Hellenistic Sealings in Context: The City Archive of Seleucia-on-the-Tigris

Seleucia-on-the-Tigris was founded by Seleucus I in the last decade of the fourth century BC, at the centre of a very large network system. The city is characterized by a regular grid of Greek Hippodamian-type, but it also reveals in its planning and monumental layout intentional recollections of Babylonian traditions. Its ruins, located about 30 km south of present-day Baghdad and extending for hundreds of hectares, lead one to think that this foundation must have been envisioned as the pivotal centre of more than just Babylonia, the region in which it was located. The city rivalled Alexandria and Rome, and can be defined as one of the largest mega-sites of the ancient world whose ruins came down to the present unencumbered by the debris of later occupational strata. Excavations were conducted at the site by two expeditions: the joint American expedition of the University of Michigan, Toledo Museum of Art and Cleveland Museum of Art, which worked continuously from 1927 to 1936; and the Italian expedition of the Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino per il Medio Oriente e l’Asia (CRAST), which worked from 1963 to 1976, and resumed activity from 1985 to 1989. Buildings of various type were brought to light by both teams, but there can be little doubt that the City Archive was one of the most important discoveries ever made. The building is unique for its layout and the context of its finds, and is potentially the most important material source of information on Seleucid administration known so far. This is the reason that induced the members of the Italian team who discovered it to devote particular attention both to operations on the ground and to data processing. This task involved generations of scholars, and work is still in progress. Studies were conducted on the building and the materials it contained. Some light was shed on architecture and urban setting; the materials found there, a hoard consisting of thousands of sealings that are the remnants of perished documents, were investigated only for some aspects with particular focus given to the iconography of the seals impressed on their surfaces. Information embodied by sealings on administration procedures is of even greater potential, however, and demands further investigation. For this reason, a database was created for recording information on the many characteristics of both the sealings themselves and the seal impressions on them; meantime, statistics and spatial distribution analyses were started. Though decades elapsed since the discovery of the Archive, data-processing is still in fieri, due to the enormous quantity of records and the difficulties caused by incompatibilities between software used in the past and in use at present. This paper will address the peculiar architectural layout and the setting of the Archive, the relationship between the Archive and the (now lost) sealed documents within, as well as the spatial distribution of the sealings themselves. The context of the finds is addressed with the purpose of offering an overview on the trends preliminarily observed on the basis of this distribution. No conclusive arguments are formulated, because the trends discussed here need to be validated when data-processing is completed.