Rolling Stones: Looking at Ancient Mesopotamian Cylinder Seals

Intro I thank you all for joining us today and taking part in this talk Let me thank Paula Zadigian the Manager of Public Programs as well as Tony Del Aversano the Public Programs Associate arranging this presentation and for guiding me through the technical aspects of doing this talk. Today I will give you a brief overview of cylinder seals from Ancient Mesopotamia and show you how the Morgan Library & Museum presents this remarkable material in a new way on our website where you can actually rotate the seal stones themselves and zoom in for spectacular details no other site does this the website was designed by Dan Friedman and he's the Senior Manager of Digital Media at the Morgan and I thank him for his invaluable work every image that you will see of the seals today and their impressions would not have been remotely possible (excuse me) would not have been remotely possible without the tremendous assistance of Marilyn Palmeri Imaging and Rights Manager at the Morgan and above all the Morgan's master photographer Graham Haber these images of the seals and their impressions involving painstaking hours of adjusting lights and involved tremendous patience from Graham in putting up with me throughout the entire process I cannot thank him enough really thank you Graham Morgan Library on the screen is the 1906 Mckim building that you all know and cherish as the Morgan Library and we hope to be able to reopen it for you soon this very building is considered the masterpiece of the American Renaissance architectural movement and the purpose of that movement was to bring the ideals of the Italian Renaissance to this country and try to transplant those ideals on American soil through the arts and architecture the Civil War had a profound effect on those of Morgan's generation and it was hoped that through culture and education such a tragedy would never be repeated the sober facade gives way to the dazzling splendor of the rotunda providing a setting that visually emphasizes the importance of what is in the building and that it is worthy of scholarly pursuit Morgan used much of his wealth to bring the material evidence of the world's culture to this country his efforts were perhaps the most significant of a national movement to enhance the cultural life of America itself in 1910 Pierpont Morgan received a letter from Mark Twain responding to Morgan's request for the author's manuscript of Pudd'nhead Wilson this bears repeating now in the remarkable times that we are all living through Twain replied quote, "One of my high ideals is gratified, which is to have something of mine placed elbow to elbow with that august company which you have gathered together to remain indestructible in a perishable world." end of quote that august company included Morgan's legendary collection of Ancient Mesopotamian seals and cuneiform tablets on the screen is what appears to be a large sculpture relief carved with great detail it dates to around the 7th century BC during the time of the Neo-Babylonians and the legendary Nebuchadnezzar the scene depicts a demonic lion facing a winged superhuman hero the lion's threatening gestures and the tension in the span of his sharp claws suggests his evil power but the hero will be the victor taller than the lion he acts with a calm force and the bull the victim or prize of the contest remains in his power despite the violence in the action the figure seems suspended in time a result of the symmetry of the design the subject of a heroic being protecting a domesticated animal from an attacking lion has a long tradition in Mesopotamia here on the screen in all its majestic grandeur this very image represents the culmination of several thousand years of Mesopotamian art however this relief is in reality only about one inch high and was made by me by rolling a stone cylinder as shown on the left onto a soft material in the miniature scale- in the miniature space of the seal the artist has created a contest of monumental proportions this is the magnificent monumental miniature world of Ancient Mesopotamian cylinder seals all of the impressions you will see today and on the website as well as on view in the library were made by me it has taken me years to perfect the technique in order to create an even and true impression of each seal Mesopotamia before we go further and discuss the importance of viewing the stones as well as the impressions let us briefly orient ourselves on the left is a map of the modern boundaries of the land the ancient Greeks called Mesopotamia you are all now familiar with this map showing the modern state of Iraq from the news relating all its chaos over the last several decades and on the right is a satellite view of the region Turkey is up here to the north where the two great rivers of Mesopotamia the Tigris and the Euphrates have their sources and below is the great flood plain all of this of southern Mesopotamia what you may- not- what you may not know is that from here with the border with Turkey in the north all the way to the gulf in the south the level of the land changes only about 30 feet the land is awesomely flat with no quantities of stone timber metals or minerals the raw material that epitomizes Mesopotamian civilization is mud refined into clay and used in the almost exclusively mudbrick architecture as shown here on the right