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A New Seal in the Ashmolean Museum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

G. R. Driver
Affiliation:
Magdalen College, Oxford

Extract

Among a number of cuneiform tablets recently presented to the Ashmolean Museum by Mr. H. Weld-Blundell is an interesting seal (Fig. 1). It is an egg-shaped lump of bitumen with a slit through the centre, in which can be seen carbonised remains of the tag; stamped on it are the impressions of two different seals: a small stamp showing a winged sphinx confronted by a star, repeated eleven times, and a very finely drawn head, facing to the right, laureate, which Prof. P. Gardner states to be the head of Apollo. He compares with it the head of Apollo on the coins of Magnesia, Myrina, etc., after 190 B.C. (see B. V. Head, British Museum Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Ionia, Pl. XIX. No. 3). A similar seal is shown by L. Speleers (No. 205 on Pl. IV. of his Notice sur les Inscriptions de l'Asie Antérieure des Musées Royaux du Cinquantenaire à Bruxelles, Wetteren), who wrongly calls the figure there depicted Hermes; it is, according to Prof. Gardner, Apollo, holding in his right hand an arrow and leaning his elbow on a sacred tripod, precisely similar to that depicted on the reverse of certain coins of Seleucus II.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies 1923

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References

1 I owe the photograph to the kindness of Mr. E. T. Leeds, of the Ashmolean Museum.

2 Mr. E. J. Forsdyke of the British Museum, and Dr. Hogarth, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, incline to the view that the type is a conflation of the heads of Apollo and Seleucus II. Callinicus as they appear on contemporary coins.