2024/02/19 by Christoph Uehlinger · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Physics and Astronomy · #Ancient Near East History #Historical Astronomy and Related Studies #Maritime and Coastal Archaeology
paper · doi:10.1086/727582
openalex publication_date 2024/02/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant (SSSL) project is based on a comprehensive corpus, big data, and complex historical scenarios. Sometimes, though, an individual artifact stands out as a highlight in its own right. Such is the case with a stamp seal discovered recently at Tel Hazor. It is unusual in several respects, but mainly because of its spectacular base engraving. The main scene represents a hero fighting a coiled, seven-headed serpent; it is enhanced by a series of mixed creatures and secondary motifs. This article offers a description and analysis of the object, situating its iconography in the long history of combat myths spanning from mid-third-millennium southern Mesopotamia through second-millennium northern Syria to first-millennium Phoenicia and Israel. Most significant for a historian of Near Eastern mythology, the seal provides a visual missing link in the main motif’s literary transition from Late Bronze Age Ugarit to the Hebrew Bible.