in the Great Ziggurat of Ur as it has dominated the unrelentingly flat landscape for over 4000 years to this very day Mesopotamia bears the stamp of clay as does no other civilization and nowhere in the world but in Mesopotamia did people hold the idea of using soft clay as the vehicle for impressed signs to which established meanings were then assigned an intellectual achievement that is amount- that amounted to nothing less than the invention of writing on the screen is an actual sun-dried cuneiform tablet from the Morgan collection dating to the mid second millennium BC the tablet is less than four inches high and this is all the cuneiform inscription and here you can see it is impressed or signed as it were on its edge with a seal in order to authenticate the text of the tablet you see two standing figures here and this is the caps of the cylinder seal on the screen are a number of these cylinder seals again the largest here is less than an inch Cylinder Seals and a half they are among the smallest objects ever produced by sculptors you can immediately see the beauty in the variety of materials such as white and colored marbles, lapis lazuli, jaspers, carnelians, rock crystal, banded agates and a variety of chalcedonies among others none of these stones were available locally and all were imported from great distances such as the lapis lazuli coming from Afghanistan the seals were all drilled you see through here at the top so they could be worn indeed a primary function of these seals was amuletic a particular stone was thought to have a specific property that would have a beneficial effect on its wearer the stones such as lapis lazuli, jasper, rock crystal, and many others were often named in Mesopotamian dream and omen literature with their intrinsic metaphysical properties and beautiful colors quote, "If someone carries a seal of lapis lazuli, he will have protection and his god will rejoice in him. If he wears a seal of mushsharu rock (which is actually rock crystal), he will have good fortune wherever he may go." those are just two of a number of these moreover a seal had a direct relationship to a particular individual for the seal identified what it was used to seal a vessel, a sack, a storeroom, or a cuneiform tablet we have seen as the responsibility or as a responsibility of or an authentication by a specific person to that extent seals represent the earliest pictorial representation of a person on the left is an ancient jar ceiling from a private collection and it was rolled around 2300 BC and this is all that survives that must have- what must have been a spectacular cylinder seal now lost in the remote is past you see two heroic figures wrestling with the lions here's a line another lion an inscription and it was repeated again here and this would have been placed over the neck of a jar to secure a cloth covering the top of the jar and on the right is the tablet again from the Morgan Library that I have shown you here on the right is a drawing of a shell inlay showing a woman wearing a seal right here suspended from her garment pin this is the cord that's the seal and that's the garment pin the original is in the Metropolitan Museum and on the left is shown how the great Lady Puabi was found in her tomb at the Royal Cemetery of Ur in the late 1920s showing her garment pins with her seal this is her elaborate headdress much more elaborate than our lady on the right her shoulders were here everything's been removed but here is the garment pin that you see here and that's one of her seals as found flopping up as it was left in her burial the importance of seals to their owners has survived in a biblical text from the Song of Solomon (8:6) in which the bridegroom tells his beloved quote, "Wear me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm, for love is as strong as death, passion cruel as the grave; it blazes up like blazing fire; fiercer than any flame." end of quote what this means is that since seals were so personal they were not buried with you so if you were worn as the seal upon someone's heart and therefore buried with that person as here you would be together for eternity and your love would transcend death here is exactly one of those seals referred to in the biblical text and carved 3,300 years ago the impression is below and above are various views of the stone itself that can be found on our website the seal is a beautiful milky chalcedony as you see above and it shows a leaping stag in a landscape this could be a royal image as an epithet for a ruler or prince at the time was the same as the word for stag with that in mind an echo of its meaning is surely to be found in a biblical text from the Song of Solomon (2:8-9) in which the bride speaks of her bridegroom quote, "The voice of my beloved! Behold, he commeth leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a row or a young hart." end of quote this could be an illustration of that passage whether it is or is not is not the point all of this is in the air at the time Holland Cotter, Art Critic for the New York Times has described the image on the seal in particular quote, "A leaping stag carved around 1300 BC is a masterpiece of sculptural relief. The animal's startled eyes and taut muscles are caught with exquisite, not-a-stroke-wasted naturalism; two trees that flank him are near-abstract bursts of line, midair explosions. Talk about