OCHRE Wiki - Managing Seals

Managing Seals

By Sandra Schloen, September 2015

OCHRE is well adapted to the study of artifacts and texts from the ancient world and has specialized features that help manage complex relationships between them. A case in point is the management of ancient tablets and the sealings impressed upon them, as manifested by many of the tablets in the Persepolis Fortification Archive. Here we summarize how to take advantage of OCHRE's seal-related features.

Seal-related items

Note first of all that a project will typically identify the artifact, e.g. a clay tablet, each of the surfaces of the tablet, and each of the sealings impressed on each surface as separate database items. This is straight-forward using the item-based approach of the OCHRE data model. The tablet item will be described by properties that pertain to its overall characteristics -- its size, shape, condition, and so on. The tablet surfaces will likely benefit from properties indicating their state of preservation and/or legibility. The seal impression items will identify the seal used to make the impression and other details as to orientation and legibility.

These separate items are related through a natural hierarchy that breaks down each tablet item into its surfaces and their seal impressions. If a seal is impressed more than once on any given surface that surface will have multiple seal impression items.

Seals on a tablet

Data entry shortcut: OCHRE provides a "stamp" tool that will insert 6 predefined surfaces in one fell swoop: the obverse (obv), upper edge (ue), reverse (rev), bottom edge (be), left edge (le), and right edge (re).

Insert tablet surfaces

Catalog of Seals

A project should also create, separate from the tablet and its surfaces and impressions, a catalog of the seals themselves. This will serve as a master list for identifying the source of the seal impressions. The seal items can then be described as to their type and features, and be assigned images and bibliographic details. Be sure to include in this catalog the <unidentified seal>, borrowed in from the Locations & Objects of the OCHRE master projects.

When a seal impression is described via its properties, the specific seal from the catalog can be assigned easily using the dynamic pick-list feature.

Seal variable setup

In order for this to work well, the Seal variable used by the project needs a little bit of special setup. Create a relational variable (call it whatever you want) that links to Locations & objects and set it to target the catalog of seals that has been established for the project. This will identify for the chevron pick-list feature the items that represent valid seals. In addition, make your project's Seal variable a synonym of the OCHRE master predefined Seal variable in order to trigger the special seal-related functionality.

Views

From a Tablet item of interest, use any of the Descendants, ... View options to see the details of the tablet and its surfaces and impressions (not pictured here).

From any Seal item of interest, use the Comprehensive View which is specially designed to find all instances of the seal and create a table which itemizes all of their occurrences, and includes useful summaries and counts.

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