Seal Rotation Device – an Automated System for documenting Cylinder Seals

Abstract

Cylinder seals are complex artifacts used in many early administrative systems especially in the Near East and Egypt. They are also linked to religious practices and concepts of identity. Several classical methods can be applied to document these objects, like photography, drawing and molding in plaster or plasticine. In addition to more recent methods like structured light scanning, we present an alternative method for 3D data acquisition. By combining existing technologies in a particular way, seals can be documented fast, cost efficiently and safe from a conservation viewpoint. This method developed at the Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR) at Heidelberg University is a two-step procedure: first several series of images are obtained with a digital reflex camera in an automated way. The seal is mounted between two soft silicone buffers. An Arduino-based control unit rotates the seal using a stepper motor and triggers the camera. In the second step a 3D reconstruction of the seal is computed with the photogrammetric structure-from-motion approach. We will show first results acquired with this method both at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology and the British Museum in London.