Sealing with Images in Kato Zakros

This monograph offers the final publication of the sealings from Kato Zakros, a Minoan Neopalatial harbour town with a palace at the east end of Crete. Sealings are lumps of clay with seal impressions used to secure from unauthorised access as well as to label and authorise. In Kato Zakros, 554 nodules were found in contexts dating to ca. 14801425 BCE. Most of them come from a town building with house-like architecture, House A, and five from the Palace. The objects were studied macroscopically but their clay was also analysed with pxrf (portable xray- fluorescence spectrometry). The study offers a complete catalogue of the objects, including photographs. This body of material forms the foundation for using the nodules as evidence that can help us reconstruct aspects of Minoan sealing administration. It is possible that the sealings entered the deposits in groups. The transactions recorded by the sealings may partly be connected with the exchange of goods and probably concerned Cretan actors and affairs. The sealing administration possibly involved many individuals with fixed duties, e.g., nodule makers, and seal users of diverse status. Its complexity attests to a formally organised documentation of transactions by sealing. In the end, the sealings are drawn in the discussion of the role Kato Zakros played in Neopalatial Crete. Two main groups of nodules were discerned. There are those with a regular pan-Cretan character that would have been at home anywhere in Crete; and those with distinctive characteristics that are rare outside Kato Zakros. The latter must have been part of a local branch of the Neopalatial sealing administration. The sealings found at the Palace belong to the first group and provide indications that the building had direct economic transactions with Knossos in north central Crete, where the largest Minoan palace is located. This could mean that, from at least the time when the palace was constructed in Kato Zakros, the town functioned as a gateway for the Knossian trade with eastern ports.