CHAPTER I. 
INTRODUCTION: ORIGIN, USE, AND MATERIALS. 
The earliest method by which, so far as we know, proprietary rights were 
recorded in the East was by the use of a seal in the shape of a cylinder, or an ap- 
proximation to the cylinder, engraved with some special device peculiar to the 
owner. We find it in use in the very earliest period in Babylonia and also in Egypt, 
although in the latter country it was after the twelfth dynasty mostly superseded 
by the scarab. Its use, as an archaism, was not wholly discarded there as late as 
the twenty-second dynasty. 




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The shape of the seal suggests that the early writing was on clay. Of course, 
property rights existed before writing was invented, or even hieroglyphics. I have 
seen in a khan at Hillah, near Babylon, the door of a room in which a merchant 
left his goods, while absent on a journey, sealed with the owner’s seal impressed 
on pats of clay, so placed that the opening of the door would break the seal. Thus 
in the earliest times a seal might be used occasionally to protect property stored in 
rooms or jars. Occasionally such sealed pats of clay are found, but generally 
burned by some conflagration, and showing marks of the string which was attached 
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