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Toutes les enchères / Arts asiatiques / Two Mesopotamian Stone Stamp Seal Beads - Cross & Zoomorph
Near East, Mesopotamia. A pair of pierced stone stamp seals, each drilled laterally for suspension and worn as both ornament and instrument of authority. The darker example, a squared plaque of dense black stone (perhaps steatite or chlorite), carries a deeply cut cross dividing the face into four lenticular quadrants, repeated on the reverse, with an abstract floral or petal band incised along one unperforated edge. Its companion, a paler gray lentoid of mottled limestone or marble, bears on one side a spare linear composition resembling a winged quadruped facing left, its body sketched in confident single strokes beside a field of parallel hatching. Seals of this kind stamped clay sealings on jars, baskets, and storeroom doors, marking ownership at the dawn of administered economies. The stamp seal predates the cylinder seal in Mesopotamia by well over a millennium, emerging in the Halaf and Ubaid horizons as a simple pierced button or gable incised with crosses, chevrons, and rosettes. Impressed into a lump of damp clay closing a jar or a door bolt, the device functioned as a signature before writing: whoever broke the seal broke the record. The quartered cross seen here is among the most persistent of these devices, appearing across Anatolia, northern Syria, and the Zagros foothills for thousands of years, its meaning likely both administrative and apotropaic. Animal designs, by contrast, tend toward the schematic in this period, reduced to the few strokes that distinguish horn from haunch, and the boundary between a winged creature and an economically drawn caprid is often left to the modern viewer to settle. Item # 204841
Estimation:€353.15
Vers la vente aux enchèresVoir tous les objets deArtemis Fine ArtsouArts asiatiques
Estimation:
€353.15
TRÅG, 2 st, bemålade, bomärkta, 1800-tal.
09/29/2026
€26.46
Est. : €70.62
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