Some Unpublished Knossos Sealings and Sealstones

Extract

While engaged in the study of pottery in the apothekai of the Stratigraphical Museum at Knossos in 1962, M. R. Popham discovered two boxes containing eighty-one fragments of clay sealings and five worn and damaged sealstones.

The sealstones and sixty-seven of the sealings, those bearing distinguishable impressions, are published in this catalogue. The other fourteen fragments have been omitted; and of those published no photographs are provided here because the material will, it is hoped, appear fully in the volumes of the Corpus der minoischen und mykenischen Siegel devoted to the Herakleion Museum collection. The present catalogue is intended as an interim publication and, in particular, as a subscript to M. A. V. Gill's account of the Knossos sealings and their provenience.

Of the two boxes in which this material was rediscovered the first came from an apotheke which housed pottery from the Domestic Quarter of the Palace. It contained the sealstones and forty-two of the sealing fragments (nos. I to V and 1 to 42 below). The second containing twenty-five of the sealing fragments (nos. 43 to 67 below) came from an apotheke just north of the Throne Room with pottery originating from the West Quarter of the Palace. Unfortunately the pottery in the apothekai is not an infallible guide to the original provenience of these sealstones and sealings. A few of the latter are duplicated by sealings in the Herakleion Museum of known provenience at Knossos or may be identified as from a particular deposit because a sketch of them appears in Evans's notebooks and/or because they are listed in The Palace of Minos. In fact the evidence tends to suggest that these sealings came from widely scattered proveniences both inside and outside the Palace (cf. BSA lx (1965) 60, and in particular comments on 1, 12, 17, 20, 28, 33, 51, and 52 below).