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Help with attribution seal. Seal was brought from excavations in the period 1915-1925. A relative was an archaeologist. Excavations were carried out on the border of Kazakhstan and China. I will be glad to receive any help! Thank you all in advance for your response and help. Sincerely, Svetlana

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Now they answered me from the Fersman Mineralogical Museum about the stone itself: it looks like very light jade, a type of actinolite mineral that has long been traditionally very popular in China.

Seal reads,
陳苑茂印　 Seal of Chen Yuanmao - Surname and given name

Inscription on the side,
西園翰墨林　Xiyuan Han'molin - West Garden Brush and Ink Forest*
少宗 Shaozong - Name of carver

* Name of the garden created by Cao Zhi of Wei in the capital city of Ye. It was there that famous literati of the time, the so called Seven Sons of Jian'an gathered and composed poetry.

This inscription suggests that the owner of the seal may have been a kind of literati at some time in a much later undetermined age.

With regards,
I.Nagy

Thank you very much for your answer. Everyone translates the inscription differently.
What period is the seal?
And what stone is the seal made of?
We were told that the seal might be ancient…

Dear Svetlana,
In order to get an idea of the approximate age of the seal, it may be useful to compare it with the age of other artifacts (no stone objects) unearthed from the same excavation site during excavations in the early 20th century. I assume you don't have an excavation report etc.
As of the stylistics of the seal engraving, perhaps there is someone at Sotheby's who might be able to give some clues.
Otherwise, I would be interested to know how others read the stamp and translated the inscription.
With regards,
I.Nagy

Thank you very much for your answer.
Unfortunately, we do not have any statistics or reports on the excavations.
In the near future we will go to the meneralogical museum to get a conclusion on the stone from which the seal was made. I will share the result here on the forum.
Next we will try to find out the approximate age of the seal. Thank you for the advice to contact Sotheby's auction house.
We hope that someone else here will express their opinion about the seal...

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Hello everyone, as promised with the report.

We were at the mineralogical museum. We conducted a full study of the seal and gave a conclusion.

Lots of news...

They determined the stone from which the seal is made - it is agalmatolite.

We conducted a study of the red paint on the seal itself under a microscope and devices: we found out that it is natural cinnabar with mercury.

Then the person studied the hieroglyphs on the side of the seal under a microscope and a device: it turns out that they were covered with natural green paint based on malachite, the remains of this coating are visible under magnification. When you look at the hieroglyphs without magnification, this is not visible.

They were also interested in the craquelure (cracks) on the seal... they said that it looks like the seal once survived a fire.

So far, this is all we have managed to find out. We are attaching the photographs.

I did not say this before, but the seal was found by a relative, Vladimir Demyanovich Fomichev. A famous geologist, paleontologist and archaeologist.

Dear participants, can anyone recommend a certain specialist at the Sotheby's or Christie's auction house? And now they have started studying auction houses, and they have a lot of experts... and it’s not clear who to contact...
Thanks in advance for your help

(mikeoz is enjoying some family time away from home at the moment, perhaps he will chime in when he's back).

Am curious about the first character of the name the carver is using. It seems to include five strokes rather that four, suggesting 必宗 or possibly 沙宗, neither of which seem credible. I can check a reference book later on the off chance there's a match there.

Thank you for your answer. Very interesting. Do you have any guesses about the time of creation of the seal?
Everyone is trying to help us and telling us that we need to contact famous auction houses... since the seal is interesting...

You can certainly try to do so, but I am unsure that even leading auction houses today have specialists in this field on staff; at best they will seek advice from a consultant they pay for this purpose, but my guess unfortunately is that this seal is not worth enough for them to do so.

I have checked 请人室名别称字号素引, 中国美术家人名辞典，and the two supplemental volumes to the latter volume for 少宗 , 必宗 , and 沙宗 , but got no matches.

Thanks for the reply.
We will try to find out more information.
Yes, we were told that it is very difficult to figure out the seals. And there are a lot of fakes.
But it is good that there is the name of the master and the person who owned the seal. We can try to find out.
It is just that as we are told, this may turn out to be an amazing discovery... so it is worth looking into it.
Maybe someone on the forum will tell something new.

We tried to find out what other objects were found on the border of China and Kazakhstan along with this seal, but we were unable to find out. This information could also help...

I tried to find similar seals based on the material and the characteristic craquelure “pattern” and the way the hieroglyphs are decorated with emerald paint... but I also didn’t find anything..

There are similar stones (seals) also with different inclusions from the Ming Dynasty in the Shanghai Museum...

Photos in daylight

In general, as we understood, the auction house Christie's is not interested in helping and did not even try to answer our questions. Prejudiced attitude towards ordinary people, unfortunately.

We ask for help from you, dear forum members. We found the Xiling Seal Engraver's Society. But we did not find either their website or any contacts for communication. If anyone knows how to contact this society, please help. It is better to contact by e-mail.

Thank you all in advance for your help!

The master's name was also translated to me as a variant: 小宗. It seems like what they said is most likely correct..
Regarding the stone and its black cracks, about which we were told at the mineralogical museum that such cracks cannot be on pyrophyllite (agalmatolite). They said that the stone probably survived a fire. Now we believe that this is not so! And the black cracks are precisely the natural pattern of the stone! In fact, this is rare. I searched for information about seals on the Internet for a long time. And I came across an article on the website of the "seal carving society". It said that once a stone was brought to the master so that he could make a seal out of it. The stone was from China. And when he tried to carve the seal, he discovered that the darker material was much, much harder than the softer stone that surrounded it. So hard, in fact, that it could not be cut with his seal carving knife.
And this stone is the same as the stone in our seal!
I have attached a photo of the stone.

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If the LE mineral represents Lead (Pb here in the USA) then the closest element I come up with is Plumalsite with trace elements but that’s just a SWAG and I can’t find many photos of the mineral. I would like to see another XRF analysis.

Good afternoon, the material is 100% agalmatolite. There is no doubt about it. Печать смотрели специалисты в минералогическом музее и есть заключение. А вот по поводу возраста никто ничего сказать не может пока что.

The seal was studied by specialists at the mineralogical museum and there is a conclusion. But no one can say anything about age yet. And the hieroglyphs on the seal have not yet been fully deciphered.

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