The Assyrian Royal Seal Type Again

In 1849 Sir Henry Layard's excavations among the ruins of Sennacherib's palace at Nineveh (the South-West Palace) produced a considerable collection of clay sealings, specimens of which were duly published in A second Series of the Monuments of Nineveh. In his description of this find, Layard discussed a ‘royal seal’, a circular stamp showing the king killing a lion, and mentioned that, on the impressions, the device ‘is frequently encircled by a short inscription, which has not yet been deciphered, or by a simple guilloche border.’ Until now these impressions, preserved in the collections of the British Museum, do not seem to have been illustrated, although Professor Sachs was able to list forty uninscribed examples of bullae and sealings bearing the same motif, fourteen of them showing the guilloche border, in his paper entitled ‘The Late Assyrian Royal Seal Type’.In all thirteen pieces of clay bearing impressions of inscribed ‘royal’ seals have been located so far in the Museum's collections, including additions made to Layard's original group (Collection no. 51, 9–2) from the excavations of Rassam, Smith, and Budge. They are here presented by courtesy of the Trustees.