The Early Development of the Lapidary Engraving Wheel in Mesopotamia

The identification of carving techniques on Chinese jade

“…The experiments to replicate features on the seals showed that both the shape and longitudinal depth of riffled features are linear or curved; their surfaces have faint to pronounced longitudinal grooves (see [22]: p. 167). Many of these characteristics overlap with those produced by wheel-cutting and it may not always be possible to distinguish between the two techniques.…”

Beyond Writing: The Development of Literacy in the Ancient Near East

“…Other materials beside clay, including stone and dust, were unlikely to have been initial media for literacy, either because they did not involve handwriting or because they were too ephemeral. A common material for seals and, by the late second millennium, for documents for which 'there was a desire to confer a particularly solemn character' (Charpin 2010, 72), stone was shaped by lapidary techniques (Sax et al 2000), movements distinct from handwriting. Further, the production of seals and even solemn documents would not have repeated characters in a way that produced handwriting effects.…”

Dr Lee's Collection of Cylinder Seals

“…However, a colleague has suggested that the detached lines behind the seated god's left shoulder are also rays, and this makes better sense than the possibility that they were part of the horned headdress of the god with his back to him. The cutting of the star illustrates the limitations in the seal-cutting techniques: the horizontal line and the two diagonal lines are short open-ended cuts that could be filed (although the proximity of the standing god made this difficult), whereas the vertical line is not open-ended and its lower point had to be scratched on with hand-held tools (see Sax et al 2000), and note that the vertical lines are cut in short sections with hand-held tools.…”