Inscribing Texts in Byzantium by Toth Ida; Lauxtermann Marc D.; Toth Ida

Author:Toth, Ida; Lauxtermann, Marc D.; Toth, Ida
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

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Inscriptions of church and state officials on Byzantine lead seals

Alexandra-Kyriaki Wassiliou-Seibt

Byzantine lead seals are among the most important sources for the study of Byzantine history and culture. They are also a kind of mirror of an empire whose crucial ideological component was Christianity, which played a decisive role in the designs of, and legends on, seals since the late sixth century. The earliest examples stem from the fourth and fifth centuries, the latest from the fifteenth.

Lead seals (or bullae) are small, more or less round objects, printed by an iron boulloterion. A boulloterion is a seal pincer with two matrices engraved in negative, which contains an inscription or an inscription and an image. If a lead seal bears imprints on both sides, it is sometimes called diptychon in versified inscriptions.1 Lead seals were primarily used for official and private documents as a guarantee of authenticity and genuineness.

The total number of preserved Byzantine seals is estimated to be more than a hundred thousand. The diameter of these small monuments normally ranges between eleven and thirty-five millimetres. The earliest examples lack (with rare exceptions) an inscription; but they do have primitive images, just as Roman sealings usually do, which are in a way the precursor of the Byzantine lead seal. It is in the sixth century that we encounter the first inscriptions, quite elegant and sometimes partially or totally encoded in the form of a monogram.2

Since the legends on seals offer the personal data of many Byzantines, usually high-ranking dignitaries of the state or the church, they provide important evidence in terms of prosopography, social and administrative history, as well as historical geography. Of course, sigillography has to take into account all the relevant data of narrative sources (historiography, epistolography, documents, etc.) and the archaeological evidence. Since seals are discovered through excavations or surface inspection (with or without the help of metal detectors), they constitute archaeological findings, just as inscriptions on and in churches and monasteries, on secular buildings such as bridges and walls, and on tomb stones, form part of the archaeological record. Regrettably, the exact finding place of lead seals is quite often unknown. Given that a considerable number of Byzantine lead seals carry names of non-Greek origin, they are also a rich source for the study of the ethnic composition of the Byzantine aristocracy and the reconstruction of administrative and social micro- and macrostructures (in much greater detail than the narrative sources allow for). However, this issue will not be of concern here. Instead I shall focus on the evolution of seal inscriptions with regard to their content and form, which show similarities to what we see in inscriptions on works of minor art.

Until the end of the seventh century, the format of seal legends remained often fairly modest, usually consisting only of the first name, sometimes with title or office, drafted in the genitive, in the sense of ‘the seal of x’, e.g. Ὀβοδιανοῦ / ἀπὸ ἐπάρχων (late 6th–first half of the 7th c.).3 Around the middle of

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