Ancient Near Eastern Seals from the Kist Collection: Three Millennia of Miniature Reliefs.

• Author: Mary, Rudi
• Position: Book Review

Ancient Near Eastern Seals from the Kist Collection: Three Millennia of Miniature Reliefs. By JOOST KIST. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, vol. 18. Leiden: BRILL, 2003. Pp. x + 237, illus. $82.

With this volume, Joost Kist, a lawyer and Ph.D. in information science, makes public the seals he has collected since the 1950s. Brill has published it to commemorate Kist's retirement from their board. Kist's active role in publishing his collection demonstrates the quote with which he begins his introduction: "as a rule, showing one's collection is an intrinsic part of a collector's way of self-expression" (W. Muensterberger). Unfortunately, despite the author's enthusiasm, the book's shortcomings are too many to be mentioned here. What follows is merely a selection.

The book begins with a brief introduction by Kist, followed in turn by essays on ancient Near Eastern seals (D. Collon), iconography and religion (F. A. M. Wiggermann), and treatment of the inscriptions (Wiggermann). The rest of the volume is a catalogue, by Kist, of fifteen stamp seals, 395 cylinder seals (plus thirty fakes), eighteen ancient sealings, and a cuneiform tablet that comprise the collection.

Collon's account is so drastically simplified that it is at times simply erroneous. For example, she identifies the variant of the presentation scene in which the worshiper, with arms folded, stands directly before the king (generally known as the "audience scene"; see Mayr, "Depiction of Ordinary Men and Women on Ur III Seals," CRRAI 47 [Helsinki, 2002], 359-66) as an innovation of the nineteenth century B.C. (p. 8; cf. Collon, First Impressions [Chicago, 1987], 44). But it has long been known that this scene originated in the Ur III period (see W. Ward, Seal Cylinders of Western Asia [Washington, 1910], figs. 51a, 52a, 52b; also L. Legrain, Ur Excavations, vol. 10, Seal Cylinders [Oxford, 1951]; B. Buchanan, Early Near Eastern Seals in the Yale Babylonian Collection [New Haven, 1981], nos. 642-54).

The subject of Wiggermann's first, interpretive, essay is the meaning of seal designs. His thesis is that all seal designs were intended to further one of three aims, namely: good relations with the gods, protection against evil, or support of magic. The thesis' simplicity is alluring, but not satisfying. Ur III seal designs, for example, evidently reflected the seal owner's place in society, but Wiggermann's thesis does not allow for this.

The insights in these essays are...