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Seals and Sealing: Aegean
 Return to Seals and Sealing
The first stamp seals appear in the Aegean from around 2400 B.C. A number of sites have produced seal impressions, which were applied to the mouths, necks, and handles of jars, pressed onto baskets and boxes, and probably also applied to door locking devices as a means of protecting the contents of containers and rooms. Seals were also stamped directly onto pottery, on the handles and bodies of vases. On the Greek mainland seal designs are geometric with continuous looping patterns and combinations of various elements. On Crete, however, by the late third millennium B.C., pictorial imagery appears in the form of walking lions, engraved on one of the two ends of bone and ivory cylindrical stamp seals (the other end carved with floral or geometric motifs). In addition, at the site of Poliochni in the northeast Aegean, a cylinder seal was found bearing imagery derived from the Near East and demonstrating close interaction with Syria and Anatolia.
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