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Seals and Sealing in the Ancient near East by McGuire Gibson; Robert D. Biggs Review by: J. D. Muhly Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 101, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1981), pp. 399-401 Published by: American Oriental Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602628 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 05:21 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . American Oriental Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Oriental Society. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.44.77.34 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 05:21:26 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Seals and Sealing in the Ancient near Eastby McGuire Gibson; Robert D. Biggs

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Page 1: Seals and Sealing in the Ancient near Eastby McGuire Gibson; Robert D. Biggs

Seals and Sealing in the Ancient near East by McGuire Gibson; Robert D. BiggsReview by: J. D. MuhlyJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 101, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1981), pp. 399-401Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602628 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 05:21

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

American Oriental Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal ofthe American Oriental Society.

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Page 2: Seals and Sealing in the Ancient near Eastby McGuire Gibson; Robert D. Biggs

Reviews of Books 399

South," an anonymous historical poem of over 8,000 lines written in the NWm script. But it also includes Lam tuien ki> ng6 "Marvelous Encounter in the Woods and by the Brooks," a novel consisting of nearly 200 poems.

Thus works in N6m had started to appear next to writings in Chinese (or Han) characters in the 17th century. However, only the next century witnessed great fecundity through numerous authors, several of them women of great talent, who, while continuing to write in Chinese, turned more positively toward the enrichment of a vernacular literature to be transmitted orally and therefore easily and widely dis- seminated among the illiterate masses in the countryside. In Volume 11, we see that long narratives (truj'jn) and ballads (ngam-khtW or ngam) in verse had emerged amidst other traditional genres: DAng Tran C6n's (1710-1745) Chinh-phu ngam "Ballad of the Warrior's Wife," which first appeared in Chinese, then was translated into Vietnamese by several poets (including the scholar Phan Huy ich and the poetess DoAn Thi Died Nguyen Gia Thieu's (1741-1798) Cung-odn ngfim-khtW "Plaint from the Harem," and Hoa tin "Flow- ered Stationery" by Nguyen Huy TU (1743-1790) and Nguyen Thien (1763-1818).

The well-known Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du (1765-1820) receives 42 pages, which is more than 10 percent of the book. Apart from ten more popular narratives listed at the end of this volume and whose authorship is unknown, we are also given fourteen poems by Poetess Ho Xuan-Hddng, four poems by Lady of Thanh-Quan, as well as stanzas by Cao BA QuAt, etc.

Selections in Volume 111, the most substantial of the three volumes, highlight a patriotic literature between 1858 and 1900, period during which the French tried to consolidate their colonial rule after their conquest, then a modern litera- ture conceived amidst great social upheavals and born dur- ing the first four decades or so of this century, mainly thanks to the Roman script (Qu6c-ngiTl) introduced by early Cath- olic missionaries.

The figure of the blind poet Nguyen Dinh Chieu (1822- 1888) stands out as the most indefatigable standard-bearer of a long tradition of nationalistic scholars opposed to foreign rule. Variety distinguished this period of feverish literary activity. Nguyen Dinh Chieu himself wrote Luc Van TiDn and a host of poems, appeals, proclamations and funeral orations praising the guerilla fighters. Then there are poems by Nguyen Khuyen and Tran Te Xddng, that every schoolchild in the country knows by heart.

Revolutionary writings by the modernist Phan B16i Chau (1867-1940), the dominant figure of the era who together with his colleagues in the D6ng-kinh Ngh7a-thuc "Free School of Tonkin" tried to renovate national culture, to promote the use of Qu6c-nga in political propaganda as well as the role of the press, and to fight illiteracy and combat

political inertia. Thanks to Western influence, or rather thanks to the influence of Western political and social ideals, imported through Chinese translations sometimes, and in some instances in spite of the French colonial administra- tion, three tendencies evolved in the field of literature: romantic poetry and fiction, revolutionary poetry, and the realist novel.

Short biographies of authors, succinct introductory notes to the works cited and excellent translations make these three volumes highly useful to teachers of a survey course. The editors of this Anthology of Vietnamese Literature have proved how rigorous teamwork can reveal the beauty and richness of a national literature to a foreign audience. Specialists and laymen, however, wonder whether an antho- logy of Vietnamese literature can be complete when it chooses-obviously out of political considerations-to leave out significant works by such significant writers as Pham Quynh, Nguyen Van V inh, Khdi-Htng, Nhat-Linh, etc.

DINH-HOA NGUYEN

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

Seals and Sealing in the Ancient Near East. Edited by McGuIRE GIBSON and ROBERT D. BIGGS. Pp. i + 160. (Bibliotheca Mesopotamica, Vol. 6). Malibu: UNDENA

PUBLICATIONS. 1977.

This volume represents the publication of most of the papers delivered at a symposium on seal function held at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, presumably in 1975. A short paper by W. W. Hallo, not read at the symposium, has also been included. While line drawings and diagrams are printed in the text, the actual photographs of the seals and seal impressions are published as microfiche in a pocket on the inside back cover, a method also used in the new book by P. R. S. Moorey, Kish Excavations 1923-1933 (Oxford, 1978).

