Chapter 11 focuses on ancient ‘contracts’, with specific reference to commerce, property and other economic activities for which there is relevant evidence. The chapter begins with urbanization in southern Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium bce, bringing together archaeological, material and written evidence in order to introduce a broad working idea of ‘contracts’. The next section moves on to a discussion of technical ancient terms and concepts, noting the ‘considerable terminological instability in the common English translations of the original terms’. The following section turns to ‘contracts’ between states, whilst the next develops a comparative analysis of ‘oaths in interpersonal agreements’. The following two sections analyse specific questions surrounding the use of writing and ’the contract of sale’, noting that there is surviving evidence for the use of (different forms of) contacts of sale across every ancient legal system. The chapter concludes by drawing together a set of generalized conceptions of ‘contract’ and briefly suggesting that long-distance trade - among other factors - may lie behind some of the similarities - for example the use of seals - evident across the extant ancient evidence.

Marine mammals are a diverse collection of about 137 mammals that have returned, in varying degrees, to life in the water. This group includes cetaceans (whales, dolphins and porpoises), pinnipeds (seals and sea lions), sirenians (sea cows) and a few species of otters and bears.

Chapter 4 is oriented around a letter-making signet ring whose imprint makes Curculio’s forged text “real.” Its agency, however, is not confined to epistolary deception, and this chapter unpacks the anulus’ potent theatrical agency by elucidating its operation in excess of human design. I shift my focus in exploring the metatheatrical portrait generated by Curculio’s epistolary motif. Whereas Chapters 1 through 3 consider the common ability of letters and scripts to evoke absent people, here I look at the power of these media to conjure up faraway places. Both epistles and dramatic texts bring “here” to “there” (or vice versa), a capacity enacted in Curculio’s composition of a letter at Epidaurus which encapsulates his encounter in Caria and flaunted in the choragus’ tour that blurs the line between theatrical and experiential space. Finally, this chapter returns to questions of innovation and artistic dependence. Curculio’s missive invites us to reflect on the impossibility of originality for the author on the outside when an author on the inside makes the play by recomposing yet another author’s text. A coda considers the play’s seal as related to the literary sphragis.

The smallest and least-studied of the Chelsea porcelain manufactory’s wares are seals for watch fobs and étui, first described in an advertisement of 1754 as “Trinkets for Watches (mounted in gold and unmounted) in various shapes.” Rival manufacturers, Charles Gouyn, near St. James’s Square, produced similar pocket-sized toys and trinkets. At less than an inch in height, these miniatures depicted birds, animals, and amatory subjects, alongside figurines reflecting eighteenth-century society and culture. Aesthetically crude in reduction and compression, the figures are distorted, and over time the details covered in glaze and paint are gradually softened through constant caressing or clinking against a metal fob or étui. Many survive with generic intaglio hardstone matrices mounted in precious metal. Over 200 models have been identified—the majority published in G. E. Bryant’s Chelsea Porcelain Toys (1925)—attesting to the importance of consumer culture at mid-century. Novelties intended as gifts or love tokens, they are inherently charming for their smallness, yet their subject matter frequently touches on bigger issues of globalization, empire, colonialism, and race. These themes privilege the elite market for these wares, exposing the passions, pursuits, prejudices, and obsessions of their customers, who literally held the world in their hands.

Cultural, social and legal markers of elite maturity were shifting over the central Middle Ages, generating changes which affected how young people experienced late childhood and early adulthood. This chapter examines how some of these developments unfolded in relation to child kingship. It reinforces an argument which recurs throughout the book: that change over time was more substantial than cultural and political differences between kingdoms. First, the chapter examines the shifting significance of a boy king’s knighting. The acceptance of arms had been part of a child king’s rite of passage to young adulthood in the mid-eleventh century but, a century and a half later, knighting had instead become a crucial element in a royal child’s rite of passage to kingship. Then the chapter turns to consider the seals produced for and used by boy kings, emphasising the increasing diversity in seal forms and their creation from the thirteenth century. A crucial theme throughout the entire discussion is how kingship altered a child’s progression from boyhood to manhood, distinguishing a boy king’s experience of adolescence from other elite youths.

This chapter takes a fresh look at the ideological and theological significance of the Mandylion of Edessa, an object of unparalleled importance for the religious identity of the Byzantines. Departing significantly from previous scholarship, it argues that the legend of the Mandylion is not about an especially authentic visual portrait of Christ’s face, but rather about Christ as the true image (eikon) of God the Father, understood in a purely ontological sense. Middle Byzantine theological writings about the Mandylion ought also to be read as late contributions to the debate on the legitimacy of visual representations of Christ.

Probably during the fifteenth century BC the Hittite ruling elite developed a second script, the Anatolian hieroglyphs, out of an already existing repertoire of symbols whose roots may go back to the Old Assyrian period. Egyptian inspiration for this script seems unlikely. Typologically, it fits in with an Aegaean script like Linear B but it may well be an originally Anatolian creation. Given the fact that the Luwian language became increasingly widespread within central Anatolia, that, where visible, Luwian is the language of the hieroglyphic inscriptions, and that the imported cuneiform and the Hittite language were never used for publicly displayed inscriptions, the creation and promotion of the hieroglyphs were part of the same attempt at unifying the kingdom. This chapter ends with a brief introduction to the Anatolian hieroglyphic script and system.

An overview of all possible terms denoting wooden tablets indicates that few can be regarded as positive evidence. As a result, it is argued that wooden tablets played a secondary and even modest role in scribal communication. There is also no real evidence for the theory that they were inscribed in hieroglyphs instead of cuneiform. The strong Luwian character of the terms discussed reinforces the picture of a Luwian speaking population in the chancellery. Other issues discussed here are the objects often identified as styli and assumed to be used for writing hieroglyphs, the cursivization of the hieroglyphic script, and Hittite terms for writing.

This chapter gives an overview of all sources written in Anatolian hieroglyphs, that is, seals and inscriptions. Whereas cuneiform was the strictly internal means of communication within the kingdom, the hieroglyphs were used whenever the population at large was addressed. Given the sociolinguistic situation hieroglyphic inscriptions were written in Luwian, not in Hittite.

The thousands of bullae and other objects impressed with seals found in the Hittite capital Hattusa have thus far been interpreted, almost exclusively, as related to wooden tablets. The seal impressions contain the names and very often also the titles of kings and high-ranking officials allegedly witnessing royal decisions recorded on the wooden tablets that were lost in fires that destroyed the buildings where they were kept. Such buildings would have housed the state archives of the Hittite kingdom. This theory leaves a lot of essential questions unanswered. Instead, using Neo-Assyrian and later parallels, it is proposed that these collections of sealings were used as reference collections to check the authenticity of a seal and to detect forgeries. Seal forgeries were common in the ancient Near East and checking earlier impressions from the same persons was the only way to verify the authenticity of incoming sealed documents and goods.