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TRACING THE ACQUISITION HISTORY OF SOME OLD SYRIAN POPULAR STYLE CYLINDER SEALS*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2016

Barbara A. Porter
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Abstract

Examples of Middle Bronze Age cylinder seals, categorized today as “Old Syrian popular style” have been documented since the mid-nineteenth century, albeit usually without any dating or provenance information. This particular subset of the vast array of ancient Near Eastern glyptic has recently been studied by the author and an acquisition history identified for many of them. Here the disparate paths that brought some of these seals into museums and private collections are explored to demonstrate, not only the vagaries of where these eminently portable objects end up, but to highlight the importance for modern scholarship of documenting such histories.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 77 , December 2015 , pp. 143 - 157
Copyright
© The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2015 

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Footnotes

*

As many of Dominique Collon's recent articles have been included in volumes in honor of her colleagues, it is a pleasure to offer here some insights into the acquisition history of a selection of the seals included in my doctoral thesis, which owes so very much to her. The details presented here derive from research for a Columbia University dissertation entitled Old Syrian Popular Style Cylinder Seals (Porter 2001). The basis for the investigation of this seal type evolved out of a seminar conducted by Edith Porada and John M. Russell in spring 1989 at Columbia University. My research started under the aegis of Edith Porada (see, for example, Porada 1993: 575, n. 40), with whom I conferred closely while forming the corpus, and she was able to attend my first lecture on this subject in April 1990 as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's colloquium for fellows. In the end, this doctoral study was completed under the guidance of Dominique, who had studied with Dr. Porada in the late 1960s and defended her Columbia dissertation in 1971 (Collon 1975), thus she returned to New York thirty years later for the other side of the table. A few of the seals discussed here and in the dissertation were included in Dominique's book First Impressions: Cylinder Seals in the Ancient Near East (Collon 1987; 2005).

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