Uruk: Hellenistic Seal Impressions in the Yale Babylonian Collection, vol. 1: Cuneiform Tablets.

AuthorBregstein, Linda

By RONALD WALLENFELS. Deutsches Archaologisches Institut, Abt. Baghdad: Ausgrabungen in Uruk-Warka, Endberichte, vol. 19. Mainz am Rhein: VERLAG PHILIPP VON ZABERN, 1994. Pp. xii + 206 + 62 plates. DM 150.

This volume is an expanded, fully illustrated reworking of Wallenfels' 1990 Columbia University dissertation, "Sealed Cuneiform Texts from Hellenistic Uruk: An Iconographic and Prosopographic Analysis of the Private Business Documents." Wallenfels studies the connections between seal motifs and the personal names in the seal captions, hoping to understand how seals were selected and used in Seleucid Uruk and whether Hellenism had an effect on these practices.

The volume begins with an introduction that appropriately focuses on such issues as the paucity of published sealed tablets and the fact that Hellenistic Babylonian material has historically been treated by scholars of Greek rather than Near Eastern history. The core of the volume is the catalogue of 1100 different seal impressions found on 154 cuneiform tablets and fragments from Hellenistic Uruk housed in the Yale BabyIonian Collection. The catalogue contains 423 supplemental entries detailing previously published seal impressions from Hellenistic Uruk tablets in other collections that do not duplicate the Yale impressions. The 154 sealed tablets treated range in date between 329 and 132 B.C.E. (8 and 180 S.E.) and represent twenty-two percent of the 700 known Hellenistic Uruk tablets.

The seal impressions are uninscribed and belonged to private individuals (rather than to officials), the principal parties and witnesses of private business documents. Seleucid texts were typically witnessed by eight to twelve individuals, a number much higher than earlier Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid contracts, and virtually all of the witnesses sealed the tablet. The contractor(s) ceding rights or property or accepting an obligation sealed the right edge; witnesses placed their seals on the remaining edges. Most of the impressions were made by metal finger rings with elliptical bezels. The other seal forms attested are gems (79 examples; 5% of the total), stamps (10 examples) and cylinders (4 examples).

The catalogue is divided into eight major iconographic categories, as defined by their dominant motifs: heads and busts (27 examples), full figured humans (96 examples), full figured anthropomorphic deities (54 examples), semi-human demons (32 examples), human-headed and man-faced demons (243...

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