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A Sumerian Cylinder Seal with Handle in the Ashmolean Museum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 August 2014

R. W. Hamilton
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Extract

Plate XI illustrates a white magnesite cylinder seal, surmounted by a small recumbent ram in silver, which was acquired by the Ashmolean Museum at Sotheby's sale of the Ernest Brummer Collection on 16th and 17th of November, 1964.

The cylinder is engraved with a continuous design in two registers, combining cattle with reed buildings. The ram is probably attached to the end of a copper spindle, or what remains of it, designed to rotate in a perforation drilled through the axis of the cylinder. This cannot in fact be verified, for the ram is now immovable and nothing can be seen at the opposite end of the perforation except a tough filling of earth mixed with products of corrosion, which could not be removed without danger to the cylinder. An unexpectedly fine perforation is seen on each side of the ram itself, placed rather high, as if to take an exceedingly thin suspending thread. This perforation, too, is now obstructed.

The proportions of the seal, as well as the style and subject of its design and of the ram which forms its handle, all associate it with the latest proto-literate or predynastic phase of Sumerian culture; specifically, with the third level of the Archaic Temple sequence at Uruk (Warka).

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , Spring 1967 , pp. 34 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1968

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References

1 Ashmolean accession no. 1964.744. Cylinder: H. 53 mm., D. 46–48 mm. Top: H. 32 mm., L. (tail to nose) 34 mm. Sotheby & Co., Catalogue of the Ernest Brummer Collection, 16–17 11, 1964Google Scholar; Lot 156.

2 Fig. 1 was drawn by Mrs. Diane Gurney. In the spacing of his design the engraver had no difficulty with the lower register, containing four huts. But in the upper, where thirteen heads of cattle may be counted, but only twelve tails, the complexity of the subject has caused one minor breakdown. No particular correlation of points in the two registers can be detected.

3 Fig. 2, a. Detail of a cylinder seal, Khafajeh, Sin Temple II: Frankfort, Cylinder Seals, pl. VI a; also Stratified Cylinder Seals from the Diyala Region, pl. VI, 33;

b. Fragment of a limestone relief vase, drawn after R. Hall and C. L. Woolley, Ur Excavations I, al Ubaid, pl. XXXIX, 1; a better photograph, but omitting one fragment, is in Parrot, A., Archéologie Mésopotamienne II, pl. IVGoogle Scholar;

c. Green stone relief vase, Khafajeh: H. Frankfort, Oriental Institute Communications, N. 20, fig. 54.

Fig. 3, a. Detail from a cylinder seal: Delaporte, L., Catalogue des Cylindres … Musée du Louvre, II, pl. 63, 3Google Scholar;

b. From a limestone mosaic frieze, al U'baid: R. Hall and C. L. Woolley, op.cit. pl XXXI, 2.

c. Detail from a limestone trough, from Warka( ?), now in the British Museum: B.M.Q. III (1928), pl. XXIIGoogle Scholar; better photographs in Hirmer, M., Art of Mesopotamia, 23Google Scholar.

4 W. Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs, pls. 93–7.

5 For example Fig. 2, b. Another example, with the bindings clearly visible, is on a cylinder seal from Tell Billa in northern Iraq: H. Frankfort, Cylinder Seals, pl. III d.

6 Khafajeh: H. Frankfort, Cylinder Seals, pl. VI a (here Fig. 2, a, detail only); Tell Billa: ibid. pl. III d; British Museum 128844, unprovenanced: D. J. Wiseman, Catalogue of Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum, Pl. V, d, where the base of one standard appears very like a miniature reed house.

7 Unprovenanced: above, Fig. 2, b. Also Khafajeh: Fig. 2, c; also Warka: E. Heinrich, Kleinfunde aus den archaischen Tempelschichten in Uruk, pl. XXV, b an inlaid bowl fragment, 14819 b, from the “Sammelfund”.

8 A. Falkenstein, Archaische Texte aus Uruk no. 251 and p. 60. No example of the sign at this early stage is recorded with three pairs of rings; nor is its value ascertained. But it seems to have developed at a later stage into both and Falkenstein no. 236, which in legible texts carried the value nun with the meaning “prince”. From this association of pictorial symbol and meaning the inference has been drawn that the Sumerian group é - nun, or “princely house”, designated precisely the stable surmounted by ringed standards which is depicted both on our seal and in these other contexts: Lambert, M. in Revue d'Assyriologie, XLIX (1955) p. 104Google Scholar, n.1. The same interpretation is carried a step further by the occurrence many centuries later, in the “B Cylinder” of Gudea from Lagash (Telloh), of an obscure minor divinity “Ur-énuntaé,” “The (divine) Pole which comes out of the Princely House”, a phrase which could well pass as a description of the standard itself: Lambert, M. and Tournay, R. in Revue Biblique, 55 (1948), p. 541, n. 70 bGoogle Scholar.

9 A guarded definition befits the present anonymity of the ringed pole as compared with the less cryptic symbol which is seen in Fig. 3, c. That, too, recurs as a sign in the archaic script, and even more commonly, Falkenstein 208, appropriated to Innin, the embodiment in Sumerian thought of the female as quickcner of nature. In its archaeological occurrences the same symbol plainly denotes the domain or tutelage of Innin over those of the flocks and pastures which were her concern.

10 Both small figures carved in bituminous limestone, (a) from the Warka “Sammelfund”, now in Berlin: Heinrich, E., Kleinfunde … pls. 6 and 7 (W 14819 e) and p. 8Google Scholar: “Die Hörner … kommen so bei keiner Schafrasse vor”; (b) a strangely similar but smaller beast, without provenance, now in the J. B. Nies Collection, New Haven, Conn.: Nies, J. B. and Keiser, C. E., Babylonian Inscriptions in the collection of James B. Nies, II, pl. LXXII mGoogle Scholar.

11 For this quality, conveying the illusion of soft flesh on underlying bone, compare especially the marvellously expressive head in red sandstone from the Warka “Sammelfund”: Kleinfunde …, pl. VII. a and VIII b (W 15237 a). A duplicate of that head in the British Museum (132092) made of baked clay is illustrated by R. D. Barnett and D. J. Wiseman in Fifty Masterpieces of Ancient Near Eastern Art, pl. 2.

12 Kleinfunde …, pl. 17 a and b, W 14772 c and W 14766f.

13 VA 10537; H. 54 mm., Diam. 45 mm. Bought in the neighbourhood of Uruk and attributed to the site: Andrae, W., Die Ionische Säule, p. 25 and pl. VGoogle Scholar; and Moortgat, A., Vorderasiatische Rollsiege, p. 87 and pl. V, 29Google Scholar.

14 Delaporte, L., Catalogue des Cylindres … Musée du Louvre, II, pl. 63, 3Google Scholar.

15 H. Frankfort, Stratified Cylinder Seals … pl. 1 a. The seal was found in a stratified context in the Sin Temple II.