elegance." end of quote and this mottled grey limestone seal is perhaps one of the Grey Limestone Seal most striking animal representations in all of Mesopotamian art again the limestone seal at the top in several views from our website and the impression below made by me this dates again to about 1300 years before christ it shows a male figure pursuing an ostrich here possibly representing the earthly equivalent of the griffin thought to be the conveyor of death in other words the hero here is trying to overcome or conquer death in the biblical text from the Old Testament in the book of Job (39; 13-17) the ostrich is indeed considered a malevolent creature and the reason given is that it disdains its young which may actually help to explain the young ostrich here sort of being shunted off to the side by the fleeing adult notice the wonderful naturalism of the squawking head as the hero grasps the tail feathers of the bird the wing feathers bristle up in anger and annoyance that being molested by the hero and also notice how the entire design is balanced on this magnificent diagonal line starting in the upper left-hand corner starting here through the shoulders of the hero into the tail feathers down to the bottom the whole this beautifully balanced magnificent work of art in miniature Morgans Cylinder Seals Pierpont Morgan was justifiably proud of his collection of ancient Mesopotamian cylinder seals in 1909 a privately printed volume appeared which published illustrations of 300 impressions out of the some 1100 seals in Morgan's collection the author was the Reverend William Hayes Ward who was fascinated by how the images on the seals might inform biblical studies ward summarized Morgan's intentions as follows quote, "It is the chief project as I understand it of Mr. Morgan in bringing to this country the written and figural monuments of the early East such as tablets seal cylinders bar reliefs or statues to put within the reach of American scholars the material necessary for adding to the knowledge of the world." end of quote this volume from 1909 was the very first publication of cylinder seals in America here is an illustration of an impression of the seal getting to about the 12th century BC from that volume in what was then a lavish groundbreaking publication showing for the first time photographs of modern impressions of Morgan seals the impression is not up to the standards that have been developed since look how it's not clearly cut and as the impression was made the whole image started to become distended this is too much of a distance between the legs and by the time you get to a repeat of the inscription all the lines are curved they're not straight any longer never mind this was the first publication of seals and is that extremely important also notice that the lighting is somewhat uneven across the surface of the seal and much of the detail is missing so be it the publication had a run of 250 copies and was therefore not widely distributed a year later in 1910 Ward himself published the first comprehensive book of seals for a wide distribution and included 3,300 known examples of seals however published in line drawing only here is the same seal now numbered 707 and it was by these line drawings this one here and it was by these line drawings that the Morgan seals were known for the next 38 years until the Morgan seals were beautifully published in 1948 by Edith Porada this she was the first curator of seals in the history of the Morgan Library this was the first publication to treat seals as works of art not just iconographical information and present them as such here is that same impression or this is Porada's impression this is that same impression of the same seal as published in Edith Porada's corpus notice how beautifully cut it is the impression is not distended as the rolling has gone by everything is nice and straight and lined up and how beautifully raked the lighting is evenly across the surface of the cylinder seal scholarship focused on the seals because as I have said before Mesopotamia is basically a massive floodplain lacking in stone there is none of the monumental stone architecture or quantities of stone sculpture that attest to the achievements of Egypt, Greece, and Rome therefore the image is engraved on the seals to be understood by making modern impressions represent the largest body of pictorial information to have survived from Ancient Mesopotamia and provide a unique chronological and artistic sequence for well over 3000 years the publication of the Morgan seals in 1948 by Edith Porada remains to this day a standard reference and is how the Morgan seals have been known for the last 72 years but of course what has been missing all this time is this image of the actual object itself here is the magnificent seal stone that made that impression in the Porada publication a brilliant red sard for over a century the information provided has been incomplete limited to a drawing of the impression or at best the impression themselves in various qualities of rolling and often unpredictable lighting this is unfortunate for two reasons first here is an impression of a famous seal in Berlin Berlin Cylinder Seal as published in the late 30s and is the image of this seal that is often reproduced the description of the image identifies the standing male figure in the middle as standing as a priest king standing before an