Honoring a Legacy, Inviting a New Generation

The aim of this introductory article is threefold: (1) to situate the Stamp Seals from the Southern Levant (SSSL) project in the broader history of twentieth-century glyptic research, especially with regard to Othmar Keel’s multivolume Corpus of Stamp Seals from Palestine/Israel launched in the 1980s; (2) to explain the SSSL project’s research design as a strategic response to that unfinished initiative, the intrinsic potential of stamp seals research, and the demands of a specific funding opportunity that emphasizes interdisciplinarity; (3) to consider SSSL as a trans-generational project, attentive to both transmission and innovation. The digital humanities transition offers crucial opportunities and challenges regarding all three aspects.