History

The CMS was founded in 1958 by Friedrich Matz who was a professor of classical archaeology at the University of Marburg. Matz considered seal iconography crucial for understanding the Aegean Bronze Age world and saw a necessity in publishing this material in a systematic and standardized way. After managing to secure long-term funding from the of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz, the project was initiated in 1958, with its headquarters at Marburg. 

According to Matz’s publication plan, the seals would be ordered in the volumes based on keeping place. For the publication of the first volumes, Hagen Biesantz, a former student of Matz who had published a thesis on Mycenaean seals, coordinated work in Greece. Carl Albiker was chosen as project photographer and Piet de Jong as well as Antonis Papailiopoulos as  draughtsmen. Biesantz remained Matz’s co-editor until 1967.

In 1965, another former student of Matz, Ingo Pini, who had completed a doctoral thesis on Minoan burial customs, joined the project. Pini started as an editorial assistant but in 1969 he became co-editor and in 1975 editor of the series. From the start, Pini felt that primary research, comprehensive publication, and a systematic approach to the material were necessary. For this reason, he started collecting impressions and casts from the seals that were already published or were planned for publication in the series. With time, Pini developed his own methods for photographing seals and trained a draughtswoman in drawing them. Later, he expanded Matz's publication plan by including a series of volumes containing new finds (CMS V Suppl. 1-3).

In 1971, a grant from the Volkswagen Stiftung meant that a second archaeologist could be employed in the project. This post, which was later funded further by the Akademie, was held by several scholars. In 1985, Walter Müller, who was just completing his doctoral thesis on Late Minoan pottery, joined the Marburg project. In 2003 and after Pini’s retirement, Müller became co-editor of the CMS.

Pini focused his research on the material he was publishing. With time, he became highly proficient in issues of style and iconography, rising to a world leading authority in the field of Aegean glyptic. Müller devoted his research to carriers of seal impressions which were not yet consistently documented in research as objects in their own right. He also developed an expertise on the identification of the materials used in Aegean glyptic, which were often falsely and inconsistently identified. Having previous experience in engineering, Müller also introduced the use of technical methods for the study of Aegean glyptic, such as X-ray photography of metal signet rings. In their 26 years of work together, the pair travelled for months each year to museums all over Greece collecting material to be published in the CMS volumes.

In 1986, and with the help of the archaeologist and programmer Stefan Wildt, Pini and Müller started work on SPHRAGIS, a database that would record all seals published in the CMS volumes. After the sudden death of Stefan Wildt this project was suspended, but in 2005 it was resumed by Walter Müller. The new database was a pared-down version of the initial SPHRAGIS but unlike the initial project, it also contained the images of the seals. These were already available after a grant by the Institute for Aegean Prehistory in Philadelphia had allowed for the digitization of the totality of images kept at the archive. Müller also created a database for the carriers of seal impressions. In 2007 the CMS Databases were intergrated in ARACHNE, the central object database of the German Archaeological Institute and the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne. By the end of the project in 2011, revised data on all seals published in the CMS volumes had been imported in the seal database.

Six international symposia on the topic of Aegean glyptic were organized by Marburg, with the first taking place in the 1970s and the last in 2008, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the CMS. Four doctoral theses were completed at the study centre in Marburg.

In December 2011 the project came to a succesful end. The Archive of the CMS was moved at the Institute for Classical Archaeology and Byzantine Archaeology of the University of Heidelberg.

Today the CMS Series comprises 25 catalogue and 10 supplementary volumes mostly published between 1964 and 2011. One supplementary volume was published from the CMS in Heidelberg in 2018.