Seals (Sumerian: kišib) and their impressions on clay form the oldest and most extensive group of images that have survived from what is now known as the Middle East or West Asia.
The sealing of containers and doors, contracts and letters played an important role in the lives of people in Mesopotamia and its neighboring regions — today mostly Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey —, especially from the fourth to the first millennium BCE. The miniature depictions and inscriptions engraved on seals allow detailed insights into ancient networks of social, political, economic, religious, and artistic interaction, as well as the transmission of cultural knowledge, evolving forms of visual communication, and shifting ideologies.
More than a hundred years of archaeological, philological, and art historical research on these objects have contributed significantly to our knowledge about the region’s past. However, access to this knowledge remains limited with the original artefacts dispersed across numerous collections worldwide.
KIŠIB seeks to overcome these challenges by establishing a representative digital corpus of c. 80,000 seals and sealings. The inter-academic project, housed at the BBAW in Berlin and the BAdW in Munich, makes use of machine learning to speed up the collection, segmentation, and controlled annotation of artefact-, image-, and text-related information, based on state-of-the-art FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and LOUD (Linked Open Usable Data) data standards. Its research component explores ancient mechanisms of interpersonal and societal trust established through sealing practice and seal design.
KIŠIB aggregates and curates seal-related data from various sources to facilitate high-quality knowledge exchange in close collaboration with seal-holding institutions, other projects active in digital ancient Near Eastern studies, and with colleagues from West Asian countries. It aims to equip future generations of researchers and a broad international audience with the seminal tools to understand the distant past of ancient West Asia through the lens of miniature arts.
KIŠIB - Digital Corpus of Ancient West Asian Seals and Sealings is part of the Research Centre for Primary Sources of the Ancient World at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The Long-term Academy project “KIŠIB - Digital Corpus of Ancient West Asian Seals and Sealings” is part of the Academies’ Programme, a research funding programme co-financed by the German federal government and individual federal states. Coordinated by the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, the Programme intends to retrieve and explore our cultural heritage, to make it accessible and highlight its relevance to the present, as well as to preserve it for the future.