Mesopotamian Locks: Khorsabad, Clay Sealings, and the Evidence

Khorsabad (Dur-Sharrukin)

Khorsabad is the modern village beside Dur-Sharrukin, "Fortress of Sargon," the capital that Sargon II of Assyria built for himself. Sargon reigned from 722 to 705 BCE. The French Ministry of Culture's Khorsabad site dates the construction of the city and palace to about 717–706 BCE.

The site has a long excavation history:

• 1843–44. Paul-Émile Botta, the French consul at Mosul, discovered and excavated the palace.
• 1851–55. Victor Place resumed French work.
• 1929–35. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago excavated for six seasons, led first by Edward Chiera and later by Henry Frankfort and Gordon Loud. The results were published as Khorsabad, Parts 1 and 2.

Much of the early material was lost. Wikipedia's account, drawing on the excavation histories, describes reliefs damaged by exposure and a large shipment of antiquities that was attacked and mostly lost near Al-Qurnah in 1855.

What Bonomi Reported

The source behind the "Khorsabad lock" is Joseph Bonomi's Nineveh and Its Palaces (1852). It is a popular account based on the French excavations. In describing one passage chamber of the palace, Bonomi writes that at its end "was formerly a strong gate, of one leaf, which was fastened by a huge wooden lock, like those still used in the East ... and by a bar which moved into a square hole in the wall." Later in the same description he notes: "In the last slab occurs the hole in which the bolt of the lock was inserted."

Bonomi's description of the lock's working parts is of the wooden locks of his own day. These had iron pins that drop into holes in a wooden bolt and are lifted by matching pegs on a large key. He compares their keys to the verse in Isaiah about "the key of the house of David" laid "upon his shoulder."

On this reading, what Khorsabad provided was a socket for a bolt in the stone, together with an inference that the vanished door had been fastened by a wooden lock like those Bonomi knew. It was not a recovered mechanism. In 1883 the archaeologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers summarised Bonomi as saying he "found a similar lock" at Khorsabad. In the same study, Pitt-Rivers warned that ancient evidence for the pin lock "certainly requires confirmation," and he called it doubtful whether ancient Egypt knew the lock at all.

The sources reviewed here do not describe wood or metal lock parts from Khorsabad held in a museum. This article therefore treats the Khorsabad lock as reported and inferred, not as a surviving object.

Clay Sealings: Access Control Before Keys

Mesopotamian officials had a well-documented way to secure rooms and goods that did not depend on locks. A door, jar, basket, or box was tied or pegged shut. A lump of wet clay was pressed over the fastening and impressed with a seal. Breaking in was still possible, but it could not be hidden.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that cylinder seals were rolled onto clay lumps closing jars, doors, and baskets, as well as onto tablets. Seals in its collection range from Akkadian examples of about 2250–2150 BCE to the second millennium BCE. Sealings work like a modern tamper-evident seal more than a lock. They record who closed something and show whether it has been opened.

The richest early evidence comes from just outside Mesopotamia proper. At Arslantepe, on the upper Euphrates in southeastern Turkey, excavators recovered thousands of clay sealings ("cretulae") from a late fourth-millennium BCE palace complex. A 2009 review in the American Journal of Archaeology describes the Arslantepe Cretulae volume. It identifies clay lumps pressed against containers, doors, or documents, and reports that the authors identified, from the backs of the sealings, "doors closed with wooden 'pin-tumbler' locks—the world's oldest locks—probably securing rooms containing valuables." This is an interpretation of impressions left in clay, not a recovered lock. The site is Anatolian, not Mesopotamian. It is the strongest archaeological claim for very early wooden pin locks found in the sources for this batch, and it should be presented with that caution.

Dating and Interpretation

The Khorsabad material dates to Sargon II's reign, the late eighth century BCE. Whether the doorway's lock was a pin lock is an inference from Bonomi's comparison with modern Eastern locks. The Arslantepe sealings are much older, from the late fourth millennium BCE. Their lock reading depends on the specialists' study of impressions. Popular claims of a firm "oldest lock" date in Mesopotamia go beyond this evidence. So do claims that the idea spread one way between Egypt and Mesopotamia.

For how the wooden pin lock became the modern pin tumbler lock, see Linus Yale. For other early traditions, see Greek locks, Roman locks, Chinese locks, and Persian and Islamic locks.

Related Topics

• Ancient Locks
• Egyptian Locks
• Pin Tumbler Lock
• Greek Locks
• Persian and Islamic Locks
• Warded Lock

Sources