The study of glyptic art has for long been the most distinguished aspect of the study of art in the Ancient Near East. The work of scholars such as Frankfort, Moortgat, Buchanan, Porada and Amiet has made the cylinder seal the best studied product of the art of Mesopotamia and neigh- bouring lands. The one drawback of this work is that it has tended to treat seals and sealings as a world unto themselves, resulting in the seals and seal impressions becoming divorced from the society that used them and the tablets upon which they were impressed.

The seal symposium was an attempt to redress the balance, to bring together archaeologists and philologists and to examine the many ways in which seals were used and, in particular, the sealed tablet and its envelope and the complex traditions that produced this familiar product of Meso- potamian society.

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Page 3: Seals and Sealing in the Ancient near Eastby McGuire Gibson; Robert D. Biggs

400 Journal of the American Oriental Society 101.3 (1981)

The practice of sealing seems to have begun as an attempt to safeguard objects and commodities, to ensure that a jar, box or bag was intact and still contained its original contents as when sealed. Egypt seems never to have gone beyond this original idea. From the beginning there was a certain legal aspect involved in sealing, as an unbroken seal guaranteed that the recipient was in receipt of goods not tampered with, and this legal aspect soon came to dominate the use of seals in Mesopotamia. Seal impressions appear on the earliest admin- istrative texts from Uruk IV, and even earlier on uninscribed bullae. These bullae have received much attention in recent years because of the theories of D. Schmandt-Besserat that they played a role in the formative stage of the art of writing (see her articles in Scientific American, 238/6 (1978), 50-59; Archaeology, 32 (1979), 22-31.

By the Ur III period the practice of placing the tablet in a

sealed envelope had developed and in the Old Babylonian period we find the full elaboration of this practice with the

seals of all the witnesses to a transaction impressed on the

envelope of the tablet. Those who did not own seals could have one made on the spot for the occasion, it being known as a burgul seal (after the Sumerian word for seal-cutter, Akkadian pa/urkullu), or could seal using the hem of one's garment or one's finger nails. It even was possible to seal using another's cylinder seal. In such a case the name of the person actually involved in the transaction was added as a by-script, written in smaller script than the rest of the text.

This much is clear and fairly straight-forward. It is even possible to study both regional and chronological develop- ments and to provide explanations for changes and variations in sealing practice. It is when one tries to go beneath the surface, to explain who did and did not seal and why and to establish a relationship between ownership and use of seals that the trouble begins. It is the great merit of the volume under review that it attempts to deal with such problems and begins to explore the complexity and apparent contradictions in our evidence for ancient seal usage.

Mogens Trolle Larsen gives a superb presentation of "Seal Use in the Old Assyrian Period"; his paper is certainly one of the best in the collection. If a man's seal was a mark of identification, its use symbolizing an assumption of respon- sibility so that "seals were valuable objects which could possibly be used for fraudulent purposes by others" (Larsen, p. 100), it is difficult to see how this identification was made. Very few OA seals have legends that give the name of the owner and, considering only those that do, Larsen points out that (p. 90):

... approximately half of all the seals which have inscrip- tions giving a name were used by persons with different names, and it is not possible to establish any relationship between the name on the seal and the name of the user.

What, then, does the use of a seal represent, and how is the author of a seal impression identified?

J. Renger found the same situation in OB Mesopotamia. He points out that, at Sippar, there are many examples of texts

. . . where the by-script declares that a seal impression is that of a particular person; but there is no prosopographic evidence to link the legend on the seal with any person mentioned in the document (Renger, p. 77).

There are even cases where the tablet has only a by-script, without seal impression.

Clearly the seal impressions, with or without legends, do not identify the participants in a transaction or the witnesses of that transaction. M. Gibson argues (p. 150) that what was important was not the seal or the seal impression but the act of sealing. This it was that demonstrated the presence of participants and witnesses who were at and saw the trans- action. No one seriously thought of identifying a man by the impression of the hem of his garment or his finger nail impressions. Such things only symbolized his presence at the transaction; his name was supplied by the account of the transaction on the tablet itself.

Thus a seal impression was not like a signature today (Renger, p. 79), nor was a seal anything like a modern credit card, to which it has often been compared. But why, then, do we have cases where people deny ownership of a seal and why was there such concern over the loss of a seal? If a seal was thought of more as an amulet, as Gibson argues (p. 150), this might explain the references to the loss of a seal in dream omens and in the nam.bdr.bi rituals (discussed by Hallo, p. 58). It does not explain those texts describing the actual loss of a seal, concentrating upon the exact date of that loss (Hallo, pp. 55-57). These texts certainly imply that the date of loss is recorded in order to absolve the owner of the seal from any legal or financial responsibility over the misuse of his seal after that date.