altar here and feeding the sacred herd of the goddess Inanna and this description is used until this day however if you go to Berlin and actually see the seal you will note that the so-called altar here is really just a chip in the stone this then changes the meaning of the scene as a whole one must always look at the stone itself and to do that you must travel to the various collections and in this case to Berlin recently a student also wrote that the animals these animals were untamed because they were depicted on a rocky rocky mountainous landscape again this mountainous landscape in reality is just damaged to the bottom of the stone here is that detail this is the seal stone itself which I took a photograph through the case and this is our hero there's his face there's his face this is the big chip that is the altar and these are the rough chips that are not mountainous landscape and also what you don't see is that this seal has a magnificent silver sculpture of an animal on top as a handle that's set into the stone itself and these are very very rare and secondly so first is to see the seal and how it's really carved on it and secondly and perhaps more importantly for the ancient Mesopotamians it was the seal itself that was of greater significance as I have mentioned they were worn as amulets and had deep personal associations and significance for the wear and the stones themselves had their own intrinsic meanings it is this personal and amuletic aspect of the seals which is often overlooked to this day before we go to the website I want to show you one specific example in the Morgan that profoundly illustrates the tremendous importance of being able to combine the iconographic information with the material of the seal first let's discuss the iconography here is the seal shown here only in the impression from the end of the Mesopotamian sequence dating to around 400 BC when Mesopotamia had been defeated and absorbed into the Persian kingdom the scene shows the Persian or Achemenid king dominating lions holding them up by their back legs and dangling over to two griffins in the perfectly symmetrical composition where all the design elements focus attention upon the king and his power the subject the so-called master of the animals of a heroic male being dominating animals is perhaps among the longest-lived motifs in art and particularly in Mesopotamian art and it had its origins in the late 4th millennium BC its first appearance Late Aurora Cylinder Seal is on this cylinder seal perhaps the earliest in the Morgan's collection it dates to about 3,300 BC to a phase in Mesopotamian history called the late Uruk period is a large piece of serpentine shown in three views from the website above here and in my impression down below at the center right here staring straight out at you is the earliest known representation of a cyclops hero anywhere in the world and indeed this is about 2,000 years before he becomes a prominent figure in Greek mythology and art he starts in Mesopotamia and many of my classical colleagues do not know this but here he is in the Morgan collection in New York so here is our staring eye of the cyclops and there you can see it in the seal itself a pair of confronting lions stands on his shoulders you see here the lion's tails the lion's tails the bodies and their fore paws are on his head and then he's grasping the lions by their hind legs and dangling them as they try to bite at his ankles the lions that the cyclops grasp symbolize the chaotic power of the natural world their domination emphasizes the hero's legendary strength and prowess the heraldic scheme signifies the control of nature elements that need containment to ensure survival on the left to fill out the seam a magnificently horned animal is seated in a boat with only its head and wonderful horns visible above the the rail of the boat a lion-headed eagle swoops into attack and on the right you have an animal standing also with wonderful horns trying to steady a boat acting as a human and inside the boat is another animal acting as a human casting a fishing net again a lion-headed eagle is coming in to attack from above hybrid animals as well as animals acting as humans an act of imagination that underpins all animal fables are already found here and suggest a culture at the very dawn of history with well-developed myths in which animals play a central role let's just focus for a minute on the central figure of the cyclops there again is staring eye notice how the whole design is beautifully worked as sort of a series of abstract angular lines such as W's let's say here at the top with the two lines on his head and then a larger one with his elbows and then the largest at all at the bottom with the lions there's the lion's head the legs the waist the legs and the lion it's sort of a series of cascading W's making a very beautifully proportioned design now this is a tripartite composition majorly three major elements lion hero lion and it really is a visualization of the idea of permanence because if you take one element away the whole idea of the design itself will collapse and throw off the balance now I said this is the first example of the cyclops image in Mesopotamian what I really mean is this is the earliest known example and look how beautifully formed this already is certainly it must have had precedence which are now lost to us or unknown to us