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Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Asian Art / Cypriot Hematite Cylinder Seal Bead, Fire Altar, Bird-Headed Deity
Ancient Near East, Cyprus, Middle to Late Bronze Age. A miniature barrel of polished hematite, bored lengthwise for suspension so that it served as bead and seal at once, its dark surface cut with a crowded procession of borrowed gods. A robed figure tends a flame at an altar beneath a bucranium and a cruciform star in a disc; two further robed celebrants raise their arms around a deer suspended in the field, with a second deer below, the pairing likely a sacrifice. Beyond them kneels a winged, bird-headed deity confronting a seated sphinx in profile. The vocabulary is deliberately cosmopolitan, drawing on Syrian, Egyptian, Anatolian, and Mesopotamian repertoires in the manner of Cypriot glyptic, and the engraving survives in fragmentary condition across parts of the frieze. Cyprus in the second millennium BCE sat at the hinge of the eastern Mediterranean, exporting copper and importing, along with everything else, other people's gods. Its seal cutters absorbed the Old Syrian repertoire (robed worshippers, altars, bull's-head bucrania, the star-in-disc), the Egyptianizing winged and composite beings that reached the island through Levantine intermediaries, and the Anatolian taste for filling every empty field with small animals and symbols. The result is glyptic that quotes fluently in four traditions without belonging wholly to any of them. Hematite was the preferred stone for cylinder seals across the Bronze Age Near East: hard enough to hold a crisp engraving under repeated rolling, heavy in the hand, and taking a mirror polish that reads almost metallic. Pierced longitudinally, such seals were worn strung at the wrist or neck, functioning simultaneously as ornament, amulet, and the personal signature that authenticated a sealing in clay. Item # 204616
Estimate:$350
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorAsian Art
Estimate:
$350
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