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Chapter Three - Slave Labor: Uruk Cylinder-Seal Imagery and Early Writing

from Part I - The Ancient Near East and Cyprus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 April 2018

By
Sarah Jarmer Scott
Edited by
Marta Ameri ,
Sarah Kielt Costello ,
Gregg Jamison  and
Sarah Jarmer Scott
Marta Ameri
Affiliation:
Colby College, Maine
Sarah Kielt Costello
Affiliation:
University of Houston-Clear Lake
Gregg Jamison
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Waukesha
Sarah Jarmer Scott
Affiliation:
Wagner College, New York
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Summary

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

Type
Chapter
Information
Seals and Sealing in the Ancient World
Case Studies from the Near East, Egypt, the Aegean, and South Asia
 , pp. 36 - 53
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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