Seleucid Babylonian “Official” and “Private” Seals Reconsidered: A Seleucid Archival Tablet in the Collection of the Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina

Abstract

AbstractIt has been convenient for scholars categorizing Hellenistic Babylonian seal impressions found on clay tablets and on clay parchment-sealings to distinguish “private” seals, those owned and used by private individuals acting on their own behalf in personal matters, from “official” seals, those used by office bureaucrats and high-ranking officers of the state or temple in the execution of their respective institution’s affairs. It has been argued on the basis of the tablets’ written contents, with but a single exception that proves the rule, that the tablet seal impressions, known to the field since the mid-nineteenth century, are those of private individuals, specifically the local urban elite, pursuing their personal interests. With the later publication of the clay parchment-sealings, two new seal types were distinguished by their Greek inscriptions and iconography and labeled official: (1) the largely aniconic seals identifying one of several different local Seleucid tax offices; (2) the large oval or rectangular seals with well-modeled intaglios depicting heads/busts and anthropomorphic figures of Greek style all identifying thechreophýlax, the local royal records officer. In the first comprehensive study of the parchment-sealings, Rostovtzeff (1932), expanded the definition of Seleucid official seals to include other large non-epigraphic impressions also displaying portraiture and figures obviously similar to the epigraphic seals, as well as those displaying the Seleucid anchor, certain that these too were all seals of thechreophýlakes. It is argued herein, in part on the basis of the appearance of two such large anepigraphic portrait seals on the edge of a previously unedited Seleucid cuneiform archival tablet, that such seals are not those of royal officers but rather those of preeminent members of urban elite families and their agents; it is also argued that the anchor seal impressions are those of the kings themselves.