Selves Engraved on Stone explores the ways in which multiple aspects of identity were constructed through the material, visual, and textual characteristics of personal seals from ancient Mesopotamia and Syria in the latter half of the 2nd millennium BCE.

Typically carved in stone, the cylinder seal is perhaps the most distinctive art form to emerge in ancient Mesopotamia. It spread across the Near East from ca. 3300 BCE onwards, and remained in use for millennia. What was the role of this intricate object in the making of a person's social identity? As the first comprehensive study dedicated to this question, Selves Engraved on Stoneexplores the ways in which different but often intersecting aspects of identity, such as religion, gender, community and profession, were constructed through the material, visual, and textual characteristics of seals from Mesopotamia and Syria.

Studies of seals and sealing practices have traditionally investigated aspects of social, political, economic, and ideological systems in ancient societies throughout the Old World. Previously, scholarship has focused on description and documentation, chronology and dynastic histories, administrative function, iconography, and style. More recent studies have emphasized context, production and use, and increasingly, identity, gender, and the social lives of seals, their users, and the artisans who produced them. Using several methodological and theoretical perspectives, this volume presents up-to-date research on seals that is comparative in scope and focus. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach advances our understanding of the significance of an important class of material culture of the ancient world. The volume will serve as an essential resource for scholars, students, and others interested in glyptic studies, seal production and use, and sealing practices in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Ancient South Asia and the Aegean during the 4th-2nd Millennia BCE.

Not only their function in Ancient Near Eastern daily life makes stamp and cylinder seals an important subject of study, but also their outstanding aesthetic beauty. The examples of stamp and cylinder seals catalogued and described in the present volume are part of the collection of Ancient Near Eastern glyptic art acquired by the Kist family during the last century. The collection consists of hundreds of seals ranging from the fourth millennium Uruk and Jemdet Nasr periods up to the Achaemenid period of the first millennium B.C. The majority of the artifacts are published here for the first time, making the volume into a unique and essential resource for Ancient Near Eastern scholars and art historians.