Hellenistic Sealings and Archives: Proceedings of The Edfu Connection, an International Conference Edited by Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter and Ronald Wallenfels. (Studies in Classical Archaeology 10). Turnhout: Brepols 2021. Pp. xxxvi+260. €110. ISBN 978-2-503-59127-8 (paper).
2022; Archaeological Institute of America; Volume: 126; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/721902
ISSN1939-828X
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeology and Historical Studies
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewHellenistic Sealings and Archives: Proceedings of The Edfu Connection, an International Conference Edited by Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter and Ronald Wallenfels. (Studies in Classical Archaeology 10). Turnhout: Brepols 2021. Pp. xxxvi+260. €110. ISBN 978-2-503-59127-8 (paper).Noah KayeNoah KayeMichigan State University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreIn the early summer of 47 BCE, Julius Caesar accompanied Cleopatra VII on a sightseeing tour up the Nile. Arriving in Upper Egypt, the pair stepped onto the west bank of the river at Edfu (Apollinopolis Magna), sacred to the falcon god Horus, the site of his ancient mammisi (house of birth) and now a Ptolemaic temple (fig. 1) with an awe-inspiring hypostyle hall. Construction of the 137 × 47 m temple had taken almost two centuries, and Caesar and Cleopatra would have entered through doors installed just 10 years earlier as the finishing touch. Somewhere inside the sprawling complex of side chapels and annexes was an archive, in which Caesar or an attendant deposited a document. Was the priesthood of Horus being shaken up? Or was it a purchase of land, say, for a foundation? We just don’t know, but we have good reason to believe that Caesar performed one transaction or another at Edfu during a stop on the way to Elephantine: a clay sealing with his portrait was attached to the lost document. The unique sealing with its portrait of the balding, frowning man, which Branko F. van Oppen de Ruiter has matched to the Tusculum bust, was discovered ca. 1906 and belongs to the “Edfu Hoard,” more than 800 clay sealings, mostly held in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, and the Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam. In a fashion that will be familiar to numismatists, sigillography has created a new historical fact: Caesar stopped at Edfu on his way to Elephantine and transacted. Such are the tangible realities that this type of evidence conjures up.Fig. 1. The Ptolemaic Temple at Edfu in Upper Egypt, photographed a few decades before the discovery of the Edfu Hoard (Wilhelm Hammerschmidt, 1860s; courtesy Getty Open Content Program, 84.XO.1278.81).View Large ImageDownload PowerPointThe volume Hellenistic Sealings and Archives, edited by Van Oppen de Ruiter and Ronald Wallenfels, is a treasury of evidence, a global survey of Hellenistic sigillography, updating Archives et sceaux du monde hellénistique (M.-F. Boussac and A. Invenizzi, eds., École française d’Athènes 1996). This new survey combines archaeological results—often tantalizingly preliminary ones, such as Zosia Archibald’s work on Pistiros—with records of unprovenanced objects from auctions and museums. Most of the contributions take aim at the explication of a particular “hoard,” a term with no standard definition in the Vocabulaire international de la sillographie of Robert-Henri Bautier (Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali 1990), but which seems to mean here a substantial group of sealings found together—though the “Edfu Hoard” actually does not quite fit the bill by the authors’ own admission (3, 15). The first part of the book is devoted to this virtual, iconographic archive from Edfu (ca. 185–25 BCE): Pharaonic-themed sealings (Robert Bianchi), Hellenistic-themed ones (Van Oppen de Ruiter), and royal portraits (Catherine Lorber). The heart of the book consists of reporting and analysis of excavations, from Sicily to India, with two regional surveys tacked on. One is a case study of Uruk by Wallenfels that sets its scant corpus in the broader context of Arsacid Mesopotamia and Iran, and the other is a useful overview of the Hellenistic Far East (Gunnar Dumke). Excavated archives from Hellenistic city centers are also presented in detail, including the sensational 145 m long, purpose-built archive building from Seleucia-on-the-Tigris (Vito Messina) and the chreophylakeion at Dura-Europos (Gaëlle Coqueugniot). In between, one finds two syntheses: Sharon Herbert’s valiant attempt to find patterns in her survey of Hellenistic sealings practices, and a penetrating study by Laure Marest of the use of royal portraits in this medium.The Edfu sealings are the subject of their own forthcoming catalogue raisonné and are presented here in batches under the rubric of Egyptian vs. Hellenistic. While Van Oppen de Ruiter writes of the “inextricable entanglement of these categories” (65), it seems at times like the ancient engravers were in fact trying to sort them out. Along with the hieroglyphs of the Ptolemies, the kings as harpooning pharaohs, playing the role of Onuris in the myth of Horus, we find everyday cross-cultural interaction facilitated in the form of an impression that depicts the falcon god named with the Greek legend, Ὧρος (figs. 2.9 and again 4.65). Another example of communication across a cultural divide depicts a Grace and Eros scene—labeled Χάρις—and framed by an unexpected star and a winged solar disc, which are Egyptian elements (fig. 4.43). Also noteworthy is a sealing of the second millennium with the praenomen of Sesostris III, remembered as a patron of Edfu (fig. 2.17). An entire cycle of stories about the mytho-historical Sesostris was in circulation in Graeco-Roman Egypt, transmitted by Herodotus and Diodorus, and preserved in popular Demotic literature in the Tebtunis temple library of the second century CE. No simple heirloom, the object evokes the “archaeophilia” that Felipe Rojas traces in Roman Egypt and elsewhere in his book The Pasts of Roman Anatolia: Interpreters, Traces, Horizons (Cambridge 2019). Finally, an emphasis on uniting the study of coins and seals comes through in Lorber’s essay on the portraiture of the middle and late Ptolemies. While the kings appear clean-shaven on coins, they wear beards on seals, thus the image of “a king depicted as past his physical prime, even elderly … an enigma” (50). The stark contrast between the two media points to a functional difference and accords well with results of a similar study of Seleucid material by Panagiotis Iossif (Mythos n.s. 8, 2014, 