14 Mar 2025
As part of a new inter-academic project, thousands of seals from the fourth to the first millennium BC are now being captured and annotated at the Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology.
Processing of a seal | © KIŠIB-Projekt, A. Otto/A. Dietz
At LMU’s Institute of Near Eastern Archaeology, a project to establish a representative digital corpus of c. 80,000 seals and sealings from the fourth to the first millennium BC is going off the blocks. Seals and their impressions constitute the biggest and, indeed, only continually stocked inventory of visual images from West Asia in ancient times. The miniature depictions and inscriptions on the seals give us detailed insights into ancient networks of social, political, economic, religious and artistic interaction, into how cultural knowledge was passed on in those days, and into how forms of visual communication developed and ideologies evolved.
The challenge to researchers is that thousands upon thousands of seals and sealed objects are today scattered around museums and collections all over the world. The aim of the emerging digital corpus is thus to make this cultural legacy accessible and open up its content to the academic community across many disciplines, but also to the public at large. Machine learning accelerates the collection, segmentation and controlled annotation of artefact, image and text data.
The project “KIŠIB. Digital Corpus of Ancient West Asian Seals and Sealings” is part of a joint undertaking by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. It was set up under the auspices of the federal and regional government Academies Program, whose aim is to conserve and open up access to our cultural legacy. The project is being run jointly: at LMU under the leadership of Professor Adelheid Otto and at Freie Universität (FU) Berlin under the leadership of Professor Elisa Rossberger.
KIŠIB – Digital Corpus of Seals