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.
Item Type: | Journal Article, refereed, original work |
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Communities & Collections: | 01 Faculty of Theology and the Study of Religion > Institute of Religious Studies |
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Dewey Decimal Classification: | 200 Religion
220 The Bible
290 Other religions
890 Other literatures
930 History of ancient world (to ca. 499) |
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Scopus Subject Areas: | Social Sciences & Humanities > Archeology (arts and humanities)
Social Sciences & Humanities > History
Social Sciences & Humanities > Archeology |
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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 |
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Scope: | Discipline-based scholarship (basic research) |
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Language: | English |
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Date: | 1 March 2024 |
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Deposited On: | 12 Mar 2024 08:13 |
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Last Modified: | 31 Oct 2024 02:38 |
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Publisher: | American Schools of Oriental Research |
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ISSN: | 1094-2076 |
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OA Status: | Green |
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Publisher DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1086/727582 |
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Related URLs: | https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/727582 |
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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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