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Achaemenid Art
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Blue
chalcedony cylinder seal
Achaemenid, about 6th-4th century BC
From Kirmanshah, Iran
This seal shows the varied foreign influences on the art of the Achaemenid
Persian empire. The Persians had, at first, no clearly defined art of
their own,
but they made use of foreign craftsmen and expertise and welded the
disparate traditions of their immense empire into a coherent and
distinctive style. Greek and Egyptian motifs were particularly popular.
Here is a representation of a falcon, perhaps the Egyptian god Horus,
beside an incense burner. Along the border runs the Egyptian wedjat eye or
'Eye of Horus', a symbol of perfection. The winged goat is typical of
Achaemenid art. By the mid-first millennium BC alphabetic Aramaic was
increasingly written on leather or papyrus and came to replace the
cuneiform script written on clay tablets. Stamp seals were more suitable
for sealing knotted twine around rolled documents and the cylinder seal
gradually declined in popularity. However, under the Achaemenid Persians
there was a brief revival in the use of the cylinder seal,
and they produced some of the finest surviving examples.
This is probably to be associated with the political
reorganization of the empire under Darius I (521-486 BC).
Height: 2.7 cm
Diameter: 1 cm
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