about 900 years later during the time of the Early Dynastic The Contest Scene Sumerian temple states and the beginnings of our first cities again we are now around 2600 to 2300 BC is the subject called the so-called contest scene where domesticated animals are not involved in the conflict with wild animals but they're not involved in a conflict wild animals are often attacking these domesticated animals and a hero comes in to aid the domesticated animals this rich lapis lazuli seal as you can see in four views on the top and it's a magnificent pure piece of rich blue lapis lazuli is inscribed here for a prince and it shows one of these contest scenes of interconnected figures creating a frieze across the surface of the seal so here's a hero facing you with a dagger grabbing a feline by the tail that attacks the stag which is protected by a hero in the middle protecting another stag with his arm wrapped around the neck being attacked by a lion this is our hero master of the animals in the middle of this contest scene the subject here by this time has developed and evolved to represent one of the great cultic dramas of the Sumerians and that is the eternal struggle between the forces of order and chaos this eternal struggle which is our shared fate the lions representing the chaos of the natural world with the domesticated animals and men representing the forces of order and the struggle to impose order on the world around them what's profound is that in the scenes on the seals the battle is never clearly resolved no winner and no clear loser the Sumerians knew already then that this very struggle is a constant and how fitting to carve this image on a cylindrical surface with the scene endlessly repeating itself as you roll it now about a thousand years later a very fine cylinder seal style evolved in the 14th and 13th century in the courts of the Assyrian kings who had outstanding seal cutters in their entourage and we saw two at the beginning of the talk with animals this rock crystal seal has a complex design combining naturalistically rendered figures in elaborately decorative schemes here's our master of the animals again grasping two lions approaching him by the- he's grasping them by the wrists they're standing on bulls then you have a winged sun disc eagles flying in griffins and sphinxes on either side of a stylized tree a very complicated packed scene full of design elements and all beautifully balanced Nebuchadnezzar and here now is again the Persian seal with the motif now used to emphasize here our king's majesty this motif I've shown you has over- has been evolving over 3,000 years from our cyclops to our master of the animals to the middle Assyrian seal and now to our Persian king and it's all been cleaned up so that the focus really is now on the king himself now please keep this motif in mind as we now turn to the stone itself but before we go to the stone I must introduce a new object that will play a very important role in our discussion I've already mentioned Nebuchadnezzar he is one of the most famous figures in history and is best known from biblical accounts Nebuchadnezzar was a great general and statesman and a builder with ambition and imagination whose surviving monuments are without rival in Mesopotamia the Babylon of Herodotus including the Hanging Gardens is largely the work of Nebuchadnezzar's architects the monumental procession way in the gate of Babylon known as the Ishtar Gate are all built by him on the left is a picture at the beginning of the excavations of the Ishtar Gate Ishtar Gate there it is poking up out of the ground and on the right are the finished excavations you see this at the very top of one of these towers coming out of the ground an extraordinary excavation and here a model on the left and a painting of the entire procession way and gate the Morgan Library has an extraordinary object that belongs to An Extraordinary Excavation Nebuchadnezzar this banded agate about an inch in diameter it was probably worn in a precious The Morgan Library setting to judge by the chipped rim- the chip state of the rim from which the setting was forcibly removed you can see this little chips all the way around the rim the natural banding in the stone of alternating brown and white bands have been carved to resemble an eye with its dark brown center and white circumference and this class of objects called by us today eye stone amulets were worn to ward oft evil however this eye stone is no ordinary example of a type around the edges of the brown circle inscribed in- inscribed in the finest miniature cuneiform is an existing- this is some of the finest miniature cuneiform in existence here's an inscription and you see it's right there this inscription carved in stone which was so easy just to impress in clay with wedges here it's carved into the stone and the inscription says nothing less than the following quote, "To Marduk his Lord, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, son of Nabopolassar, gave this for his life." end of quote in other words this was given by Nebuchadnezzar as a votive object to be worn around the neck of the cult statue of the chief god of Babylon Marduk to continually protect Nebuchadnezzar's life on the right is a reconstruction of part of Babylon with the Great Ziggurat in the center and here is the Marduk temple where the cult statue stood of Marduk wearing this very amulet