3. Cylinder glyptic: the cylinder seals
The purpose of cylinder seals was to serve as marks of personal ownership and to convey information about the contents of jars. They were used on the seals of jar mouths and on the backs of contracts written on tablets, as well as on various other containers.
Cylinder seals were a distinctly Mesopotamian invention; their appearance is set within the Samarra and Hassuna cultures, in northern Mesopotamia. There, circular or oval stone seals with reticulated decoration have been found. But the most developed figurative decoration — representations of animals such as antelopes or goats — appeared in the Halaf period.
Cylinder seals were generally made of limestone, even of semi-precious stones such as lapis lazuli or carnelian, and even of precious metals.
Their dimensions? Between 4–5 cm and 10–12 cm in height.
In the Northern Ubaid period, impressions have been found with both geometric and naturalistic decoration, with the human figure also present.
In the Gawra period the decoration developed, moving from a primarily geometric style to a naturalistic one that included scenes grouping figures. The seal took the shape of a flat circular button with a small attachment lug. The novelty of the cylinder seal did not affect Gawra's sigillographic development, which ignored it entirely.
The Pre-Dynastic Uruk period offers, alongside the invention of the cylinder seal, a series of different forms in which the button seal has already disappeared: domed seal, semi-cylindrical seal and so on.
The motifs are treated in flat relief with no modelling. They are characterised by the use of series of hemispheres to construct the figure, the figure being an aggregate of them. The basic themes are felines and quadrupeds in general, crouching, with the tail raised, in heraldic position, still arranged with a sense of symmetry.
Cylinder-seal glyptic appears in Uruk V and IV. Later, this device seems to have spread to the rest of the country, with most sites yielding cylinders contemporary with Uruk III.
The impressions from Uruk V and Uruk IV are similar.
The transition to the Jemdet Nasr phase (Uruk III) marks a number of innovations, such as the duality observed between cylinders that follow the traditional pattern — clearly signalling continuity between one period and the next — and those in which a new trend towards stylisation and schematism attests to more serial production.
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Glyptic in other languages:
- German: Glyptik
- French: Glyptique
- Spanish: Glíptica
- Polish: Gliptyka
- Romanian: Gliptică
- Russian: Гли́птика