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Lot Essay
Multi-sided pendant seals are relatively rare. Depicted on the base is a hawk. On one of the sides a seated Persian testing an arrow, his bow on the groundline before him. His stool is covered with a cross-patterned cloth, and the legs are turned. The opposite side has a standing Persian man holding a spear and a bow. The other sides have a standing Persian woman holding up a conical cup and a wreath, and a standing Persian woman holding a cup, a dipper and a stemmed cup.
Three similar pendant seals in the Greco-Persian series (including the present example) were grouped together with gems of other shapes by Boardman (op. cit., p. 316) on account of a homogeneity of style, all perhaps the work of one artist, which he called the Pendants Group. On a grey chalcedony scaraboid in Oxford, a Persian woman approaches a man who sits on an identical stool as seen on our pendant (see no. 178 in J. Boardman and M.-L. Vollenweider, Catalogue of the Engraved Gems and Finger Rings, I, Greek and Etruscan). The act of testing or inspecting an arrow is a subject more Greek than Eastern in flavor, as seen on an earlier blue chalcedony scaraboid by Epimenes (pl. 357 in Boardman, op. cit.) and vases (see for example the tondo of a red-figured cup by the Group of London E 33, no. 200653 in the Beazley Archive Pottery Database). Neither the relaxed pose of the standing man nor the depiction of women are found in more formal Achaemenid art.
Three similar pendant seals in the Greco-Persian series (including the present example) were grouped together with gems of other shapes by Boardman (op. cit., p. 316) on account of a homogeneity of style, all perhaps the work of one artist, which he called the Pendants Group. On a grey chalcedony scaraboid in Oxford, a Persian woman approaches a man who sits on an identical stool as seen on our pendant (see no. 178 in J. Boardman and M.-L. Vollenweider, Catalogue of the Engraved Gems and Finger Rings, I, Greek and Etruscan). The act of testing or inspecting an arrow is a subject more Greek than Eastern in flavor, as seen on an earlier blue chalcedony scaraboid by Epimenes (pl. 357 in Boardman, op. cit.) and vases (see for example the tondo of a red-figured cup by the Group of London E 33, no. 200653 in the Beazley Archive Pottery Database). Neither the relaxed pose of the standing man nor the depiction of women are found in more formal Achaemenid art.