Two Mesopotamian Stone Stamp Seals | Cross Motif Steatite + Winged

Near East, Mesopotamia. Two pierced stone stamp seals, each drilled through the side for suspension and worn both as ornament and as a mark of authority. The darker one, a squared plaque of dense black stone (perhaps steatite or chlorite), is cut deeply with a cross dividing the face into four lens-shaped quarters, repeated on the reverse, with an abstract floral or petal band incised along one edge. The other, a paler gray lentoid of mottled limestone or marble, bears on one side a spare linear figure resembling a winged quadruped facing left, beside a field of parallel hatching. Seals like these were pressed into clay sealings on jars, baskets and storeroom doors to mark ownership, at the very beginning of administrative record-keeping. The stamp seal predates the cylinder seal in Mesopotamia by well over a millennium, emerging in the Halaf and Ubaid horizons as a simple pierced button or gable incised with crosses, chevrons, and rosettes. Impressed into a lump of damp clay closing a jar or a door bolt, the device functioned as a signature before writing: whoever broke the seal broke the record. The quartered cross seen here is among the most persistent of these devices, appearing across Anatolia, northern Syria, and the Zagros foothills for thousands of years, its meaning likely both administrative and apotropaic. Animal designs, by contrast, tend toward the schematic in this period, reduced to the few strokes that distinguish horn from haunch, and the boundary between a winged creature and an economically drawn caprid is often left to the modern viewer to settle. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 204841

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