Seal-Impressed Vessels at Hama, Syria (c. 2500-2000 BC)

During the second half of the 3rd millennium BC – a time of state formation and diffuse urbanization in the Near East – new kinds of food preparation tools and cooking and serving ceramics appear, alongside the proliferation of a new standardized range of vessels specifically designed for consuming liquids. Hama, in the Orontes Valley, seems to have been in this period at the centre of a Western Syrian use of a new and improved cooking pot, characterized by the occurrence of seal impressions. This paper seeks to reconsider the evidence of seal impressed cooking pots from Hama J (8-1), making use of both published and unpublished vessels kept at the National Museum of Denmark. We discuss several aspects related to the typology, chronology, and petrography of the vessels, their find context, the technical characteristics of the seal impressions (i.e., position and orientation), as well as the iconography. This allows us to put forward some hypotheses about the dynamics of production and distribution of seal impressed pots at Hama and other western Syrian sites during the Early Bronze Age period.