Progress Report: An Online database for the documentation of seals, sealings, and seal impressions in the Ancient Near East
Keywords:
seals, sealing practice, glyptic, ancient near east, database, work-in progressAbstract
This is a report on the efforts for the creation of a relational database to document Ancient Near Eastern seals, sealings and seal impressions. The aim of this paper is to acknowledge the existence of such a project, its background, methods and future perspectives. A brief overview of glyptic art and sealing practices is given before the structure of the database is explained in more detail. The database was initially created at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin in cooperation with the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI); it comprised a catalogue (a FileMaker database), images and the transliteration server, used for the epigraphic seals, all hosted in UCLA, Los Angeles. The web-interface was developed at the MPIWG in Berlin by Robert Casties, and was hosted in both Berlin and Los Angeles. Catalogue data on tablets and seals was entered and edited in the FileMaker databases on the LA server online using a FileMaker client. Transliterations of tablets and seals in ATF format were kept on a separate transliteration server, while images of sealed tablets and seals were on the LA server, with high-resolution files archived and web-resolution files kept on the web server.
