Cultural Transactions: An Introduction to Medieval Seals from a Global Perspective

Abstract

Extensive geographic coverage, including China, South East Asia, Arabia, Sasanian Persia, the Muslim Empire, the Byzantine empire, and Western Europe allows the essays gathered in this volume to offer a well differentiated examination of seals and sealing practices between 400 and 1500 CE. Contributors expose rather than assume the inter-subjective, transnational, and transcultural connectivity at work within the varied processes mediated by seals and sealing – representation, authorization, identification, and transmission. These essays encourage an understanding that seals operated in liminal, transitional situations arising from legal, administrative, martial, mercantile, or diplomatic encounters, creating cross-cultural sealing networks in which adaption and accommodation underlay the force of seals as objects and images that generate sociocultural identification through mutual exchange and visual hybridity.

When considering metals, in book XXXIII of his Natural History, Pliny the Elder (d. 79 CE) broached the topic of sealing:

For my own part, I do not find that any rings were used in the days of the Trojan War; at all events, Homer nowhere makes mention of them; for although he speaks of the practice of sending tablets by way of letter, of clothes and gold and silver plate being kept laid up in chests, still he gives us to understand that they were kept secure by the aid of a knot tied fast, and not under a seal impressed by a ring. … And even at the present day, the greater part of the nations known to us, peoples who are living under the Roman sway, are not in the habit of wearing rings. Neither in the countries of the East, nor in Egypt, is any use made of seals, the people being content with simple writing only.¹

Pliny's remarks are not entirely accurate but his perception that the use of seals was sporadic and culturally contingent, rather than sequential and universal, contrasts sharply with the modern understanding of the practice.

The use of seals, both for authenticating and closing, descends, in unbroken succession, from the cylindrical seals of Assyria and Babylon and the cone shaped ones of Persia and the Sassanians, through the scarabs of the Egyptians and Etruscans, to Greece. … Either from Greece or Asia Minor, the seal passed to the Romans … The Frankish kings … affixed a signet to their acts, thus forming the connecting link between the use of the signet by the Romans and its revival as a seal in mediaeval times.²

Thus wrote Charles Hunter Blair (d. 1962) in an excellent article informed by his deep knowledge of medieval seals acquired while cataloging the seals attached to the charters of the Benedictine monastery at Durham. Not specific to Blair, such vision of a linear and agentless flow of spatiotemporal continuity has engendered its own permanence. Permeating the European study of seals from its beginnings as a discipline in the De Re Diplomatica (1681) of Dom Jean Mabillon, this idea has, indeed to this day, dominated the perception of medieval sealing in manuals of sigillography,³ symposia and proceedings,⁴ essays,⁵ and exhibition catalogs.⁶ Along the way, the topos of continuity has acquired the connotation of universality,⁷ although many cultures, some of them literate, functioned without seals,⁸ and even within societies that utilized seals, their role ranged widely, from marginal to highly significant.⁹

To a considerable extent, modern sigillographic scholarship still clings to the nineteenth-century anthropological goal of investigating cultural phenomena to find universal laws of human behavior,¹⁰ -in the case of seals, the need for a universal device "to make honesty unnecessary."¹¹

It is true that by their extensive geographic coverage of China, South East Asia, Arabia, Sasanian Persia, the Muslim Empire, the Byzantine empire, and Western Europe, the essays gathered in this volume offer some support to the notion of a widespread, though differential, presence of seals and sealing practices between 400 and 1500 CE. They even implicitly recognize the standardization of typology that has permitted the establishment of seals as a general category. However, the essays collected here refrain from assuming that shared material culture implies shared values; indeed, they even suggest that classificatory mutability in the medieval world may well challenge our modern typology.¹² Furthermore, these essays convey no sense that the practices described and analyzed therein represent the ongoing duplication of a single historical model of behavior. Of course, their authors are well aware that sealing constitutes a superficially convergent transnational practice,¹³ but they seek to identify the relationships between the modalities of seal operations, and the contexts and directionality of the processes mediated by seals -representation, authorization, identification, transmission, translation, negotiation. In so doing, they expose rather than assume the inter-subjective, transnational, and transcultural connectivity at work in these processes. What emerges from their approach is an understanding that seals functioned in liminal, transitional situations that arose through encounters between different entities involved in legal, administrative, martial, mercantile, or diplomatic exchange. In the course of such often unstable and potentially disruptive encounters, seals upheld personal credentials (Anderson, Sode) and signaled the quality of transnationally circulated goods (Cherry); they enabled dialogue between myth and politics (Gallop) and between competing religions and philosophies (Copp, Weill-Parot); and they facilitated interchange in cases of enmeshed identities (Sijpesteijn) or entangled religious and political settings (Copp, Sijpesteijn, Gallop, Berenbeim).

