Mastering the Seven-Headed Serpent: A Stamp Seal from Hazor Provides a Missing Link between Cuneiform and Biblical Mythology
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 unu...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Chicago Press
2024
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| In: |
Near Eastern archaeology
Year: 2024, Volume: 87, Issue: 1, Pages: 14-19 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
Seal
/ Stamp
/ Levant (Süd)
/ Levant
/ Hazor
/ Mythology
/ Hero
/ Serpents (Motif)
/ Fight (Motif)
/ Ugarit
/ Mesopotamia
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| IxTheo Classification: | HB Old Testament KBL Near East and North Africa |
| Online Access: |
Presumably Free Access Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | 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, seven-headed 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. |
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| ISSN: | 2325-5404 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Near Eastern archaeology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1086/727582 |