Dr Lee's Collection of Cylinder Seals

Abstract

Dr Lee was known as a collector of cylinder seals only because six of them were published by Cullimore in 1843. Now twenty seals have been rediscovered in the Buckinghamshire County Museum in Aylesbury, and have been registered and recorded. Some of the preliminary drawings made for Cullimore's publication have also survived and have thrown light on the way the seals were recorded for publication in the early 1840s. Here a full catalogue and assessment of Lee's collection is presented, together with evidence for the way seals were recorded for Cullimore's catalogue.

Tracing the Acquisition History of Some Old Syrian Popular Style Cylinder Seals

“…Unprovenanced OSPS seals in European museums (1840-1914) 11 What follows are the collection histories of nine unprovenanced seals that form part of significant museum collections in Berlin, Geneva, Leiden and Paris formed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Porter 2001: 118-22). Very relevant to our understanding of practices that led to the formation of collections of this type is a study by Brett Thorn and Dominique Collon of a group of seals acquired by John Lee (1783-1866) and now in the Buckinghamshire County Museum (Thorn and Collon 2013). The authors have demonstrated that seal collecting had already gained popularity by the 1840s-in many cases by those with opportunities to travel within 2001: nos.…”