In the global perspective embraced by this volume, cross-cultural sealing networks connect particular sealing practices, which undergo change as a result but do not necessarily fuse. Such practices remained in tension, involving resistance (Weill-Parot), but also compromises (Berenbeim) and accommodation (Sijpesteijn, Copp). The extension of or adaption to particular forms of seals and seal usage, the co-option and conversion of motifs manifest the force of seals as objects and images that generate sociocultural identification through mutual exchange and visual hybridity.¹⁴

A Class of Objects in Global Perspective

The acknowledgment of non-western cultures as sources of medieval European sealing suggested that this practice was the product of ongoing global interactions over millennia. Yet, once these origins were granted, the notion of global interaction faded from seal study, while western seals, their functions, materials and forms become the implicit norm, the standard used for comparison with seals and sealing in the rest of the world.

The seals that circulated in the medieval world present a varied landscape of shape, form, and materials. This volume considers that the category "seal" comprises objects whose composition diversely encompasses multiple elements, to the point where it becomes possible to refigure the normal as atypical,¹⁵ or better even, to dispense altogether with such polarization so as to concentrate on the array of possibilities offered by the global.

All seals discussed in the essays imply the use of a device engraved intaglio to imprint a malleable support. The stamping device is called seal, seal-matrix or die; the resulting imprint is termed seal or seal impression, with the term "seal" thus applicable to both elements of the sealing process.

Medieval seal-dies were made of durable materials (stone, brass, silver, iron, tin, ivory, wood) used either as block stamps, or as tongs (boulleterion) or, in the case of precious stones, set within rings. In Malay, no seal-matrix survives before the eighteenth century, when they are metallic.¹⁶

In his paper on Scandinavian seals of the central Middle Ages, Anderson focuses on Danish metallic seal-matrices, which have recently been unearthed in great numbers by metal detectorists and archaeologists. The resultant corpus, Anderson points out, has changed the nature of seal studies, which heretofore was focused on documentary seals primarily housed in archives, and now has moved into the field of archaeology. John Cherry, in his contribution on cloth seals, Petra Sijpesteijn, in her essay on early seals from Islamic Egypt and Syria (600-800 CE), and Claudia Sode's study of Byzantine seals also stress the implications of archaeological seal findings. In addition to bringing to light much new material, these situated discoveries help delineate zones of seal circulation, a mobility made possible by the seal as a portable object. However, both Anderson and Sijpesteijn warn against equating the finding of seal-like artefacts in a given locale as proof of sealing practiced in that particular locale. Sijpesteijn's cautionary is based on the fact that in the regions under her consideration rings offering the appearance of signets may well have served as jewels rather than seals. Anderson's caveat derives from archaeological theory, which informs his argument that the specific patterns of seal fragmentation, burial, and deposition he has identified are evidence for legal ceremonies of seal destruction that brought people to specific courts, and for international diplomatic encounters on Danish lands. Anderson further emphasizes the distinction between loss and waste on one hand, and deliberate acts of breakage and deposition on the other, with the latter articulating connections between people, places, and objects (seals among them), and thus being integral to the generation of distinct social relations.¹⁷

