Two Near Eastern Bronze Age Stamp Seals - Stone Bird & Pottery Foot

Near East, Bronze Age, Levant and Anatolia. A pair of small stamp seals, each cut as miniature sculpture rather than the usual plain button. The larger, of gray-brown terracotta, is modeled as a human foot, the arch swelling gently before rising into the stump of the lower leg just above the ankle, while the flat sole carries a deeply incised abstract device read as a flowering vase, volutes scrolling out on either side of a central bloom. The smaller, of purplish stone, takes the compact silhouette of a nesting bird and is pierced laterally so it could hang on a cord as an amulet as well as serve as a matrix; its underside bears an ithyphallic figure, a fertility motif recurrent in second-millennium BCE glyptic. Both were pressed into damp clay to close jars, doors, and bullae, marking ownership and certifying that a container arrived unopened. Stamp seals precede cylinder seals in the Near East and never fully surrendered to them. In the Levant and Anatolia the stamp form persisted for millennia, and by the third millennium BCE carvers were shaping the seal's back into small-scale sculpture: animals, birds, hands, and feet. Such zoomorphic and somatic handles were not idle decoration. A seal worn on a cord doubled as an amulet, and the chosen shape lent its protective character to the wearer, while the engraved face below stayed strictly functional. The ithyphallic figure on the bird seal belongs to a durable vocabulary of fertility and apotropaic imagery in Anatolian glyptic, where explicit potency motifs were understood to repel harm as much as to invoke increase. The foot form carries a parallel logic: the impressed footprint stands for presence, ownership, and the legal weight of the person who left the mark. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 204804

Estimation:€267.24

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