Cylinder Seal with Winged Disc and Animals
Unknown · Late Cypriot period, circa 1600 to 1050 BC
A cylinder of black stone just two centimetres tall, carved so that it prints a continuous frieze when rolled across wet clay. Look at the modern impression displayed beside it to read the scene. Under a winged sun disc, a lion rears up and plants a paw on the back of a bull, while a second bull, winged and with the head of a bird of prey, stands nearby. Above the lion an antelope turns its head back. The empty spaces are filled with a globe and three six-pointed stars, and two signs of the Cypro-Minoan script float in the field, perhaps naming the owner.
Seals like this were the signatures of the Late Bronze Age, pressed onto jar stoppers and tablets to mark ownership. On Cyprus, local engravers borrowed the winged disc, the fighting animals and the monsters of Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt and mixed them into a style of their own. The Louvre bought this seal in nineteen twelve, and the museum record gives only Cyprus as its place of discovery. Its writing is one of the few surviving traces of Cypro-Minoan, a script that has still not been deciphered.
Did You Know? Cypro-Minoan, the script whose two signs appear on this seal, remains undeciphered to this day.
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