Left Hand, Right Hand in the Bronze Age Aegean Glyptic: The Artists and Representations of Handedness

Aegean Bronze Age artists quite consistently depicted people as right-handed. However, glyptic artists faced a problem unknown to other art genres, which was the impressing of their products in clay giving a mirror image of the composition from the seal. The article examines how artists dealt with this issue. Since the glyptists belonged to the same cultural milieu as other Aegean artists, it can be expected that they were equally aware of the occurrence of handedness. Analysis of 282 seals with various figurative compositions shows that seal makers developed several important formal tricks and conventions. Indeed, the analysis of those representations shows that handedness was not indifferent to the seal makers. Our sources indicate that only some seals were made with the appearance of impressions in mind (reversed handedness), and in turn impressed those whose authors apparently did not think about the appearance of impressions perhaps did not know that they would be used for this purpose. Similarly, users quite often impressed such seals obtaining the inverted handedness of the figures depicted. This leads to the conclusion that the old discussion of the “correct” view of Aegean seals is pointless, since apparently for the people of the time this was not a significant problem and they were used to seeing the seals both as originals and as impressions, which meant that the image was always “incorrect” on one of them.