Sijpesteijn suggests a distinction between stamp-like ornaments and seal-matrices, defining the latter as devices that produced imprints for the authentication of shipments and documents in the early Muslim Middle East. Paul Copp, in his essay on seals in Chinese Buddhism (ca. 600-1000 CE), also notes that seals were a distinct group within the broader category of stamps. Chinese stamps were used to imprint texts and images, from which they derived their significance. Chinese seals, by contrast, bore the identity of individuals and institutions whose person-hood they extended and from which they derived a power of being that imbued both the state officials responsible for them and the documents sealed with them. Such ontological and referential distinctions were, as is further discussed below, central to the metaphorical use of seals in Chinese Buddhism. Both Sijpesteijn and Copp demonstrate an overlap between seals and stamps, with their definitional borders changing as these devices passed through different contexts of utilization and networks of signification. This mutability of category is explored in depth by Nicolas Weill-Parot in his essay on the Christian reception of astrological talismans. Of Greek and Arabic provenance, such talismans were brought to the attention of Christian Europe by the Speculum astronomiae (ca. mid-thirteenth century), whose author classified astrological talismans as astral seals. This projection of magical elements onto a pre-existing practice, sealing, that had governmental and legal resonance threatened destabilization and prompted scholarly reflections on royal and astral seals and their modes of agency.

Contributors to the present volume have focused much of their attention on seal impressions. Hand-formed clay registered fingerprints before receiving the impressions of Arab-Muslim seals. The wax impressions that predominated in Northwestern Europe (France, Northern Spain, England, Germany, Scandinavia) were also stamped while held in the hand, thus recording fingerprints as well. Ink seal impressions, on paper and silk documents, and on paintings, circulated widely in China. Lead impressions, or bulls, produced by metallic tongs, were preponderant in Byzantium and throughout the early Muslim empire.

The lead, clay, and (extremely rare) wax imprints found in lands newly brought under Muslim control, such as the provinces of Syria and Egypt and the Sasanian empire discussed by Sijpesteijn, offer a diversity of materials that attests to the circulation of Arab, Byzantine, and Sasanian cultures in these lands. However, the persistent usage of a particular material may have signified pride in asserting a conqueror's custom, or else the retention of a local tradition resisting encroachment by a foreign administration that sought to impose standardization in the form of specific texts, languages, and images. The material composition of seals thus may well have articulated regional identities independently of seals' linguistic and iconographic inscriptions. Avoidance of specific seal materials may even have expressed distancing from a particular practice. For instance, early Muslim bulls, like Byzantine bulls, served as commercial closure and fiscal verification. Additionally, Muslim bulls served as taxation marks (also known as neck-sealing) worn by non-Muslim subjects around their necks to show that they had paid their poll-tax.¹⁸ Lead documentary sealing, however, so prominently practiced in Byzantium, was not the mode in the early Islamic period. Clay was initially affixed to Muslim documents. The clay sealings produced by Arab conquerors in Egypt broke with Byzantine and Sasanian practices by displaying pictures rather than texts, but utilized motifs borrowed from Byzantine and Sasanian iconography. The strengthening of Arabicization and Islamization from the late seventh century onward gradually promoted the withdrawal of images and the exclusive use of Arabic texts on seals, which began to display features that cannot be traced to Sasanian or Byzantine practice.

In Northwestern Europe too, metallic imprints were primarily trademarks,¹⁹ as illustrated specifically by the cloth seals analyzed by John Cherry whose essay brings into focus the nature of the relationship between seal materials and functions. Made of two lead discs joined by connecting strips, cloth seals were riveted through the textile, and were imprinted with information about the cloth's quality and provenance as well as the payment of tax duties. Cherry notes that European cloth seals, in use between the late thirteenth and the nineteenth century, have been discovered in far-flung parts of the medieval and modern world. Their metallic composition has ensured their durability far better than wax would have. Although early cloth seals may also have been stamped in wax, no such seals have survived. Following Cherry's lead, one may speculate about the influence lead commercial sealing from the Byzantine and Muslim empires may have had upon western usage. In any case, throughout the Middle ages, there was an internationally recognizable form of good labelling that facilitated the transnational circulation of goods. The standardization of seal materials may have been crucial for such objects, which were also expected to impart specific, local information.

