{"title":"The Archives of Artaxata: Archival Practice in the Capital of Ancient Armenia","authors":"Torben Schreiber","doi":"10.4467/20800909el.21.017.13375","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the seal impressions from Artaxata discovered in 1979/80 during excavations carried out by the Armenian Academy of Sciences on Hills V and VIII. As the archive on Hill VIII is quite small with only 20 to 25 seal impressions, the focus of this paper lies on the approximately 8,000 seal impressions found on hill V. The complex was dated to the period from 180 BC to 59 AD and it was assumed that it was a “private” archive or a kind of “chancellery.” An analysis of the finds in a wider context and the comparison with other archival complexes of the Hellenistic period as well as an examination of the characteristic features of “official” seals (size, image, shape, number of impressions) leads to the conclusion that it must have been a public archive, most probably it is the city archive of Artaxata.","PeriodicalId":38045,"journal":{"name":"Electrum","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2021-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"2","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Electrum","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.4467/20800909el.21.017.13375","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"Arts and Humanities","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 2
Abstract
This article examines the seal impressions from Artaxata discovered in 1979/80 during excavations carried out by the Armenian Academy of Sciences on Hills V and VIII. As the archive on Hill VIII is quite small with only 20 to 25 seal impressions, the focus of this paper lies on the approximately 8,000 seal impressions found on hill V. The complex was dated to the period from 180 BC to 59 AD and it was assumed that it was a “private” archive or a kind of “chancellery.” An analysis of the finds in a wider context and the comparison with other archival complexes of the Hellenistic period as well as an examination of the characteristic features of “official” seals (size, image, shape, number of impressions) leads to the conclusion that it must have been a public archive, most probably it is the city archive of Artaxata.
期刊介绍:
Electrum has been published since 1997 by the Department of Ancient History at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow as a collection of papers and monographs. In 2010 it starts as journal with one monographic issue per year. Journal publishes scholarly papers embodying studies in history and culture of Greece, Rome and Near East from the beginning of the First Millennium BC to about AD 400. Contributions are written in English, German, French and Italian. The journal publishes books reviews.