KIŠIB

The sealing of containers and doors, contracts and letters played an important role in the lives of people in Mesopotamia and its neighboring regions — today mostly Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey —, especially from the fourth to the first millennium BCE. The miniature depictions and inscriptions engraved on seals allow detailed insights into ancient networks of social, political, economic, religious, and artistic interaction, as well as the transmission of cultural knowledge, evolving forms of visual communication, and shifting ideologies. More than a hundred years of archaeological, philological, and art historical research on these objects have contributed significantly to our knowledge about the region’s past. However, access to this knowledge remains limited with the original artefacts dispersed across numerous collections worldwide. KIŠIB seeks to overcome these challenges by establishing a representative digital corpus of c. 80,000 seals and sealings. The inter-academic project, housed at the BBAW in Berlin and the BAdW in Munich, makes use of machine learning to speed up the collection, segmentation, and controlled annotation of artefact-, image-, and text-related information, based on state-of-the-art FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and LOUD (Linked Open Usable Data) data standards. Its research component explores ancient mechanisms of interpersonal and societal trust established through sealing practice and seal design.