In Jambi, whose eighteenth-century Islamic seals are studied by Annabel Gallop, impressions were obtained by blackening a metallic die with the flame of a wax candle, and by stamping the die and the lampblack produced on it by the soot of the flame onto a moistened piece of paper. The use of lampblack as a medium for imprinting seals was specific to the Malay Archipelago, where it remained in use for three hundred years, until it was replaced by ink in modern times. The material uniqueness of the lampblack seal imprints from South East Asia stands as a distinctive identifying cultural trait noted in 1819 by an English official present at the treaty that led to British settlement in Singapore, who remarked that "their [the Malay chiefs of the area] mode of sealing is peculiar."²⁰

Essays in this volume have mostly focused on the seal impressions of ruling elites and their administrations whose seals, with their sensitive combination of materials and graphic features, were attuned to adjust cultural encounters with a flexibility of imitation, translation, and imposition. Given the sociology of such official seals, it is worth asking whether the private seals of common individuals who lived in multi-ethnic and multi-religious environments may have retained more composite styles, being less affected by political strategies of connectivity.²¹

Sealing as Cultural Technology

The connectivity engineered by seals may be said to begin with and within their mode of production. A seal impression is an assemblage of prints left by material bodies, both human and otherwise, simultaneously coming into contact with a malleable support. Forming a nexus of durable and reliable traces, the seal impression is an indexical sign, linked to its several originating agents by an actual haptic connection and its resulting combination of organic bodily marks and identifying designs. On a seal impression, marks and design are not so much represented but actually reproduced as a replicated likeness. The technique of seal imprinting thus fuses bodies and artefacts, embodiment and representation, a crucial outcome since, for the seal impression to be revealed, both the die and the hands have to be lifted up. The existence of a seal impression is predicated upon the absence of its originating cause, whose traces of agency are nevertheless indubitable.²²

The modalities of seal production epitomize the transmission of likeness. Moreover, they exemplify a complex model of causality, providing explanatory patterns of inference that have been variously harnessed to formulate definitions of reality, articulate beliefs in the supernatural, and inform religious and talismanic rituals. Key metaphors inspired by seals were fundamental to Buddhism during its expansion out of India and eastward. Indeed, Copp argues, during the formative phase of Buddhism in China's later Tang empire (seventh through tenth century CE), seals circulated Indic and central Asian elements, translating them into idioms more closely related to local Chinese culture, which included long established Daoist and Confucian sealing practices. In Indic rhetoric, the seal of the Buddha was the seal of truth. Impressed on the world and on scriptures, it creates an axis of resemblance with true reality that guides the fundamental relationship between truth and appearance, and shapes modes of learning, meditation, and human behavior and interaction. Copp demonstrates that the metaphor was crossbred with the local styles of Chinese literati who transferred truth to the Chan master. Nevertheless, the metaphor of sealing deeply influenced Chinese notion of reality and extended beyond Buddhism to enter the thought of Daoism. In this encounter, the metaphorical sense shifted to a different aspect of sealing, the contrast between a single seal-die and the multiple imprints issued from it, paralleling in Daoism the unchanging and singular true reality and the imprints of its responses to the infinitely diverse phenomena of the world. As seals migrated into new intellectual contexts, their metaphorical import mutated to fit specific ontological probes but along a trajectory afforded by the properties of the seals themselves. Thus Muhammad who, as Sijpesteijn reminds us, is identified in the Qu'ran as the seal of the prophets, is positioned metaphorically as a closure, the ultimate prophet sent by God.

As their rhetorical valence situated seals at the confines of the spiritual and the material, they were also experienced as possible conduits for supernatural forces. In the Buddhism of Tang China, seal dies inscribed with the names of gods and buddhas were believed to channel their divine power, and were thus worn as protection, applied for healing, used in ceremonies of exorcism, and even stamped into the earth in order to rejuvenate it. Such practices had long been established in Confucianism and Daoism, from which they entered Chinese Buddhism. Nevertheless, it seems that seals became standard tools of the Daoist priesthood by the Tang period, at the end of which they were systematically incorporated into the religious rituals of Daoism. Thus, the Buddhist borrowings of existing practices fused with Buddhist imagery and conceptualization of seals, in turn reshaping Daoist sealing practices and moving them to a position of centrality within Daoist ritual. This hybrid culture of sealing optimized exchanges and facilitated diffusion, possibly promoting competition but also providing a common tool by means of which to enter relationships with the self, others, the world, and the gods across specific religions.