35–53).Herbert’s synthetic study of Hellenistic sealing and archival practices brings a certain amount of order to the data by drawing out two key metrics: the number of different seals employed and the ratio of seals to impressions (sealings). A greater number of distinct seals, often on the same documents, signals more officialdom, while a low ratio of seals to impressions points to the public character of an archive. These terms, perhaps unavoidably, compel the author to find that most archives are neither wholly public and official nor private and unofficial—making the outliers fascinating. For example, archives from the Punic world evidence strict control, so it seems, in sacred contexts such as the precinct of Baal and Tanit at Carthage and the dormant (?) Temple C at Selinunte (91). Yet, as Jane Ainsworth suggests in her study of Melqart-Heracles on sealings from Selinunte, the third-century archive may bear traces of a nonstate or subcivic network of individual traders. For broader patterns of use, the reader can look to the intriguing findings of Marest on the social use of royal portraits. She finds that royal friends and allies were usually the ones deploying the image of the king, while the monarch himself shrewdly withdrew his face from the visual field.A worthy goal of the volume is to unite the study of sealings—with or without context—and excavated archives. In the end, this proves to be very difficult, even for the archaeologists digging with that goal expressly in mind. Toren Schreiber provides a preliminary report from the city of Doliche, attached to the prominent sanctuary of Jupiter Dolichenus (at Dülük Baba Tepesi, near Gaziantep, Turkey). Several rounds of excavation were launched in 2017 in Field 415 on the Keber Tepe with the aim of finding the archive and public center of the city underneath a Roman bath. In the end, 1,444 sealings were recovered, but no building. These add to a growing “archive repertoire” (103) that does smack of officialdom, with 25% of 4,255 sealings coming from just 2% of known seals. We also glimpse civic identity captured on the typology of the Tyche seal, traced from ca. 100 BCE to ca. 100 CE, and an imperial transition in the dexiosis scene-type that shows the Roman emperor taking up the role of the kings of Commagene in the cult of Jupiter.Even where public archive buildings have been located, thorny interpretive problems abound. These are apparent in Messina’s study of the monumental archive in the agora of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, with its 14 modular rooms with niches divided into two suites. While he can reconstruct a hypothetical correspondence between sealing practices and documents’ contents or transaction types such as the salt tax (table 9.1), the relationship of the archive to the architecture, rearranged it seems on the eve of the Parthian sack, is all but lost—“chaos,” laments the excavator (160). We are on surer footing at Tel Kedesh, as Herbert notes that all but 90 of its more than 2,000 sealings came from the back room of a three-room complex—“the deep archive” (131). At Dura-Europos, however, the architecture seems to come alive. The chreophylakeion, an office of public witnesses and registrars of sales, loans, and other contracts known by different titles under Seleucid, Parthian, and Roman rule, was constructed on the agora of Dura when it was laid out, no earlier than the mid second century BCE. In the back room stood a bronze statue, perhaps of Seleucus I—the very presence of the king in the archives of the Hellenistic polis, as Laura Boffo once put it. The archive was in an adjacent room with diamond-shaped shelves atop a mudbrick bench. Dated graffiti and comparison with a Ptolemaic notarial system allow us to plot the quantity of documents accumulating in the shelving system over time. All this adds fine-tuned detail to the archaeological picture of archives already presented by Coqueugniot in her book Archives et bibliothèques dans le monde grec: Édifices et organisation (BAR-IS 2536, Archaeopress 2013). It also provides positive test cases for the conclusions reached by Michele Faraguna et al. that ancient archives, especially public ones, were rarely centralized (Archives and Archival Documents in Ancient Societies, Edizioni Università di Trieste 2013). At Doliche, for example, the same seal is used by temple administrators at the sanctuary and in the city (124). Likewise, chronologically, the central archive on the agora of Dura could not have housed the royal Law on Inheritance (P. Dura 12).While the book presents the results of the most recent generation of scholarship in sigillography, it also promises a digitized future under the banner of the Signet Consortium, an international network (7). Signet is currently building a digital platform for Hellenistic sealings and archives, which will be structured by open linked data. Such a platform has the potential to tie together vast storehouses of archaeological data and connect cultural heritage stakeholders with scholars. The volume’s editor forecasts a coming age without connoisseurship, in which automated image recognition will facilitate big data research with Hellenistic sealings. Yet, as Van Oppen himself admits, the authors of this collection chose, “for better or worse” (7), to abjure a shared thesaurus of terms for the artifacts. This is unfortunate, and not only because nonspecialist readers may be vexed by the “variety of terms such as bulla, cretula, impression, matrix, seal, sealing, signet, and stamp, not to mention flat, convex, (napkin-) ring, and saddle sealings” (7). It is also unfortunate because an opportunity seems to have been missed to create a controlled vocabulary, the kind of multilingual word bank of standard terms that an open linked data schema for Hellenistic sealings on the model of EpiDoc must possess. A contemporary research project on Byzantine seals at King’s College, London (Digiseal) has in fact developed such a controlled vocabulary within the framework of an XML-based and TEI-compliant standard for the encoding of seals, known as SigiDoc. Perhaps, until the digital platform arrives, a study like Hellenistic Sealings and Archives may be destined for the proverbial academic silo.Notes[email protected] Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 126, Number 4October 2022 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 275Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721902HistoryPublished online August 09, 2022 Copyright © 2022 by the Archaeological Institute of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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