The most famous example of the loss of a seal is that recorded in text no. 12 in Collection B of Sumerian letters (F. A. Ali, Sumer, 20 (1964), 66-68), a text that ultimately made its way into a collection of model contracts (Hallo, p. 56). According to this text the loss of the seal was made public by having the herald blow the trumpet in the streets of the city, announcing that no claim could be made against Ur- dun, the owner of the seal. The problem is that this is a literary, not an administrative text. Ur-dun, alleged owner of the lost seal, is also known as the author of a letter to a Sumerian king, and Si-de, the scribe of the text, is also the 'author' of the "Series of Enlil-ibni" (Hallo, p. 57). Almost all the people mentioned in the text are known from other OB texts purporting to describe events in the Ur III period. I

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Page 4: Seals and Sealing in the Ancient near Eastby McGuire Gibson; Robert D. Biggs

Reviews of Books 401

certainly doubt that it is proper to see this loss of a seal as a historical event, though I am not sure that the Sumerians would have thought the distinction to be of any significance.

Among the numerous problems examined in the papers included in this volume I would like to single out the suggestion made by both J. Franke and R. Zettler that seals provide examples of Mesopotamian portraiture. The theory is that both the presentation seals and the so-called dedica- tory seals ( Widmungssiegel) were awarded by the king to prominent people (officials or members of the royal family) and that the scene on the seal depicts the individuals involved. If this is true, and the case appears to be a reasonable one, then the seals provide us with portraits of Enmenanna, daughter of Naram-Sin, Tudasharlibish, wife of Sharkali- sharri, and the rulers of the Third Dynasty of Ur, especially Ibbi-Sin. This is a possibility worth further investigation. Central to Zettler's thesis is his assumption that, on the dedicatory seals, the final arad.zu is to be read as Akkadian warassu, meaning therefore not "your servant" but "his servant."

There is a great deal of evidence for the practice of re-using seals of past generations, the most spectacular case being the impression of the seal of the OA king Erishum I found on one of the tablets belonging to the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon (Larsen, p. 89 and p. 92, fig. 12), a gap of some 1300 years. The use of Ur III seals in the kdrum Kanesh (Larsen, p. 98) has been responsible for much of the chronological confusion regarding that site. On the fortification tablets from Perse- polis, dating to the middle years of the reign of Darius I, one of the seals used (no. 93) has an Elamite legend reading "Cyrus the Anshanite, son of Teispes" (Hallock, p. 125). This must be the seal of Cyrus I, contemporary of Ashurbanipal. It is hard to explain why this seal was used only on texts involving cattle.

This elaborate procedure of sealing and witnessing certainly reflects an open society, with individuals initiating and taking responsibility for purchases, sales and other legal matters. The outstanding exception seems to be Eshnunna where all sale transactions were conducted through a royal official, either the kakikkum (for the sale of a house) or the shassukkum (for the sale of a field). In discussing this material R. Whiting (pp. 67-74) misses the crucial significance of the fact that, at Eshnunna, no private individual owned a seal. At Eshnunna the sealings were placed on the tablet itself, with the seal of the royal official being rolled before the text was written. Then the seller sealed with a burgul seal made for this single transaction. Whiting remarks (p. 68):

It is difficult to visualize the rationale behind the use of the burgul seals for these transactions. Certainly anyone who was affluent enough to own property would have had

his own personal seal. Yet not one personal seal is found used by a seller in any of these documents.

A remarkable situation, but one, I would suggest, that indicates a connection between owning a seal and possessing the autonomy to use that seal in both commercial and legal contexts. The private citizens of Eshnunna did not own seals, not from lack of means but from lack of autonomy. Every transaction had to be initiated and authorized by a royal official whose seal had to be applied to a tablet even before the text could be written. It follows that these officials, the kakikkum and the shassukkum, received their seals from the king and that the a rad . z u of the seal's legend must be read as Akkadian warassu, "his servant."

It remains to investigate the background of this degree of royal authority, but that is far beyond the scope of a review. What the situation at Eshnunna does suggest, if I am correct, is a new way of looking at the use of seals and of the socio- political implications of seal ownership. This is but one of the questions raised by this important volume, a publication that, it is hoped, will stimulate much further work into sealing practices in the Ancient Near East and the changing aspects of seal usage.

J. D. MUHLY

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

7The Poem of Erra. By LUIGI CAGNI. Pp. 61 (Sources from the Ancient Near East, 1/ 3). Malibu: UNDENA PUBLICATIONS.

1977. $5.20.

The volume under review is the third in a new monograph series brought out by Undena Publications, the laudable intent of which is to offer specialists and general readers alike annotated translations of important ancient Near Eastern texts not easily available elsewhere. This is also Cagni's third published volume on the Erra Poem, building on and up- dating his full Italian edition of 1969 (L'Epopea di Erra [Studi Semitici 34], Rome: UniversitA di Roma) and his cuneiform Schultext of 1970 (Das Erra-Epos: Keilschrifttext [Studia Pohl 5], Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute). In the present instance, we are treated first to a discussion of the poem as a whole: the previous studies of it, particularly since Das Erra- Epos; the problems of defining its literary genre and Sitz im Leben; the nature of its principal characters-Erra, IHum, the Sibitti, Marduk, and Anum; the difficulties of determining its date of composition; and some criteria for translating it (pp. 5-22). There follows, as the bulk of the volume (pp. 26- 61), an English translation of Erra, covering all the surviving text except for the fragmentary sections of Tablets II and III,

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