archaeologists frequently find such sealing fragments, but dating considerably later.
For example, a merchant might press his seal into a lump of clay in order to close a storage barn. Or an amphora of wine or oil. He’d arrange it so that if opened, the clay would break. Thus it would leave behind evidence of the tampering. An ancient “security closure.”
A Hittite Business Tool
In the period of the Hittites I write about, only 3,500 years ago or so, such seal use was part of ordinary life. In my most recent novel, Of Kings and Griffins, Tesha notices the unbroken sealing on a storage room before she has it opened to continue an essential search. Interesting to be able to date this practice far enough back that there was no writing yet, and hence, no names on the seals as there would be later, just geometric shapes.
Artistry in a signature
Seals came in a variety of shapes and styles across the ancient world. In Priestess, I made the key seal a gold ring with an oval seal on it. The seal shown in this article, in a rounded rectangular shape, is a stamp seal with a little handle to hold while pressing it into the clay. A hole in the handle allowed it to be worn. Cylinder seals, maybe the most common style, rolled across the clay to form what were often highly detailed little scenes with two or three figures. Sometimes the miniature figures engaged in a hunt, a battle, or a sacred ritual. The artistry they demonstrate is impressive. (The photo at the top shows both the cylinder and the impression. It also includes a “bonus” seal like a stamp seal on the bottom. I particularly like the winged creatures. They have serpentine back ends, so they aren’t griffins, but one of them definitely has a leonine head. Photo by Zunkir on Wiki.)
We’ve lost the use of seals today, but they figured throughout most of history—and go back, according to this article, at least 8,000 years.
For a post about a similarly early seal found in southern Turkey and viewed as an indication of early seal use in trade.