Religion(s) in Seals: Old and New Challenges

This article emerged within the Sinergia Project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation “Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant: A Multifaceted Prism for Studying Entangled Histories in an Interdisciplinary Perspective” (2021–2023; SSSL), among the Universities of Zurich, Bern, and Tel Aviv. Taking its starting-point from groundbreaking research initiated in the 1970s by Othmar Keel, particularly through his Corpus of Stamp-Seal Amulets from Palestine/Israel (CSSPI) and the Corpus of Seal Amulets from Jordan (CSAJ), the project will bring to completion the unfinished task of publishing all the stamp seals and seal impressions from the southern Levant dated between the Chalcolithic and Persian periods, prioritizing materials deriving from archaeological excavations. Moreover, it aims to develop an online, open-access, collaborative database entitled Corpus of Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant (CSSL). The focus adopted in this article corresponds to the SSSL module entitled “History of Religion(s): New Perspectives on the History of Ancient Levantine Religion(s) in the Second and First Mil- lennia BCE,” within which the author developed his research.