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Department of Archaeology

 
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Event speaker
Dr Clélia Paladre (Musée du Louvre, France)

Recently very inspiring papers from Marta Ameri (1) and Abbas Alizadeh (2) raised the question of who was behind the cylinder seals; who was actually responsible for management operations in two different Iranian regions, Seistan and Susiana? For Ameri and Alizadeh, it was a matter of defining individuals - men or women, locals or foreigners - at the origin of the development of social complexity in Iran.

The same question can be applied to the internal organization of the administrative process in Iran, while a number of sites were facing an original proto-urban phenomenon at the end of the 4th millennium B.C.E, the so-called proto-Elamite. Focusing on the classic style and considering the multiple “trades” involved in the different stages of production and life of seals (craftsmen, administrators, scribes, elites), I would like to address several questions with you, such as: who was in charge of designing the compositions? Were scribes the general administrators, or were administrators a separate trade? Were scribes independent or attached to administrators? Was it the other way around? 

(1) See Ameri M. (2022) Who holds the keys? Identifying Female Administrators at Shahr-e Sokhta, Iran, 60/1, 1-38.

(2) See Alizadeh A. (2021) Susiana in the 4th Millennium BC: Who Was in Charge?, in: M. van Ess (ed), Uruk – Altorientalische Metropole und Kulturzentrum. Beiträge zum 8. Internationalen Colloquium der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, 25. und 26. April 2013, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz Verlag, 1-26.

Contact name
Megan Hinks
Contact email
Event location
McDonald Seminar Room, Department of Archaeology