BEAUTIFUL NEAR EASTERN CUNEIFORM SUMERIAN STONE CYLINDER SEAL. RARE

A cylinder seal is a small round cylinder, typically about one inch (2 to 3 cm) in length, engraved with written characters or figurative scenes or both, used in ancient times to roll an impression onto a two-dimensional surface, generally wet clay. According to some sources, cylinder seals were invented around 3500 BC in the Near East, at the contemporary sites of Uruk  in southern Mesapotamia and slightly later at Susa in south-western Iran  during the Proto-Elamite  period, and they follow the development of stamp seals in the Halaf culture or slightly earlier. They are linked to the invention of the latter's cuneiform  writing on clay tablets.

Other sources, however, date the earliest cylinder seals to a much earlier time, to the Late Neolithic period (7600-6000 BC), hundreds of years before the invention of writing.

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