The exchange between the religious and the talismanic presented by Copp in Tang China indicates a fluidity absent from comparable encounters in western Christendom. In his essay, Weill-Parot considers the debate among late medieval Christian scholars surrounding the talismanic legitimacy of the astrological seals encountered in new Latin translations of Arabic texts. There they were described as obtaining magical and healing powers from the stars. Weill-Parot is particularly interested in theologians, physicians, and philosophers who addressed the issue by establishing parallels between magical and documentary seals. Those scholars arguing for a demonic source for the power of astrological seals constructed a definition of the royal seal that differentiated its semiotic logic and causal principles from that of magical seals. They stipulated two categories of irreconcilable and incomparable objects in the face of an awareness of their similarities.²³ Significantly, scholars invested in the legitimacy of astrological seals eschewed comparison between the two types of seals. They favored exploring the agency of Nature in imprinting stones, an agency that could be effectively transmitted by a craftsman engraving a seal in the likeness of a star at the proper astrological time under natural influences. Seals stood at the boundary of demonic and natural magic, of politics, religion and natural philosophy, serving both as powerful objects in themselves, and as concepts illuminating the ability of likeness and imprinting to channel the power of their originating referent.

Identity and Hybridity

Deployed as a tool for thought and for establishing channels of communication between different cultures, sealing is thus thematized, in a pragmatics of recursion that generated techniques for the formation and formulation of identity.²⁴ This issue is taken up by Claudia Sode, Annabel Gallop, and Jessica Berenbeim.

Pursuing an understanding of Byzantine identity, Sode focuses on the empire between the tenth and the twelfth century, when seal usage underwent a dramatic growth, possibly associated with a revival of urban and provincial life supervised by a greater number of civil and ecclesiastical officials whose official correspondence required authentication.²⁵ Many seals from this period displayed images, rather than limiting themselves to the textual inscriptions of names, titles, and invocations that were typical of earlier Byzantine seals. Such iconographic seals mainly display holy figures and religious scenes, suggesting that personal identity manifested itself by the expressions of personal piety and apotropaic concerns. On the basis of a newer trend she identified, where some individuals introduced urban architectural imagery on their seals, Sode sees these seals as offering evidence of civic identity in Byzantium, as indicating that a sense of personal identity could arise from membership in corporate bodies such as cities. Civic identity could also appear on seals in the shape of a religious edifice or patron saint, or as poems praising a personification of the city. Nevertheless, the rarity of civic references on personal seals in the empire highlights a large consensus in locating identity within the sphere of the devotional, in conversation with holy models and divine figures.

In the Malay Archipelago of the eighteenth century, seal usage was extensive and Malay seals are a part of the substantial body of Islamic seals around the world, with which they share inscriptions in Arabic. Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of Islamic culture, Malay seals have a distinctive identity of their own, consisting of large metallic matrices, lampblack impressions, and a floral iconography reminiscent of local pre-Islamic Hindu-Buddhist artworks. Annabel Gallop explores a particular case of a historicizing seal that, introduced by the Sultan of Jambi in the mid-eighteenth century, exceptionally displays four animals in four floral petals despite the traditional avoidance of the depiction of living creatures in official Muslim contexts. The animals on this seal evoke the mythical origin of the prestigious Minangkabau kings as claimants of descent from Alexander the Great. Their patronage of the Jambi court was counterbalanced by the influence of Javanese elites, also represented on the seal by the inscription of the Javanese title of the sultan in the other petals. As a site of encounter between two rival factions, this seal's hybridity navigates several frontiers. It transgresses the custom of Islam while creating a visual mode of parity between two local factions, both of which inhabit the seal as constitutional elements of the power yielded by the sultan. Transcending the circumstances of its creation, this seal design persisted until the early twentieth century, its formula successfully embodying the unity of the state.

Jessica Berenbeim examines the medieval world of European diplomacy from the perspective of sealed documents that were exchanged between sovereigns engaged in the negotiation and ratification of treaties. She demonstrates that, irrespective of their contents, the manufacture of such documents negotiated mutually meaningful forms of authentication between transnational chancery traditions. The resulting "diplomatic aesthetic," to quote Berenbeim, was a visual hybridity, whereby incorporated aspects of all traditions involved co-existed in the documents, merging their multiple origins without universalizing them. The idea was that no diplomatic tradition was to predominate, so the exchange of treaties and ratifications constructed a world of reciprocity among rulers.²⁶ The hybridity of these state documents thus conceived of national boundaries positively, as idealized sites of equal exchange - even when, as was the case with the treaty of Troyes (1420) between the kings of England and of France, the latter was being dispossessed of his kingdom in the aftermath of military defeats.