Wax seal— possibly Greek?

Hello all!

I’m very new here, but I’d love some assistance with a seal I’ve had in my collection for a while. Can anyone identify it, or (failing that) read the text around the outside? Any help extremely appreciated!

Best,
Katherine

 

It looks like Greek, and I think it's backward so this may be a wax impression of something not meant to be a seal.

 

Flipped horizontally and grayscale:

 

Grayscale....other way up!! Guessing it must be Greek??? Can see at least 5, maybe 6 birds - parrots?? on shoulders of some sort of a figure....or at least most of the top half of a figure???? At least that's MY take on it...@Bronwen??? OH, AND WELCOME to ANTIQUERS, Katherine!!!

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I thought that thing was a scorpion! lol.

 

me too.........

 

Looks like a Grand Tour souvenier intaglio .

 

Welcome, VP. Start by having a look at this thread (ignore the stuff about Brooke Shields.)

Any Grand Tour Intaglio experts out there?

Your piece is the same sort of thing, an impression of an engraved gem made for the collector market, done in a different material. This material is called sulfur & the impressions themselves are sometimes called sulfurs. As nearly as I have ever been able to figure out, sulfur is like sealing wax. It is quite durable. It would have cost more to have an impression collection made in this red stuff than in the more fragile plaster. Top of the line were impressions made in glass, like the ones Catherine the Great commissioned from James Tassie.

The gem that made the impression is really interesting & outside the sort of thing I know about, very old, a talisman or amulet. Either it is complete nonsense or it is a mystical image & inscription. To the extent I can read/transliterate them, the longer inscriptions on the sides are the same string of Greek vowels.



EUAIEAEIOEOAE



Not sure if the long edge letters are continuous with the short end ones. This has AIEAIO[OMEGA]O[OMICRON]U The ending 'ou' is normally sort of a possessive, meaning 'of' or 'by' (which leads to confusion on some gems whether an inscribed name ending ou means it was made by the person or is property of that person.) There are actually some consonants in what's below that. E(?)GP(?)OT

I'm not sure I'm seeing them all correctly, & I see more letters than I'm picking up, but you can see these concantenations of vowels are not pronounceable words. There is also an object I can't ID.

The figure does seem to be a man with crab/scorpion limbs. This impression (sulfur) in the Tassie impressions photographed by the Beazley Archive at Oxford may give a hint:

http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/897F8FB7-95A6-4E9A-87BD-145758ACA54C




The rooster is a symbol of Hermes/Mercury. If the crab is also associated, our crabby man with his staff could represent a form of Hermes, & Hermes is associated with mystical things. Here he is with a scorpion:

http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/CC834B6A-8A6F-49D2-BC09-A72098A43BD5

For fun, see also this one:

http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/record/22D96CFA-36A2-4720-B519-CCF9FD7F3E6F

Best I can do.

 

I’d never noticed the little arm— I thought it was a scorpion’s tail! Thank you!

 

This is amazing! I’m so grateful You were so quick with so much useful information!

A few minutes of googling your info, and I found a page on magical gems: “Although these names often look like gibberish in Greek or Latin, some of them are derived from foreign languages such as Egyptian or Hebrew. For example, “Iao” appears to be a Greek adaptation of YHWH, the unpronouncable name of the Hebrew God.” Maybe it’s the same for mine? I will keep looking. If it borrows from Egypt, maybe the figure’s cockerels are uraeuses? I think I’ve seen depictions of Amun-Ra like this? So much reading to do!

Again thank you, and thank you all!

 

@Van_Poperin Does your sulfur have a number written by hand on the collar?

The go-to source:

https://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/gems/tassie/default.htm

The impressions are organized in broad time periods & then subjects within those periods. It's an old & awkward site to work with, you can't go back & forth very freely. You might start viewing plates from the beginning, Gem #1 & switching to the text if you see one you would like to know more about. I usually select 4 for the Image Size; 3 is too small for me & you can enlarge just by clicking on the plate.

Gem 507 reminds me of yours. There's a glitch & you have to ask for a different number - 500 works - to see the associated text for that one.

ΙΑΩ is common on magical gems, often written in an older style with the Ω written like the lower case ω, only larger. You'll notice that almost none of the letters on yours are written with curved lines. EUAIEAEIOEOAE is EVAIHAHIWHWAE. (If this is a discrete string, if I have it correctly where it starts & ends, it may matter that there are 13 letters.) It's in archaic Greek, which is really out of my wheelhouse.

A note on Grand Tour. The Grand Tour was properly the tour of Europe a well-cultivated young man of the 18th century would take with his tutor & perhaps a few other students to finish off their education. We use it very loosely now. By the second half of the 19th century it would be just as accurate to call them Cook's Tours, the travelers & their purpose quite changed. James Tassie was by far the biggest producer of these gem impressions. Most of them were bought in Britain by Britons, who collected them avidly by the hundreds & even thousands. I do not know whether ones made in Italy tended to stay in Italy or frequently came back to Britain as souvenirs, but there is no reason to assume without evidence that a loose piece like this one was acquired on a Grand Tour.

 

That’s an amazing resource... I will have to spend some time with it. Mine doesn’t appear to have a number on its collar but it might have rubbed off? If I find a matching no. I’ll post it.
I bought this sulfur in London with no provenance, so while I love the idea of a journey behind it, I have no idea of its having any “authenticity” or age‍♀️

 

If there had been a number it would not have completely worn off. Even if there had been, the number might have corresponded to the Tassie catalogue or might have been for an index that came with the set, as in the other thread.

Not sure what 'authentic' would be beyond what it is. No one bothers to fake these. You can count on its being antique. What you will never know is who made it. It doesn't really matter because the subject is so out of the ordinary. The mystical ones are not what most people seem to have collected.

 

I know I’ve already said it, but thank you so much for this. Great to know it’s got historical value alongside aesthetic!

 

It's nice for me when someone asks about something where I can apply some of the arcane stuff I know. Do let us know if you find out what you have. It's almost certain to be in there somewhere.

 

I will place this here as a conclusion: this is from Dr. Caitlín E. Barrett of Cornell University: that it is an impression from a stone stylistically around 3rd century; the legs are indeterminate pincers and the heads are seven uraeuses. She was not able to translate the inscription but believes it may exist on other stones and encouraged me to look for examples. Here’s a quote from an email:

“You might be interested in the Campbell Bonner Magical Gems Database, http://www2.szepmuveszeti.hu/talismans/, which collects images of “magical gems” from all over the Greco-Roman world. And Chris Faraone has an excellent new book, The Transformation of Greek Amulets in Roman Imperial Times, which I’d strongly recommend! An older, but still useful, text is Campbell Bonner’s Studies in Magical Amulets, Chiefly Graeco-Egyptian.”

It’s a good database; here’s the closest entry I’ve found so far:
...and to think, I spent nearly two years googling scorpions!