SealsAnatolian5th-3rd millennium BCE

Scaraboid Stamp Seal: Bird in Flight to Right with Cycle-shaped Wing

500-300 BCE

Description

This serpentine scaraboid stamp seal features an image of a bird in flight. The bird has a rounded breast and a wedge-shaped tail, with individual feathers represented. Its head is upright, and has a small, pointed beak. One wing is shown, covering much of its body and extending upward and curling toward the back of the bird’s head. Feathers, indicated by grooves, run the entire length of the wing and fan out at the top. The bird’s feet extend outward behind it. A palm branch is in the field below the bird. The imagery of this seal is sufficiently generic so as to make attribution and dating difficult. The shape and decoration of the wing is paralleled by the wing of a griffin on a stamp seal attested in the Daskyleion bullae discovered in northwestern Turkey (1); similar wings appear on other mythical creatures on stamp seals attributed to western Anatolia in the Achaemenid period (2). The Daskyleion seals include several other images of individual birds (3), so this seal is probably Anatolian and of fifth or fourth century date. NOTES 1. D. Kaptan, The Daskyleion Bullae: Seal Images from the Western Achaemenid Empire (Leiden, 2002) no. 122. 2. J. Boardman, “Pyramidal Stamp Seals in the Persian Empire,” Iran 8 (1970) nos. 3-4, 8, 117, 125, 129-30, 144, 146, 165, 167. 3. Kaptan, Daskyleion Bullae, nos. 123-9.

Classification

Seals

Technique

Intaglio

Medium

Red steatite

Culture

Anatolian

Period

Classical period

Century

5th-3rd millennium BCE