A Selection of Sassanian Stamp Seals

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.