CHAPTER IX—CYLINDER-SEALS[129]
OF the smaller relics of Babylonian and Assyrian antiquity there are none so numerous or so pregnant with interest as the engraved seals which kings and commoners of all periods alike possessed. The universality of their usage in later times is attested by Herodotus (I, 195), who tells us that in his day everyone in Babylonia carried a seal as well as a walking-stick, while abundant evidence of their general use in early times is afforded by the vast quantity of seals discovered in the course of the excavations.
The seal, important as it is in our own day, was an even more indispensable convenience of civilized society in primitive times, and was probably one of the first inventions that owed their origins directly to the mutual recognition of private rights of ownership. The purpose which it first of all served was of course the same as that which it serves with us to-day, though the sealing of the mud plaster covering of a jar of wine, of the string of a registered parcel, or the flap of a paper envelope, in no way prevents the thief from robbing the contents in any of these cases, yet it renders it impossible for such a theft to be perpetrated without detection, detection not indeed necessarily of the thief, but of the deed itself, and that after all is the essential preliminary to the successful establishment of any suit at law. Its use in primitive times was, however, far more extensive, for, as Newberry well puts it,[130] “what locks and keys are to us, seals were to the people of the Old World.” If a man left his house for the day, and no occupant remained to keep watch, he probably secured himself and his goods so far as possible by sticking plasters of mud on the door and impressing his seal upon them in such a manner as to make it impossible to enter the house without breaking the seal; at all events Dr. Ward informs us[131] that he saw in a Khan at Hillah, near Babylon, a door of a room containing goods belonging to a merchant who was away from home, carefully sealed up with pats of clay on which the impress of the merchant’s seal had been duly fixed, thereby rendering access to the house dependent on the bursting of the seals, and in the conservative East the customs of to-day are not merely those of yesterday, but generally represent the traditional usage of hundreds, sometimes thousands of years. A few such sealed pats of clay, some of which formed stoppers of jars, have been found, but the principal object for which the cylinder-seal was used, was the authentication of deeds, documents and letters.
Fig. 48.—A, a cylinder-seal, in which the handle has been preserved.
B, a clay tablet bearing a seal impression.xxxxx
xxxxxxxxxC, D, illustrate the variation in size exhibited by cylinder-seals.
The seals employed by the Babylonians and Assyrians differed from those generally employed elsewhere, in shape as well as in the motifs of the engravings. They assumed the form of cylinders or rollers, through the centre of which a single or double piece of wire was inserted, the wire being generally made of copper, though sometimes of gold and silver, while later on, iron also occurs. At one end the wire was clamped, while at the other it was twisted into a loop (cf. Fig. [48], A) through which a piece of thread or twine was passed by means of which the seal could be slung round the owner’s neck, or carried on his wrist, the wire at the same time facilitating the process of rolling the cylinder on the moist clay.
The tablet (K. 382) seen in Fig. [48], B, is a good example of a clay tablet bearing the impress of a cylinder-seal. The tablet, which measures 4-1/8 inches by 2-5/8 inches, contains the terms of a contract. The impression itself shows us a mythological four-winged being, such as is seen so often on Assyrian bas-reliefs. In either hand he holds a bird by the leg. The cylinders by the side of the tablet are reproduced to actual size; A, C, and D (Brit. Mus. Nos. 89319, 89538, 101974) illustrate the divergence of size which the Babylonian cylinder-seals exhibit, (C) being an unusually large specimen, and (D) an exceptionally small example, the vast majority of seals occupying an intermediate position between these two extremes; in (A) we have a cylinder in which the metal handle is still preserved.
The existence of the same kind of seal in Egypt as early as the time of the first dynasty has been used as an argument in support of the theory that the primitive civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia were to some extent interdependent. It is true that cylinder-seals could only be of use where clay was employed as a writing-material, but there is no direct evidence that the practice of using clay for either writing or building purposes was borrowed from Babylonia, while the similarity in shape of early Babylonian and Egyptian mace-heads is an even more uncertain argument whereon to base an otherwise unsupported theory.