Sealing practices in Early Dynastic Mesopotamia: a case study from Fara

The thesis analyzes a corpus of unsealed sealings and clay objects recently excavated at the Early Dynastic site of Fara - ancient Shuruppak - in order to gain a better understanding about sealing practices and the chaine opératoire of sealing procedures in Mesopotamia during the 3rd millennium BCE. Such objects have been long overlooked in the research, due to their uninteresting look and the complexity of their analysis, but they can give important information regarding sealing practices and the functioning of administrative systems, especially but not only, in pre-literate societies. The purpose of the research is to create a summary of different sealings' types from the study of the reverse of these objects and to draw a preliminary picture of how bureaucratic systems worked in Mesopotamia at the very beginning of the writing revolution.