KIŠIB. Digital Corpus of Ancient West Asian Seals and Sealings.
Links to the project
Seals and their impressions on sealings and cuneiform tablets (Sumerian ‘kišib’) form the oldest and most extensive corpus of images from the region of the present-day Near East (= Western Asia). The sealing of containers and doors, documents and letters, played a central role in the lives of people in Mesopotamia and neighbouring regions (today mainly Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey). Detailed figurative representations, symbols and inscriptions were engraved on the stone cylinders and stamps used by individuals or institutions. Today, they provide us with deep insights into social, political, economic, religious and artistic contexts and ideas, in particular into material mechanisms and visual strategies for generating trust between people and within social groups.
Old Babylonian seal impression on a bulla from Ur (1850 BCE) and the segmentation of the image and text elements into codes (photomontage to illustrate the interplay between traditional seal research and digital techniques).KIŠIB. Digital Corpus of Ancient West Asian Seals and Sealings.
Host Academy
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities
Location and federal state
Munich, Bavaria; Berlin, Berlin
Type
Editions: Ancient History
Project number
II.C.30-1/-2
Today, this rich source of images and knowledge has been scattered across numerous museums and collections worldwide and is only partially digitally retrievable and searchable according to coherent parameters. The interacademy KIŠIB project, with teams at the BAdW and the BBAW, will change this. It is preparing a representative corpus of approximately 80,000 seals and seal impressions from the 4th to 1st millennium BCE for further use by scholars and a broad international public in accordance with FAIR and LOUD data standards. It is also collecting artefact information from various sources and segmenting and annotating image and text content, including the application of machine learning.
The project involves international and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange with curating institutions, researchers and projects for the digital exploration of Near Eastern sources, particularly with colleagues in Western Asia.
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