given by Nebuchadnezzar to protect his own life this eye stone agate was acquired by Morgan well over a hundred years ago the Morgan Library is justly proud of its three Gutenberg Bibles but to include among its holdings tangible evidence of Nebuchadnezzar is not to be taken lightly now again please keep in mind this banded agate eye stone as well as the motif of the hero dominating lions on the screen is another page from Ward's 1910 publication which introduced for the first time one of Morgan's great Persian Seal seals the Persian seal that is the focus of this part of the presentation and it's here numbered 1109 and this is it this is that seal in a very sketchy line drawing the line drawing is crowded on the page of similar images showing the Persian king dominating or fighting animals what you learn from this image is that the Persian king has taken unto himself the millennium old image of heroes fighting lions and now put himself in that visual even mythological function but that is all you learn from this image there is no mention in the text of the material and you have no idea from this very sketchy drawing the quality of the carving or is this as a great work of art (ringing: excuse me, forgive the interuption) In the Porada publication there is a- there is finally published a photograph of the impression and one sees for the first time the extraordinary sense of certitude in the king's gestures with the idea of permanence suggested by the very symmetry of the composition you see these wonderful stretched out arms the tremendous certitude that the artist has given the king in this position the idea of permanence suggested as I said by the very symmetry in the composition in the text of the Porada publication the stone is mentioned as a banded agate but that is that notice on the impression from the Porada publication these shadowy lines that go here and up and around here like this here I don't know if you see all of that they're very shadowy and they are omitted from the line drawing in the Ward publication and unexplained by Porada these lines can only be explained by Bandit Agate viewing the stone itself it is the very banding of the beautiful banded agate here leaving a mark in the impression as the cylinder is rolled and the V-like dip of the natural occurring bands in the stone are incorporated by the seal carver to be centered right here on the pattern of the center of the king's garment placing him right in the center with this beautiful line of the stone but most importantly that is not all if you actually were able to turn the stone as you now can on the website this is what you will find these are all images taken off the website for the very first time never before seen except for the few scholars who have had the privilege of examining the stone in person one can now see that the eye part here naturally occurring in the aggregate has not been removed and instead has been incorporated into the seal itself thereby creating an even more potent amulet for the seal owner but two things are at work here first the sealed dates of the Persian or Seal Dates Achemenid period as I said around 400 BC when all of Mesopotamia had become a mere province of the mighty Persian empire the impression shows us that the Persian king has usurped the ancient image of Mesopotamian iconography depicting power and control and second the stone itself shows us that the eye part of the agate has been left in the stone of the cylinder to be worn by the seal owner rather than create a votive object to be given to the cult statue of a god the only person important enough to wear such an agate if not a god would have to be royal so the Morgan seal has now with the information provided by the imagery as well as the visuals of the stone itself unavailable previously is to be elevated to the status of an actual royal seal as we go to the website please keep this in mind there is a remarkable passage in the old testament where the Old Testament actual rolling of a cylinder seal on clay is used to describe the landscape emerging from the darkness at dawn as an example of the majestic power of the Lord it is among the Lord's admonitions to Job (32;12) quote, "In all your life have you ever called up the dawn or shown the morning its place? Have you ever taught it to grasp the fringes of the earth and shape the dog star in its place? To bring up the horizon in relief as Morgans Website clay under a seal, until all things stand out like the folds of a cloak." end of quote with these images on the Morgan's website we are actually coming close to providing the visual visitor with experience of handling the seal and observing magnified details with spectacular results putting works of art on the internet is an extraordinary tool but it's even more so for the seals because for the first time multiple views of the seals the object itself have been made available this is new and crucial information never before readily available here at the Morgan and I hope when we reopen you will have a chance to visit this room Morgans North Room visitors are able to see the Morgan's legendary seal collection on display in the North Room of the Mckim an installation of clarity and elegance not found anywhere else here are the seals in cases around the perimeter of the room and on the web we have provided our virtual visitor and scholar with an equally unparalleled experience