Page 5 - DILMUN NO 7

side of a lizard. On two stamp seals of the
Janulac Nasr period from Tell Braq in North
Syria (for the reproduction of one, sec fig. 3),
a snake divides the two feet, rendered so
schematically that M. E. L. Mallowan did not
wish to interpret them as such.6 It is very
interesting that in examples from places as far
apart as Susa and 'Tell Braq, the feet are assoc-
iated with reptiles, or scorpions, creatures the
the symbolism of which may be related to
fertility. (The reverse of the disk from Yahva
seems to portray cither a reptile or a scorpion.)
Whatever the meaning of reptiles or scorpions
was at this period, the image of human feet
seems to have been associated with them.
In the composition of the first group of
Gulf State seals, each form is independently Fig. 1 Seal from Barbar showing bull, foot, and
related to the circumference of the seal as if scorpion or reptile (published in Kuml
it were a ground line. The resulting impression 1957, p. 143, Fig. 13b ; reproduced here
with the kind permission of Geoffery
is that all the elements - each figure: animal,
Bibby).
scorpion, star, foot - arc unrelated. Perhaps
this visual impression conveys correctly the
meaning of these designs. Each one may have
had a separate propitious significance from
which the seal owner believed that he would
profit.
The second, later group of Gulf stamps
(text fig. B) has been firmly anchored on the Fig. 2 Disk : on one side, feet ; on the other,
date of King Gugunum of Larsa, ca. 1923 B.C. scorpion or reptile. From Tepe Yahya
by Briggs Buchanan, who discovered the reproduced from Iran IX (1971), by kind
permission of C.C. Lamberg-Karlovsky).
imprint of a seal of this type on a tablet dated
in the reign of this king. Stamp seals which
belong to the style of that dated impression
resemble the earlier group in the basic disk­
shaped type and the central boss, but now the
boss is much lower and wider, three thin paral­
lel lines traverse the back, and in each half
there arc two small engraved disks with a
central dot. The relative chronological position
of these seal groups was of course known to
the Danish excavators from their work at Ras
al-Qal’af but the association of this material
with seals from other areas which helps to
define dates and make suggestions for the
interpretation of the Gulf seals was put on a
firm basis by Buchanan.® Together with the
Fig. 3 Seal from Tell Brak : feet divided by a
imprint on the Larsa tablet, fig. 4, he published
snake (reproduced from Iraq IX (1947),
the drawing of a stamp seal in the Yale collec­ PI. XVIII : I, by kind permission of
tion, fig. 5, which shows the same subject as Donald J. Wiseman).
— 5 —