The Iconography of Cylinder seals.

• Position: Book review

The Iconography of Cylinder Seals. Edited by PAUL TAYLOR. Warburg Institute Colloquia, vol. 9. London: WARBURG INSTITUTE; Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2006. Pp. xiv + 245, plates. [pounds sterling]40 (paper).

This handsomely produced volume presents a dozen communications delivered at a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute in London on October 18-19, 2002, in memory of its former Director Henri Frankfort (1948-1953). The Institute, which grew out of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek of Aby Warburg, is renowned as a center for research into the development and continuities of the iconographical tradition of Western art and thought. Thus a program on the imagery employed on the cylinder seals of ancient Western Asia was most appropriate in celebration of both the Institute and of Frankfort, whose most influential scholarly achievement is arguably Cylinder Seals: A Documentary Essay on the Art and Religion of the Ancient Near East (1939).

The essays begin with an appreciation, by later Director J.B. Trapp, of Frankfort's years at the Warburg, followed by Paul Taylor's description of the holdings of the Institute's Photographic Collection relevant to the topic at hand. Confusingly, Frankfort himself is said to have bequeathed eight thousand photographs to the Collection (p. 9), while we had earlier learned that the Institute's entire section on Western Asian iconography includes only four thousand photos (p. 2, n. 7). In any event, Taylor estimates that two-thirds of this material pertains to the eras before 2000 B.C.E.

The ten contributions by specialists in the art of the ancient Near East are generously illustrated by a total of 259 figures, clearly reproduced and gathered at the back of the volume. Diana Stein ("Palaeolithic Iconography on Bronze Age Seals from the Mesopotamian Periphery?") daringly suggests that much of the imagery on early seals, as well as similar motifs in the paintings done by our Paleolithic forbears on cave walls, originated in cross-culturally uniform hallucinations produced by persons experiencing states of altered consciousness.

Candida Felli ("Lugal-usumagal: an Akkadian Governor and his Two Masters") studies impressions from two successive seals of a high-ranking bureaucrat of the Sargonic period, demonstrating that their slightly varying compositions represent the relationships among a high god (Samas and Sin, respectively), the monarch, and his officials.

Ruth Mayer-Opificius ("War and Warfare on...