Old Babylonian cylinder seal (virtual unwrapping), early second millennium BCE. BM 129524. Credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Collaborative initiatives

Alongside our collaboration with museums, universities, and other institutions to expand the Digital Corpus of Ancient West Asian Seals and Sealings, KIŠIB actively welcomes partnerships with research projects and individual scholars. By bringing together expertise, data, and perspectives, we aim to advance the study of ancient West Asian seals and sealings and to foster new avenues of research.

Research thrives on collaboration. Together, we can build a richer, more connected understanding of ancient West Asian glyptic.

Building a hub for seal studies

KIŠIB’s digital infrastructure provides a richly annotated, open, and carefully curated database designed specifically for glyptic research. Our goal is to make one of the richest yet most widely dispersed corpus of ancient West Asian seals and sealings accessible to researchers and students around the world. Beyond providing high-quality datasets from publications and collections, KIŠIB serves as a platform for collaborative research. Whether you are documenting a museum collection, developing a research project, or working on a dissertation, our infrastructure offers a flexible environment that can be adapted to a wide range of scholarly needs.

Why collaborate with KIŠIB?

By contributing data to KIŠIB, your project becomes part of an interconnected research resource that continues to grow with every new contribution. Collaboration with KIŠIB offers several advantages:

  • Greater visibility by placing your material within a broader research context
  • Long-term preservation through sustainable storage, maintenance, and digital curation
  • A ready-to-use research infrastructure for projects of any size, reducing the technical and organisational effort required to structure and publish data
  • Improved interoperability, as datasets are integrated into a shared framework with controlled vocabularies and consistent data standards
  • Enhanced research potential, allowing material to be compared across regions, periods, and collections while facilitating the identification of broader patterns and connections

As the corpus expands, every new contribution increases the analytical value of the database—not only for your own research, but for the international scholarly community.

Your data, your research

Contributing to KIŠIB does not mean giving up ownership of your work. Project data are adapted to the KIŠIB database structure and controlled vocabularies. You may enter data directly into the database from the beginning of your project, or we can assist with importing existing datasets, for example from Excel spreadsheets. All contributions remain fully attributable. Every record created by you—or based on information you provide—is clearly linked to the contributing researcher or project through appropriate copyright statements, project attribution, and institutional logos. Your work therefore becomes part of a shared research infrastructure while remaining clearly identifiable as your own scholarly contribution.

Interested in working together?

We are always happy to discuss new collaborations.

If you would like to become part of the KIŠIB network or have questions about possible forms of collaboration, please contact us at Albert.Dietz@kishib.badw.de.

Associated projects and researchers

Below you will find an overview of our associated projects and collaborators. Each profile introduces the respective project and provides direct access to the corresponding records in the KIŠIB database.

Together, we are building an open, sustainable, and collaborative future for the study of ancient West Asian seals and sealings.

Projects

LET’S CLAY! Reviving Ancient Gestures Through Clay – Dietz, Helmholz, Paladre

Persons

Stamped & Rolled – Stöckert