Mark B. Garrison, The “Late Neo-Elamite” Glyptic Style: A Perspective from Fars
Drawing of PFS 25* from the Persepolis Fortification Archive with an Elamite inscription “Belonging to (the) Unsak.”
In an influential article published in 1973, Pierre Amiet used the
glyptic preserved in two archives of administrative documents from
Susa, conventionally called the Acropole tablets and the Apadana
tablets, along with actual cylinder seals (both provenanced and
unprovenanced), to establish a corpus of visual imagery which he called
“la glyptic de la fin de l’Élam.” Dated to the period of the
late 7th to the middle of the 6th century B.C., this late Neo-Elamite
glyptic has figured prominently in discussions of Elam in the period
after the sack of Assurbanipal (ca. 646 B.C.) and before the arrival of
Cyrus the Great (ca. 559-530 B.C.). New evidence from the hundreds of
seals preserved as impressions on a large archive of administrative
tablets from Persepolis, known as the Persepolis Fortification tablets
and dated to the years 509/508-498 B.C. in the reign of Darius the
Great, adds considerably to the discussion of “la glyptique de la
fin de l’Élam” and suggests strongly that its origin lay in Fars
(Anshan-Persepolis) rather than in Khuzistan (Susa).
