Scaraboid Stamp Seal: Man in Persian Dress Facing a Woman

This chalcedony scaraboid stamp seal features an image of a man and a woman facing each other. The woman wears a full length garment with wide sleeves. It is covered with thin parallel lines, indicating folds, and it clings to her profile, showing her ample buttocks. Little detail is discernible in her face. She wears a fillet around her head, and her hair is gathered into a long braid going down her back. The man wears a knee-length sleeved garment, belted at the waist, over trousers. One of his knees is slightly bent. His face also lacks detail. On his head he wears a long headdress that covers his cheeks and shoulders, with three curls of hair visible beneath it on his forehead. He places one hand on the woman’s shoulder, which she grasps. She holds his other hand in front of her waist. A woman with this body type, clothing, and posture appears on a seal impression excavated at Daskyleion, near modern Badirma in northwestern Turkey, as part of an Achaemenid archive (1); other examples occur on several stamp seals usually attributed to western Anatolia (2). The man’s clothing is Persian, specifically a version of the Persian riding garment, with the addition of the leather hat (often called a ‘tiara’) that Persians wore into battle. This suggests that this seal dates to the period of Achaemenid Persian rule in Anatolia (c. 546-331 BCE). In fact, coins minted in various places in Anatolia also feature images of men wearing the ‘tiara,’ and it has been suggested that Persians dressed for battle would have been familiar sight there (3). The scene on this seal is closely, though not exactly, paralleled by that on a pendant-shaped seal in the British Museum (4). NOTES 1. See examples in L. Llewellyn-Jones, “The Big and Beautiful Women of Asia: Ethnic Conceptions of Ideal Beauty in Achaemenid-Period Seals and Gemstones,” in Material Culture and Social Identities in the Ancient World, eds. S. Hales and T. Hodos (Cambridge, 2010) 171-200. 2. D. Kaptan, The Daskyleion Bullae: Seal Images from the Western Achaemenid Empire (Leiden, 2002) no. 83. 3. E. R. M. Dusinberre, “King or God? Imperial Iconography and the ‘Tiarate Head’ Coins of Achaemenid Anatolia,” in Across the Anatolian Plateau: Readings in the Archaeology of Ancient Turkey, ed. D. C. Hopkins (Boston, 2002) 157-71. 4. BM 1909,0615.2; J. Boardman, Greek Gems and Finger Rings: Early Bronze Age to Late Classical (London, 1970) no. 891.