to be found on no other museum site so thank you to my great colleagues Dan, Marilyn, and always Graham and to the funders Jonathan and Jeanette Rosen and this is a very beautiful seal of also from the Achemenid / Persian period that ends our sequence of Mesopotamian seals and look at the beauty of that stone this beautiful honey-colored chalcedony and here's just a bull striding a landscape all by itself and look the lighting that graham caught here on the horn and the face of the bull that's an exquisite still life all by itself and yes this is the chip on the stone so now let us go briefly to the website and you can now see this for yourself and you just go to any of your browsers Website you look up the Morgan Library & Museum click on that oh I did click on that Collections go back a second and then you go to collections it's all very easy and you go to collections highlights and scroll down to ancient Near Eastern seals and tablets click on that and you get a little introduction but go right to Browse Images browse images so when you go to browse images you get all of the seals that are on view in the North Room plus some extras there are about 100 things now on the website I like to look at rather than 10 to a page I like to go right to 40 because this is- I want to see as many as possible all at once so you go to 40 and then apply and then you get 40. and you scroll down to choose any you like I'm just going to show us several they are really just so exquisite and they have this tool let's just try this one Three Stags with a Plant you can either go right to rotate seal or read more I prefer to start with read more because it gives you then the seal impression and the seal so then if you go to zoom image you get Seal Impression a wonderful screen showing you the impression and you can of course enlarge it and look at any detail you want and they're really just spectacular this is a true extraordinary tool and what I love about this seal is that this is a real artist at work stylizing these wonderful stag horns across the surface at the top of the seal to create a very pleasing elegant work of art but that's not all each of the animals is really different look how they're moving across the surface of the seal these legs are tight these are further apart this one is really moving so then you x that out and you go to rotate seal and then what will happen the seal will rotate quickly in front of you but you can slow it down you can enlarge it and then use this cursor- this tool here and turn it yourself or you can just do it yourself and slow it down and you come to wonderful wonderful images I love this view of the seal you can just see it's a whole still life in itself our animal here you can see the indentation on this side and the beautiful horns and you can just delight in the seal carver carving this object and remember that what you're looking at is an artist working backwards carving in the round in the negative and that's an extraordinary accomplishment and we'll go back to the website and I'll just share two more with you because I know our time is moving these are all magnificent the lapis lazuli seal we looked at earlier and let's just go down there's one particular one I want to share with you for a number of reasons and we'll go to page two and it's also from the Middle Assyrian period and it's also a banded agate and it is- there's our leaping stag and it is this seal so we'll read more and in this case I'm going to go Banded Agate right to the rotating seal first because I want you to see this banded agate instead of dark or brown and white layers it is translucent layers with white and I- it's impossible to see what you're carving on this very complex surface it's extraordinary there's maybe I don't know what that is of the eye perhaps of an animal you turn it again and there's perhaps a star up here yes and just zoom in and look at some just a magnificent surface extraordinary and then so now we'll go to the seal itself and on this very complicated surface look at what Sculptured Art the artist has achieved it is a masterpiece of sculptured art here is a lion attacking a mouflon and all the action is in these arcs and curves the lion's tail is taught the animals the threatened animals faces between the paws of the lion and look there's even a startled expression in the animal's face as it tries to leap up and get away from the attacking lion so I encourage you all to just browse on these and just zoom in on all of these and we will- I'll Great Seal just show you one more just let you see the final page has the wonderful eye stone as well as the seal that we focused on with the eye stone built into it but on the page before and it's the final image I will leave you with is the great seal which is a beautiful beautiful red carnelian and it's of course this one and we'll go to rotate the seal Wing Seal and I want to leave you with a spectacular image great detail of our wing genius and you can see the extraordinary detail on the seal that's only about an inch high so thank you and please take time and browse through these remarkable seals and thank you for your patience it's hard for me to restrain myself from not showing you all of them but so be it thank you Sidney thank you so much for a wonderful presentation it's so great to see the details of works that we normally can see at the museum but on such a great you