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Seal catalogue

The seal catalogue is the register of seal objects. Reading it requires permission for seals; creating and editing entries requires permission to edit them.

Object and attestation

In sigillographic usage "seal impression" means the mark left on one tablet. DAPCA keeps the two apart, and the vocabulary follows the data:

  • a seal is the object — siglum, type, inscription, images, bibliography. It exists independently of any tablet;
  • an attestation is the fact that this seal appears on that tablet. One seal has as many attestations as the tablets it was impressed on.

This page documents the register of objects. Attestations are recorded from the tablet, in its Seals mode.

Named entities

1. Finding a seal

The list offers three ways in, which combine:

Filter Matches
Search the siglum, or the text of the inscription — both the cuneiform and the Luwian one
Type cylinder, stamp, ring, scarab, other
Tablet the siglum of a text: returns the seals attested on that tablet

The third is the one worth remembering: it answers "which seals were impressed on this document?" from the catalogue side, without opening the text.

2. The record

Field Notes
Siglum the identifier of the object. It is unique across the catalogue
Type cylinder, stamp, ring, scarab, other
Inscriptions recorded separately for the cuneiform and the Luwian legend
Notes free text
Attestations the tablets on which the seal occurs
Bibliography references typed by function: edition, photograph, hand copy, commentary, reading, iconography
Images typed (Seal, Picture, RTI, Hand copy) and, where relevant, by face (complete, obverse, reverse, top, bottom, left, right)

Named entities

Two details that regularly cause questions:

  • Seals without a siglum coexist. Uniqueness is enforced on sigla that exist; an unpublished or unlabelled seal can be catalogued and given one later.
  • Image visibility is not uniform. Images of the complete face are shown to every authenticated user; the other faces are shown only to accounts holding permission for seals. A tablet page may therefore display fewer images than the catalogue record does.

Each attestation in the record carries a double link: to the text, and to the tablet's Seals mode, where the anchoring of that attestation is managed.

3. Creating a seal and attesting it

The two operations are separate, as everywhere in this section (§4 of the introduction).

  1. Create the object here, with New Seal. At a minimum it needs a siglum, or an inscription by which it can be found again; everything else can be added later.
  2. Attest it on a tablet: open the text in Seals mode, search the seal by siglum or inscription, and press Attest. A seal can be attested only once per tablet.
  3. Anchor the attestation to the text, optionally: link it to the $Seal notation that describes the impression, and to the personal-name token of the owner as named on that tablet.

Creae/edit a seal

Named entities

The owner link is recorded per attestation, not on the object, and this is deliberate: the same seal may be described with different owner names across texts, and it is the occurrence — not a normalised string — that is linked. This is what makes the question "which seals belonged to this individual?" answerable through the prosopography.

Removing an attestation removes the link and its anchors only. The object stays in the catalogue with all its other attestations.

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