THE HIDDEN LEGACY. BYZANTINE SEALS OF THE EXARCHAL AGE IN ITALIAN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS

PI: Margherita Elena Pomero

Descrizione

The project focused on the collection, study, and digital cataloguing of Byzantine seals from the Exarchal period (584–751 AD) discovered in Italy or preserved in Italian museum collections. Byzantine sigillography is an interdisciplinary field that examines seals attached to official documents within the Eastern Roman Empire and its provinces, including Italy during the Exarchal period. The exarchate was an administrative and territorial unit governed by the exarch, an imperial official appointed by Constantinople.
Seals were widely used in Byzantine administration and private correspondence. They are coin-like objects, mostly made of lead, bearing inscriptions and/or iconography on both sides. Their legends usually reveal the owner’s name, titles, and functions, whether religious, civil, or military. They therefore offer valuable insights into the linguistic, palaeographic, administrative, and religious history of the Late Antique and Medieval Mediterranean. Accordingly, they also constitute a significant source for understanding the bureaucratic and social system of Byzantine Italy between Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Until now, this material evidence of Byzantine administration had been scattered across printed editions and specialized publications, complicating systematic access and analysis. Moreover, the absence of shared publication standards and centralized digital infrastructures hindered their searchability and study.
To address this gap, the project adopted SigiDoc, an XML-based and TEI-compliant standard for encoding and publishing sigillographic materials, integrated into the EFES (EpiDoc Front-End Service) platform for the visualization and consultation of seals. The project collected and organized seals from the Exarchal period preserved in Italian museums or published in catalogues and scholarly literature, identified additional specimens from archaeological contexts or foreign collections, and analyzed the material for possible reattributions and redating. It also implemented the digital encoding of the corpus according to the SigiDoc standard, contributing to the development of a structured and interoperable dataset.
A centralised search interface, currently under development by the SigiDoc team at the Universities of Cologne and Paris, will integrate the encoded material, enabling the aggregation of SigiDoc corpora and enhancing the accessibility and interoperability of sigillographic data. In this way, the project contributes to broader efforts to make Byzantine sigillographic evidence more accessible for both scholarly research and public engagement.