This volume highlights current trends in interdisciplinary scholarship on seals and sealing practices in the ancient world, touching on fields of art history, archaeology, Assyriology, and anthropology.

It comprises 33 chapters written by prominent international scholars that explore the production and use of seals and a diverse range of sealing practices in the ancient world. Contributions cover a vast geographical area that includes Anatolia, Egypt, Greece, the Indus Valley, Iran, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Spain, from the Neolithic through the present. The volume is organized into seven parts: Image Agency, Objecthood, and Object Biography; Materiality; Text and Image; Identity; Gender; Senses, Experience, and the Body; and Practice and Technology. This organizational structure allows readers to compare case studies around similar methodologies, rather than focus on specific geographies or periods. The volume provides fresh perspectives on seals and sealing practices as a means to study cultural practice, social interaction, and cognition from a wide range of cultures and geographies.

The Routledge Companion to Seals and Seal Studies in Antiquity offers an invaluable resource for researchers and students in various fields, including West Asian, Mediterranean, and South Asian studies.

Autorentext

Sarah J. Scott is Professor of Art History and Director of the Arts Administration Program at Wagner College. Her scholarship focuses on both small objects such as cylinder seals (Seals and Sealing in the Ancient World: Case Studies from the Near East, Egypt, the Aegean, and South Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2018) and monumental architecture and narrative ("Imagining Architectural Space: Methodological Approaches for Assyrian Palaces," in How Do We Want the Past to Be? On Methods and Instruments of Visualizing the Ancient Reality, Gorgias Press, 2016).

Oya Topçuoglu is Associate Professor of Instruction in the Middle East and North African Languages Program at Northwestern University. She is an archaeologist, who specializes in the art, archaeology, and history of ancient Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. Her research addresses issues of social identity and cultural exchange and the effects of political change and ideology on seals, seal imagery, and sealing practices in the second millennium bce. Additionally, she studies the looting and illegal trafficking of antiquities from Iraq and Syria, the political uses of the ancient past, and its role in the formation of national identities in the modern Middle East.