Sassanian stamp seals form the largest class of surviving artefacts from Mesopotamia and thus document life and society unlike any other material culture. Sassanian seals were a personal statement of identity, regardless of the fact that many seals shared the same similar glyptic iconography. Iconography on Sassanian seals was varied and certainly multi-faceted. Whilst portraits could be a personal depiction, images of animals were linked to mythology and cultic practices. Studying the material culture at hand, it is also clear that many motifs that were adapted to a Sassanian aesthetic, might have been directly borrowed from the existing Babylonian and Assyrian prototypes. Detailed depictions, once employed by Assyrian artists, were reduced to a standardised, schematised formula and were blended with abstract, geometric lines, as seen in Sassanian illustrations.
