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Audio Guide
Art of the First Cities: The Third Millennium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus
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Administrative tablet with seal impressions, ca. 3000–2900 B.C.; Jamdat Nasr. Mesopotamia. Proto-cuneiform inscription. Clay; H. 5.3 cm (2 1/8 in.); W. 4.8 cm (1 7/8 in.); Thickness 3.8 cm (1 1/2 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gift, 1988 (1988.433.1).
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Paul Collins
The images on this five-thousand year old tablet were impressed upon it with multiple and incomplete rollings of a cylinder seal. We see a hunting scene, with two dogs and other animals. A faint impression on the lower right corner shows a man in profile. This type of figure is recognizable from many other images: he's a city leader, a "priest-king." In the earliest cities, seal impressions provided important administrative and economic functions. Indeed, on the back of this tablet is an account of grain distribution, represented by schematic symbols and pictures drawn in the clay. So this seal proved that its owner participated in the transaction, or had witnessed it. Piotr Michalowski, professor of Ancient Near Eastern Civilizations at the University of Michigan:
Piotr Michalowski
The tablet, like most of the tablets that you will see in the exhibit, is made simply of dirt and water. But it's also what they used to build their houses with, by making bricks out of clay, their temples, but it's also what they used to write upon.
Paul Collins
Cylinder seals were invented before writing—around 3400 B.C.—and continued to be used for millennia. You'll be seeing cylinder seals throughout this exhibition—along with modern impressions made from them. Their imagery is often the most important evidence we have about larger-scale monuments and buildings, which are now lost.
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