Tracing the Acquisition History of Some Old Syrian Popular Style Cylinder Seals

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.