»Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant: A Multi-faceted Prism for Studying Entangled Histories in an Interdisciplinary Perspective  – Insights into an Ongoing Swiss-Israeli Project«

Stefan Münger | University of Bern

Stamp seals represent a highly informative artifact class for research on pre-Hellenistic material and visual culture and can provide crucial information on the social, cultural, and religious history of the Southern Levant. Their systematic study in terms of origin, production, diffusion and acquisition, function, use and consumption, deposition, hoarding or loss, yields scores of insights into the (daily) life of ancient Levantine societies, institutions, groups, and individuals.

The Sinergia-Project «Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant» funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation addresses these mentioned fields of study in various sub-projects hosted at the Universities of Bern, Tel Aviv and Zurich. Yet, the project’s main goal is to complete and update Othmar Keel’s seminal «Corpus der Stempelsiegel-Amulette aus Palästina/Israel» in printed and digital formats.

The paper will report on the progress of the implementation of online digital ‘Corpus’ and highlight its main features and research tools. In addition, it will demonstrate – by reference to the various sub-projects – the potential of glyptic studies for a variety of disciplines, such as archaeology, ancient Levantine history, iconography and art history, history of religions and biblical exegesis, gender studies, and other fields, including the sciences.