“Picture elements” are the visual items of which a seal image is composed of according to our ACAWAI-CS terminology. They may be anthropomorphic or zoomorphic figures, things, symbols, patterns, or inscriptions.
We annotate all visual elements of an image at the annotation platform hasty.ai and export this information via json into our graph database.

Additionally, the labeled elements (goddess, king, lion, sun-disc, inscription etc.) receive attributes concerning their bodily and facial orientation, posture and gesture, headdress and hairdo, clothing and jewellery. Eventually, attributes can be added to a figurative element like a cup in the hand of a king or a lion on which the goddess Ishtar rests her foot.

Afterwards, we group picture elements into “scenes” like “encounter”  between a worshipper and a god, or “contest” between a lion and a bull-man. We incorporate interspersed elements, which frequently appear in-between the main figures of a scene (like the sundisc-in-crescent symbol in divine-human encounters), in the scene since we are convinced that they served important semantic functions in the pictorial set-up.

The attributes registered for the picture element “inscription” include information about its framing (boxed, free-floating), its orientation and directionality (horizontal, vertical, top-down, mirrored), and its number of lines. The textual content and its prosopographical elements will annotated elsewhere (more information coming soon).