ANCIENT ORIENTAL SEALS IN THE ROYAL
ONTARIO MUSEUM
The ancient oriental seals here presented come from
the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology, Toronto, Canada, and were
collected by its Director, Dr. C. T. Currelly, over a period of
years. A few of them came as gifts to the Museum, but most of them
were purchased by Dr. Currelly from dealers in various parts of the
world. The provenance of the seals is accordingly quite unknown and
they can be dated only approximately by comparison with other seals
whose dates may be known. On some difficult points in connection with
the cylinder seals I had the privilege of consulting Professor Henri
Frankfort of the Oriental Institute, Chicago, and for the stamp seals
I had similar opportunity to consult Dr. Neilson C. Debevoise, also of
the Oriental Institute. These scholars are our leading authorities in
these two fields,1 but they of course are
not to be held responsible for anything that appears here because they
saw no part of the manuscript. The seals are arranged as largely as
possible in chronological order and the new low chronology is
followed,2 but some of these dates will have
to be reduced still lower if Poebel is correct in dating Shamshi-Adad
I to 1726-1694 B.C.3 The Early Dynastic
Period is divided into the three phases, I, II, and III, as indicated
by Frankfort.4 The collection is a very
representative one and ranges all the way from jamdat Nasr times down
to the late Arab period.
The seal impressions were made by Mr. William Todd of the Museum's
technical staff and are the size of the originals. The photographs are
the same size except the bottom row on Plate V (Nos. 9 and 18) and
those on Plate VI (Nos. 23, 26, 31, 35, 37, 43, 47, 48, 50 and 61)
where some of the seals on the preceding plates are repeated in
enlargements made by a special process as follows. From the impression
of the seal in
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1. See, e.g., H. Frankfort, Cylinder Seals, 1939;
Neilson C. Debevoise, "The Essential Characteristics of Parthian and
Sasanian Glyptic Art," Berytus I, 1943, 1 ff.; "Parthian Seals," in
A. U. Pope (ed.), A Survey of Persian Art, 1, 1938, 471 ff. See also
Phyllis Ackerman, "Säsänian Seals," ibid. pp. 784 ff.
2. See T. J. Meek, Journal of Religion, XXI,
1941, 404, n. 15.
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3. A. Poebel, "The Assyrian King List from Khorsabad,"
JNES, I, 1942, 285 ff. It is to be noted, however, that on
p. 289 Poebel calculates that Shamshi-Adad I began to reign in 1726 +
x B.C., x being the length of the reigns of the two consecutive kings
Ashürabî I and Ashür-nädin- ahhê I, but on p. 293 he
concludes that x must be zero,
4. Op. cit. pp, 39 ff.
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