ABSTRACT
We are all familiar with stamps that make marks, either in ink or with an impres-sion, to prevent unauthorized tampering of letters or packages. An equally familiar use for such marks is on official documents. You cannot get a loan from a bank or pass through an international border without receiving an official authorizing stamp on your papers. The problem of securing and protecting possessions against illegitimate use and the recording of authorization has been a challenge for a long time. As early as the sixth millennium BC in villages of the aceramic Neolithic period, a particularly creative and enduring solution to the monitoring and tracking of things was found. During the excavations at the site of Tell Sabi Abyad in Syria (Duistermatt 2000), abundant evidence indicates that a simple and profound solution had been found: a unique and distinctive mark that held conventional meaning familiar within the community could be repeatedly made through impressions into a soft material, like clay (Figure 16.1). Some two thousand years later, at the time of the first urban centers, the potential of this ingenious system of a unique but reproducible mark with shared meaning was the centerpiece of an administrative system of the control of goods and the identity of actors that remains in use today. The first seals were stamps that were carved with designs, both abstract and figural, that were impressed into clay masses used to secure stone and clay vessels, bags, bundles and finally doors (Ferioli et al. 2007). Later, appearing alongside the invention of proto-writing, a new form of seal was invented. This cylindrical form carried imagery on its continuous side that was transferred through rolling into soft clay applied to secure mobile containers, stationary doors or administrative documents made from clay.
