Stamp seal

The stamp seal is in hard, durable material (stone and later metal) cut embossing tool consisting of a handle and embossed plate at the lower end to symbols, inscriptions, images, signatures, later coat of arms, territorial symbols in soft clay (later also wax, sealing wax ) to mint.

The oldest finds prove that the stamp seal was first used in amulet form. For the first time they are detected in the area of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (seventh millennium BC). About 1000 years later appeared in Mesopotamia and in the region of the later Assyria forms of this amulet stamp seal on. In contrast to the cylinder seal stamp seal is pressed into the seal lumps from above.

Here, the stamp seal against the cylinder seal, which always leaves a rectangular rolling impression of the symbol content also have a certain shape to distinguish and classification, such as round, oval, square, diamond shaped or complicated. The stamp seal was initially displaced as the preferred stamping tool in Mesopotamia almost entirely by the introduced there between 3200 BC and 3100 BC cylinder seal. The Assyrians carried out only from the 9th century BC, a renaissance of the stamp seal.