OpenGlyph — Catalogue of the American Public DomainJurisdiction: United StatesRev. 2026.08
Images / art

Two archives, queried live.

Every record below comes from The Met or Smithsonian Open Access and was filtered on that archive’s own rights field before it reached this page. 12 shown for “Cylinder seal and modern impression: hero grasping two antelopes by their hind legs” — 14 records examined, 0 dropped by the rights gate.

Archives queried 2026-08-28 07:18 UTC · fetched live for this request

Object
Public domainThe Met’s isPublicDomain field is true for this object.
CC0 (public-domain equivalent)Smithsonian’s metadata_usage.access reads CC0 — a waiver, not an expired term.
Not shownAnything failing its archive’s rights field is dropped server-side and never appears here.

Smithsonian Open Access: HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. Results from the remaining archive are shown unchanged — nothing is substituted for a source that did not answer.

Cylinder seal and modern impression: hero grasping two antelopes by their hind legs

Cylinder seal and modern impression: hero grasping two antelopes by their hind legs

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 13th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cylinder seal and modern impression: hunting scene

Cylinder seal and modern impression: hunting scene

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2250–2150 BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cylinder seal and modern impression: bull-man combatting lion; nude hero combatting water buffalo; inscription

Cylinder seal and modern impression: bull-man combatting lion; nude hero combatting water buffalo; inscription

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 2250–2150 BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cylinder seal and modern impression: demons and animals

Cylinder seal and modern impression: demons and animals

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 14th century BC

Public domainThe Met
Cylinder seal and modern impression: man grasping an antelope, bull's head over ingot

Cylinder seal and modern impression: man grasping an antelope, bull's head over ingot

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 16th–12th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cylinder seal with three-figure contest scene

Cylinder seal with three-figure contest scene

Artist not stated in the record · late 8th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cylinder seal and modern impression: animal-headed divinities with prey

Cylinder seal and modern impression: animal-headed divinities with prey

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 14th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cylinder seal and modern impression: Master of Animals between lions, griffins, Minoan genius

Cylinder seal and modern impression: Master of Animals between lions, griffins, Minoan genius

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 14th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Cylinder seal and modern impression: combat between men and a lion

Cylinder seal and modern impression: combat between men and a lion

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 14th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
Shaft-hole axe head with bird-headed demon, boar, and dragon

Shaft-hole axe head with bird-headed demon, boar, and dragon

Artist not stated in the record · ca. late 3rd–early 2nd millennium BCE

Public domainThe Met
Oedipus and the Sphinx, by Gustave Moreau

Oedipus and the Sphinx

Gustave Moreau · 1864

Public domainThe Met
Cuneiform tablet case impressed with three cylinder seals, for cuneiform tablet 66.246.18a: quittance for a loan in copper

Cuneiform tablet case impressed with three cylinder seals, for cuneiform tablet 66.246.18a: quittance for a loan in copper

Artist not stated in the record · ca. 20th–19th century BCE

Public domainThe Met
What was queried

Where these records came from.

Two archives are wired, and only two. Each one is filtered on its own rights field — never on a title match, and never on the presence of an image file.

  • The Met Collection API (Open Access)Rights field: isPublicDomain. 14 matched · 14 examined · 0 dropped by the rights gate. Kept only where isPublicDomain === true and a file URL was published.12 shown
  • Smithsonian Open Access API (api.si.edu)Rights field: content.descriptiveNonRepeating.metadata_usage.access. HTTP 429 from api.si.edu. No records from this archive are shown for this query.Unavailable

These figures describe the pass run at 2026-08-28 07:18 UTC, during this request. A completed pass is kept for 24 hours and replayed for an identical search, which is what keeps repeated queries inside Smithsonian’s 30-requests-per-hour allowance. A pass in which either archive failed to answer is never kept — an outage must not be replayed as though it were a finding about the catalogue.

Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress are deliberately not wired. Wikimedia was confirmed, on a live query, to return CC-BY material inside the same result set as genuine public domain works, and filtering it safely has not been designed yet. loc.gov was blocked by bot detection during the source evaluation, so its rights vocabulary has never been observed — and nothing here is built on a field nobody has read.

An image file is a rights claim. It never travels without its field.