Ancient Cylinder Seals

General Bibliography

By Anna Glenn

To read more about cylinder seals, an excellent introduction is Dominique Collon’s First Impressions: Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East. For more detailed discussions, see the series Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum: Cylinder Seals, which has five volumes dedicated to particular periods (Vol. 1: Uruk through Early Dynastic; Vol. 2: Akkadian through Ur III; Vol. 3: Isin/Larsa and Old Babylonian; Vol. 5: Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian; and Vol 6: Pre-Achaemenid and Achaemenid.  Vol. 4, on the 2nd Millennium B.C.E., is still in publication). Other, relatively recent resources that are particularly useful or accessible are Keel-Leu and Teissier’s The Ancient Near Eastern Cylinder Seals of the Collections “Bible+Orient” of the University of Fribourg (which is mostly in German), Joost Kist’s Ancient Near Eastern Seals from the Kist Collection, and Parvine Merrillees’ Cylinder and Stamp Seals in Australian Collections. A valuable guide to ancient Near Eastern iconography is Black and Green’s Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary.

The following is a comprehensive list of resources used for this object story:

  • Black, Jeremy and Anthony Green, 1992. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary. London: British Museum Press.
  • Buchanan, Briggs, 1981. Early Near Eastern Seals in the Yale Babylonian Collection. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Collon, Dominique, 1982. Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum: Cylinder Seals II. Akkadian – Post Akkadian – Ur III – Periods. London: British Museum Publications.
  • —1986. Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum: Cylinder Seals III. Isin-Larsa and Old Babylonian Periods. London: British Museum Publications.
  • — 1987. First Impressions: Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East. London: British Museum Publications.
  • —2001. Catalogue of the Western Asiatic Seals in the British Museum: Cylinder Seals V. Neo-Asyrian and Neo-Babylonian Periods. London: British Museum Press
  • Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative. UCLA and Max Planck Institute <http://cdli.ucla.edu/> (accessed August, 2012).
  • Database of Neo-Sumerian Texts. Edited by Manuel Molina. Funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad <http://bdts.filol.csic.es/> (accessed August, 2012).
  • al-Gailani Werr, Lamia, 1988. Studies in the Chronology and Regional Style of Old Babylonian Cylinder Seals. Malibu: Undena Publications.
  • Green, Anthony, 1994. “ Mischwesen. B” Reallexikon der Assyriologie und Vorderasiatischen Archäologie 8: 246-264.
  • Hammade, Hamido, 1994. Cylinder Seals from the Collections of the Aleppo Museum, Syrian Arab Republic: 2. Seals of Known Provenance. BAR International Series 597. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.
  • Keel-Leu, Hildi and Beatrice Teissier, 2004. The Ancient Near Eastern Cylinder Seals of the Collections “Bible+Orient” of the University of Fribourg. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 200. Fribourg: Academic Press; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
  • Kist, Joost, 2003. Ancient Near Eastern Seals from the Kist collection: Three Millennia of Miniature Reliefs. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East, Vol. 18. Leiden: Brill.
  • Merrillees, Parvine H, 1990. Cylinder and Stamp Seals in Australian Collections. Deakin University Archaeology Research Unit Occasional Paper 3. Victoria.
  • Møller, Eva, 1992. Ancient Near Eastern Seals in a Danish Collection. Carsten Niebuhr Institute Publications 11. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press.
  • Porada, Edith, ed., 1948. Corpus of Ancient Near Eastern Seals in North American Collections: The Collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library. The Bollingen Series 14 (2 vols.). Washington, D.C.
  • —1993. “Why Cylinder Seals? Engraved Cylindrical Seal Stones of the Ancient Near East, Fourth to First Millennium B.C.” The Art Bulletin 75: 563-582.
  • Williams, Ellen Reeder, 1984. The Archaeological Collection of the Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.