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About 5% of the seals impressed on Persepolis administrative texts had inscriptions, about half of the monolingual seal inscriptions (more than 90) are in Elamite, and about a quarter are in Aramaic. The seal inscriptions normally give the name, and sometimes the patronym, of the seal's original owner or his superior. A few of the Elamite seal inscriptions name the current seal users, who figure in the transactions recorded on the sealed tablets; they are sometimes figures of high social status or administrative rank (e.g. the seals of Šuddayauda [Garrison and Root 2001: pp. 268–270] or Ašbazana [Garrison 1998]). In many cases, however, the seal is associated with an office, and not with an individual user, and the name in the seal inscription is not connected with the personnel of the archives. Some of the Elamite‐inscribed seals may have been heirlooms (e.g. PFS 93*, inscribed with the name of Kuraš [Cyrus], son of Šešpeš [Teispes], and others, see Garrison 2011), but others were transmitted by official succession or delegation. For users of the documents, the inscriptions alone – even if legible in fragmentary impressions – cannot have been either necessary or sufficient to identify the user and confirm the validity of the sealing.

Texts on heirloom seals are presumably pre‐Achaemenid and early Achaemenid. Conversely, some seals with similar inscriptions, sometimes classified as pre‐Achaemenid Neo‐Elamite, may also be of Achaemenid date (e.g. Amiet 1973: pl. vi–ix; Garrison 2002 [2006]).