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Mastering the Seven-Headed Serpent: A Stamp Seal from Hazor Provides a Missing Link Between Cuneiform and Biblical Mythology

Uehlinger, Christoph (2024). Mastering the Seven-Headed Serpent: A Stamp Seal from Hazor Provides a Missing Link Between Cuneiform and Biblical Mythology. Near Eastern Archaeology, 87(1):14-19.

Abstract

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, sevenheaded 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.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:01 Faculty of Theology and the Study of Religion > Institute of Religious Studies
Dewey Decimal Classification:200 Religion
220 The Bible
290 Other religions
890 Other literatures
930 History of ancient world (to ca. 499)
Scopus Subject Areas:Social Sciences & Humanities > Archeology (arts and humanities)
Social Sciences & Humanities > History
Social Sciences & Humanities > Archeology
Uncontrolled Keywords:combat myth, dragon slayer, glyptic studies, iconography and religion, visible religion, Ninurta, Ba'al, Yahweh, Leviathan, ancient Israelite religion, Hebrew Bible, Ugarit, Canaan, Hazor
Scope:Discipline-based scholarship (basic research)
Language:English
Date:1 March 2024
Deposited On:12 Mar 2024 08:13
Last Modified:31 Oct 2024 02:38
Publisher:American Schools of Oriental Research
ISSN:1094-2076
OA Status:Green
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1086/727582
Related URLs:https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/727582
Project Information:
  • Funder: SNSF
  • Grant ID: 186426
  • Project Title: Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant: a multi-faceted prism for studying entangled histories in an interdisciplinary perspective
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