know closer level than ever before we do have some questions unfortunately due to the time we can't get to everyone but we do have a few questions that we can ask the first one relates to your process of creating those impressions could you sort of explain more what you do and the materials that you use to create them yes I do it's Materials if you go to the website you can see me actually doing it and that that might be actually more helpful but I use a material that's available commercially called Sculpey III and I use semi-firm and I use a color which is no it's not available alas commercially it's called Museum Grey but you can use Elephant Grey which is fine and the reason why I use gray it comes in all kinds of different colors but when I first started doing all this many years ago photography was in black and white and gray photographed beautifully in black and white and still I still use the gray because I don't want to introduce a different color to detract from the beauty of the stones so then you roll out you have to knead it until it gets very soft and very very malleable you take a a stone rolling pin not a wooden one because a wooden one can leave marks or get gunk and you roll it out like you would a pie crust then you use a talcum powder a Caldesene I'm not plugging Caldesene but that's the one to use because it doesn't have all the other impurities that others do or the carcinogens that some of them we now know do and then you rub that in like flour onto a pie crust to smooth it as possible as much as possible and unfortunately the process also when you're kneading it sometimes air bubbles get into the surface of your of your material and you have to take a little pin and pierce all the air bubbles and then gently coax the air out and re-flatten it and then you stand up and you place the cylinder- the seal you guide it with these two fingers on either side and you alternate pressure with your thumbs and you roll and roll as carefully as possible with as much steady pressure as possible because you don't want to get riches or you don't want to push or distend the image and this is really it takes it takes practice it takes a lot of practice to get a good impression sometimes I can do one in a minute and sometimes it takes me an hour it's also depends on the seal and how deeply carved to get all of these to get all of the details that it's a complicated process and I've spent years trying to get these correct and as I age eyesight it becomes an issue so anyway I mean I probably- and then you bake them and they don't change shape once you bake them okay our next question pertains to Pierpont Morgan himself what sort of Inspiration inspired him to collect the cylinder seals that's a that's a wonderful question and a topic for an entire lecture it's an extraordinary extraordinary story Morgan came of age in- during the time when a man named Layard discovered the greatest Assyrian palaces in around 1850 or so in northern Mesopotamia and it was the removal of these extraordinary stone carvings from the palaces by the French and the British that filled the British Museum the Louvre that created extraordinary excitement during this time and don't forget this was the time of great scientific discovery and these scientific discoveries were challenging peoples of faith and here in spite of that was evidence that the Old Testament kings really existed Morgan and people of his generation were riveted by this and indeed in one year alone when the reliefs from the Assyrian palaces made their way to the British Museum 900,000 people went to see them this was the first blockbuster in museum history and then when cuneiform was finally the code was finally cracked after a very long struggle in around 1860 or so these were the names that people knew from the Old Testament and people were riveted in fact Layard's book Nineveh and Its Remains you couldn't get copies of it it was one of the best sellers there were endless editions pirated copies were made and actually Morgan purchased these seals or some of them were purchased on behalf for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and were there for a short period of time and Morgan was ahead of his time his fellow board members did not really appreciate this material the way he did and there's a board meeting when they're discussing all this material and Morgan says well I'll be happy to take them to my library so he purchased them back from the Met and they have been a treasured collection of the Library ever since thank you we have time for one more question and that pertains to Carvers do we know anything about the artists who actually created the seals themselves the carvers of the seals very good question it is all anonymous all that we know is that in rations in the temple inventories of workforces there are stone cutters and stone carvers and that's about it well thank you so much again for this Outro wonderful presentation and thank you to all of our attendees who have taken part and if you're interested in more programs like this of course we ask that you go to www.TheMorgan.org/MorganConnected there you'll find a schedule of upcoming virtual presentations as well as past recordings of Morgan lectures and concerts that took place at the Morgan and as well as blog posts and many other things that the Morgan has so thank you again and I hope you all have a wonderful afternoon.