Without printing it is impossible to imagine any official document, its presence guarantees the authenticity of any business paper. The first seals appeared on the territory of modern Syria, Palestine and other Asian countries. In Belarus the press is known from 10th century. The oldest of the surviving to our time is the seal of the Polotsk prince Izyaslav Vladimirovich (? - 1001). Such seals our ancestors used to confirm the authenticity of the document. Over time city, monastic, guild, privately owned, and state seals appeared. The concepts of "print" and "print imprint" in modern language are closely intertwined. Its correct to call print, which was made a stamp or a matrix. Those prints were made from a variety of materials: metal, bone, horn, stone, etc.
In the exposition of the Museum of Local Lore today you can see several stamps. The most interesting and unique is the print with images of "Chase" and "Deer" from the period of the 16th - the first half of the 17th centuries. It has the shape of an irregular quadrilateral and was made of stone-sandstone. On both sides of it are highly artistic embossed heraldic images made in the technique of carving. On one side the figure of an armed rider is clearly visible with a sword in one hand and a shield in the other. This is the “Pursuit” - the national emblem of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which included Polotsk in 1307. On the other hand there are the outlines of a running deer and decorative vignettes. "Deer" - the coat of arms of the Vitebsk province, which existed since 1506 until the entry of Vitebsk into the Russian Empire in 1772.
Images of “Chase” and “Deer” are negative, which gives grounds to consider this tile as a stamp or a matrix for creating positive images. Researchers believe that they could have branded the goods: wax, bricks, tiles, and also used to print medallions on the skin.
The seal was transferred in 1987 by S.V. Tarasov, the head of the archaeological site in Polotsk on Veliky Posad. It is a valuable monument of the Belarusian medieval sphragistics, a model of fine handmade.
