Byzantine Lead Seals from the Lycian Civilisations Museum at Demre

Year 2025, Issue: 28, 539 - 578, 26.12.2025

Nilgun Elam , Ünal Demirer , J.-Cl. Cheynet

https://doi.org/10.47589/adalya.1849635

Abstract

The Museum of Lycian Civilisations at Demre (established in 2014, in the granarium of ancient Andriake, the port of Myra) holds a collection of forty-eight Byzantine lead seals, which will be presented for the first time here. This collection was part of the sigillographic material preserved in Antalya Archaeological Museum, and in 2017 it was transferred to Demre Museum by the decision of the Ministry of Culture. The provenance of the collection is generally unknown. They were purchased from the inhabitants of Antalya by the museum. We assume that they were discovered in the vicinity of the city known as Attaleia during the Byzantine period, located within the borders of the Pamphylia region. The lead seals of the museum are dated to the period between the 6th and the end of 11th century A.D. Our aim is to present these forty-eight seals in detail and compare them with their parallel and / or similar examples which have already been evaluated in the sigillographical corpus together with those that have appeared in the auction houses as well as combine their data with the literary and prosopographical sources.

Keywords

Pamphylia , Attaleia Byzantine sigillography , lead seals , monograms

Supporting Institution

This article has been published as a part of the post-doctoral project titled “Religious- Military-Civil Organisation and Prosopography in Asia Minor in Byzantine Period in the Light of Sigillography (second half of the 6th c. - middle of the 11th c.),” conducted by N. Elam with the support of TUBITAK’s 2219-International Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Program for Turkish Citizens (2024-2025).

Thanks

We would like to thank the officials of the Ministry of Culture of Türkiye and N. Sezgin, Director of the Demre Museum, who gave us permission to examine and publish the sigillographic material at the museum.

References

• Ahrweiler, H. 1960. Recherches sur l’administration de l’empire byzantin aux IXe - XIe siècles. Athènes: Ecole française d’Athènes.
• Ahrweiler, H. 1966. Byzance et la mer. Bibliothèque byzantine. Études 5. Paris : Presses Universitaire de France.
• Ahrweiler, H. 1989. “Art. Flotte. A. Spätantike, Byzantinisches Reich, arabisch-islamischer Bereich. II. Byzantinisches Reich.” In Lexikon des Mittelalters 4, edited by R. Authy, 580-82. Artemis Verlag.
• Anna Komnena. 2001. Annae Comnenae. Alexias. Pars prior, Prolegomena et textus, edited by D.R. Reinsch and A. Kambylis. Corpus Fontium Historiae Byzantinae. Series Berolinensis 40.1. Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter.