cylinder seal
- Museum number
- 89514
- Description
-
Black hematite cylinder seal. A figure wearing a tall headdress with two small horns in front, perhaps topped by a plume, double necklaces, and a open mantle with rounded corners and one ladder-pattern border, faces a storm god who has a spiked, vertically-striated helmet with two small horns in front, a long curl of hair down his back, who wears a necklace with four pendants, a kilt with vertically-striated panels, four horizontal bands around the hem and a knotted belt into which is inserted a straight dagger. He brandishes a long-handled mace in his left hand, and thrusts the stem of a plant into the mouth of a serpent that rises vertically before him. Behind him is a small Egyptianizing figure with head-cloth, uraeus, collar, and folded kilt, kneeling on one knee, with his right arm bent across his chest and his left arm hanging down. A man extends his right fist above the kneeling figure’s head; he has curly hair, a necklace and a patterned garment with heavy, rolled borders, draped over both shoulders and enclosing his left arm. A secondary motif is divided into two registers by a three-coil, three-strand Z-guilloche: above is a winged sphinx with a curl of hair, seated on its haunches with one forepaw raised; below is a bird-griffin with crest and patterned neck, also seated on its haunches towards the left, with its head turned back towards the right. Remains of a line border at the top, but part of it and the entire line border nd the feet on some figures at the bottom are entirely missing due to filing in order to remove the chips.
- Dimensions
-
Diameter: 9.20 millimetres
-
Height: 21.80 millimetres
- Curator's comments
- See Williams-Forte 1983 for her treatment of this scene of storm god, plant and snake and its Anatolian and Syrian parallels. See also CLS 16 (BM 132824) and CLS 30 (BM89418). Teissier (1995, pp. 128-9) discusses the possibility that the kneeling figure might be the Pharaoh, “but he does not kneel with one knee at right angles [and his] arm gestures here are not Egyptian” whereas this attitude is “characteristic of Syrian iconography”.
- Location
- Not on display
- Condition
- The seal is badly worn and damaged in some places; chips along the edges, possibly indicating the forcible removal of metal (gold?) caps, have been filed down and smoothed
- Acquisition date
- 1882
- Acquisition notes
- Acquired from Basilios Stilianopoulis, Grosvenor Square, London; said to be from “Ain-Tap near Biridjik”, but Gaziantep is a long way from Birecik. Perhaps it was acquired at Gaziantep and was said to be from near Birecik?
- Department
- Middle East
- BM/Big number
- 89514
- Registration number
- 1882,0504.2
