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Seals and Sealing Practices: The Ancient Near East and Bronze Age Aegean

Thirty-two years ago, the Corpus der minoischen und mykenischen Siegel (CMS) published its first volume. Under the leadership of Friedrich Matz (1958-1974) and Ingo Pini (1974-present) 19 more volumes have appeared, establishing a standard reference for thousands of sealstones, rings, and impressed clay objects. In addition, the Corpus has published four symposia on glyptic research in supplemental volumes, along with special studies. Aegean scholars should be aware that the CMS has a standard format for presenting seals. Each seal is published with its own CMS number, museum inventory, a concise description, including dimensions and bibliography, clear photographs of both itself and its plasticine impression, and a clean drawing of the motif. Each volume includes indices on provenience, shape, and motif, short prefaces discussing groups of seals and their findspots, profile drawings, and a map. Since the beginning, the Corpus has set about improving its format. The first several volumes gave simpler information than the now standard set of dimensions, stringhole alignments (crucial for confirming whether a motif is typical or special), and occasional photographs of the reverse; now, volumes include comparanda for the motifs and, most recently, a few color photographs. The CMS Institute in Marburg, Germany has been open and generous to scholars; it houses a complete glyptic library, casts of all the seals and sealings, and photographs and slides, which are available for publication, often at no charge. The Institute has kept fairly to Matz's ambitious agenda (CMS Suppl. 0: xi-xii): CMS I (1964) National Museum in Athens; CMS VIII (1966) English collections; CMS VII (1967) British Museum; CMS II.1-4 (1969-1985) Herakleion Museum: sealstones and rings; CMS IV (1969) Herakleion Museum: Metaxas Collection; CMS II.5 (1970) Herakleion Museum: Phaistos sealings; CMS IX (1972) Bibliotheque Nationale, Cabinet des Medailles; CMS X (1972) Swiss collections; CMS XII (1972) New York Metropolitan Museum of Art; CMS XIII (1974) American collections; CMS V (in 2) (1975) small Greek collections; CMS I Suppl. (1982) National Museum in Athens (suppl.); CMS XI (1988) European collections (especially Berlin and Munich); and CMS V Suppl. 1A-1B (1992-1993) small Greek collections (suppl.). The volumes that still await publication, however, are not trivial: the Giamalakis Collection in the Herakleion Museum (A. Xenaki-Sakellariou, Les cachets minoens de la collection Giamalakis [EtCret 10, Paris 1958]); the Ashmolean Museum (VE.G. Kenna, Cretan Seals, Oxford 1960); and, most frustrating, the Cretan sealings. The sealings were once almost ready but new interest in what they sealed demanded reinspection, new photographs and drawings, and of course a new text. For a general guide to the Knossos sealings we still rely on M.A.V. Gill's "The Knossos Sealings: Provenance and Identification;' BSA 60 (1965) 58-98. These two new volumes, CMS V Suppl. 1A and B, present important new sealings. From an almost inaccessible cave on Mt. Zas in Naxos comes a small collection of jar sealings (B106-109; EH III), whose clay contains "cave material," implying these jars were sealed and unsealed on the spot. From the Kadmeion at Thebes comes the direct object sealing B354 (LH IIIB:2) whose imprint clearly reveals a leather document. And from Mikro Vouni in Samothrace come two sealings, two noduli, and two roundels (B320-328, probably contemporary with MM IB-II); on one of the roundels two different seal impressions (323 and 325) probably reflect a single bifacial cushion seal. Most valuable is the publication of the sealings, noduli, and roundels from Khania (A127-183; LM IB and later contexts). In House I, room D, a brick "cupboard" contained a "temporary archive" of two noduli, a jar stopper, and a document sealing. The document was of leather, folded up into a long, narrow package, tied up with thread, sealed over the top with clay, and then impressed 12 times with 10 different seal faces (A128-137) possibly reflecting four parties: an overseer (132), the impressers of the left column, the impressers of the right column, and the two cult ring impressers at the bottom. From such informative photographs and drawings in the CMS we can move from a simple appreciation of the seals to a greater understanding of how they were used. The Khania, Odos Katre archive consists of Linear A