Credit Line:The Cesnola Collection, Purchased by subscription, 1874–76
Accession Number:74.51.4301
Said to be from Kourion, Cyprus. 1865–1872, found in Cyprus by General Luigi Palma di Cesnola; acquired by the Museum in 1874, purchased from General Luigi Palma di Cesnola.
“The Book and the Spade (Biblical Archaeological Exhibition).” University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, April 13, 1975–May 4, 1975.
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Selections from the Collection of the Ancient Near East Department,” MOA Museum of Art, Atami, Japan, The Aiche Prefectural Art Gallery, Nagoya, Japan, The Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan, 1983.
“The Written Word.” Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts, September 24, 2014–May 31, 2015.
“Mesopotamia: Great Cultural Innovations, Selections from The Metropolitan Museum of Art,” National Museum of Korea, Seoul, South Korea, July 22, 2022–September 29, 2024.
Sayce, A. H. 1877. “The Babylonian Cylinders Found by General di Cesnola in the Treasury of the Temple at Kurium.” Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 5, p. 444.
di Cesnola, Luigi Palma. 1878. Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples. New York: Harper & Brothers, pl. XXXI, 3.
Perrot, Georges and Charles Chipiez. 1887. Histoire de l'Art dans l'Antiquité Vol. IV Paris: Hachette et Cie, fig. 427.
Ward, W.H. 1895. Seal cylinders and Other Oriental Seals. MMA Handbook no. 12. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 31, no. 392.
di Cesnola, Luigi Palma. 1903. A Descriptive Atlas of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities. Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, pl. CXVIII, 1.
Price, Ira Maurice. 1908. “Some Cassite and Other Cylinder Seals” in Old Testament and Semitic Studies in Memory of William Rainey Harper, edited by Robert Francis Harper, Francis Brown, and George Foot Moore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 392, no. 6.
Ward, William H. 1910. The Seal Cylinders of Western Asia. Washington: Carnegie Institution, no. 516.
Myres, John L. 1914. Handbook of the Cesnola Collection of Antiquities from Cyprus. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 430, no. 4301.
Langdon, Stephen. 1919. “Inscriptions on Cassite Seals.” Revue d'Assyriologie 16, p. 75, no. 15.
von der Osten, H.H. 1925. "The Museum Collection of Oriental Seal-Stones." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 20, pp. 83-84, fig. 8.
Porada, Edith. 1952. "On the Problem of Kassite Art" in Archaeologica Orientalia in Memoriam Ernst Herzfeld, edited by G.C. Miles. Locust Valley, New York: J.J. Augustin, p. 180, pl. XXIX, fig. 1.
Crawford, Vaughn E. et al. 1966. Guide to the Ancient Near East Collection. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 17, fig. 28.
Imai, Ayako. 1983. The Metropolitan Museum of Art: Selections from the Collection of the Ancient Near East Department, exh. cat. Tokyo: Chunichi Shimbun, no. 132.
Matthews, Donald M. 1990. Principles of Composition in Near Eastern Glyptic of the Late Second Millennium B.C., Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis, Series Archaeologica 8. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, no. 54, pp. 56-70.
Invernizzi, Antonio. 1992. Dal Tigri All'Eufrate II: Babilonesi E Assiri. Florence: Le Lettere, p. 151, fig. 270.
Paulus, Susanne. 2014. Die Babylonischen Kudurru-Inschriften von der Kassitischen bis zur Frühneubabylonischen Zeit. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 51. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, p. 182 [incorrectly cited as 73.51.4301].
Yalçin, Serdar. 2016. “Men, Women, Eunuchs, Etc.: Visualities of Gendered Identities in Kassite Babylonian Seals (ca. 1470–1155 B.C.).” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 376, pp. 121-2, fig. 1.
Konstantopoulos, Gina. 2018. “Inscribed Kassite Cylinder Seals in the Metropolitan Museum.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 53, pp. 100, 108, fig. 5.
Rakic, Yelena. 2021. “Collecting the Ancient Near East at The Met.” Metropolitan Museum Journal 56, p. 71, fig. 2a.
National Museum of Korea. 2022. Mesopotamia: Great Cultural Innovation, Selections from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. p. 105, fig. 35.
Yalçın, Serdar. 2022. Selves Engraved on Stone: Seals and Identity in the Ancient Near East, ca. 1415-1050 BCE. Culture and History of the Ancient Near East 129. Leiden: Brill, pp. 38-39, fig. 2.3.
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Includes more than 7,000 works ranging in date from the eighth millennium B.C. through the centuries just beyond the time of the Arab conquests of the seventh century A.D.