From Stone Age buttons to Chinese company chops, seals still prove who you are
Stamp seals carved from stone go back at least to the 6th millennium BC, and the device never really went away. In China, Japan and South Korea, a registered seal can still bind a company to a contract or transfer property, and British notaries each keep a personal seal on file.
A seal is both the tool that presses a design into wax, clay or paper and the mark it leaves. Its first jobs were proving a document genuine and showing whether a package had been tampered with, since the seal had to break before the contents could be reached; the everyday English verb for closing something securely comes from that. Traditional dies are cut below the surface, so the impression stands raised and reversed, which matters whenever lettering is involved.
The earliest examples, from the Halaf culture, were button-shaped with simple ornament. Mesopotamians rolled hollow stone cylinders across clay to label trade goods, probably wearing them on a cord at the neck, while Egyptians favoured signet rings, some bearing royal names in hieroglyphs. In medieval Europe, towns, bishops and kings used paired dies to make wax impressions on both sides, hung from ribbons or parchment strips beneath the document.
Most western royal chanceries sealed in wax routinely by about the end of the 10th century. England's oldest known die is a gold two-sided one found near Postwick in Norfolk, dated to the late 7th century. The habit then spread downward, so that minor knights were sealing before 1200 and ordinary freemen by the mid-13th century. Rubber stamps and embossed seals displaced wax for most purposes during the 20th century.
East Asia took a separate path. Seals have served as written identity there since the Qin dynasty, from 221 BC, pressed first into clay and, from the Tang era, in red cinnabar ink. Carving them counts as a branch of calligraphy, engravers are regarded as artists, and each seal is unique. Traditional paintings often carry several: one or two from the artist and more from later owners.
Source: Seal (emblem)
