Great Seal of Arizona

Arizona's state seal was drafted at the Constitutional Convention held in Phoenix in 1910, two years before Congress admitted Arizona to the Union. The convention delegates designed the seal as part of preparing all the formal instruments of state government — constitution, laws, and symbols — in advance of statehood. The seal was formally adopted on February 14, 1912, Valentine's Day, when Arizona became the 48th and last of the contiguous states admitted to the Union.

Arizona had been an organized U.S. territory since 1863, carved out of the western half of New Mexico Territory. By 1910, the territory had a settled population built around three industries: copper mining in the mountains of the south and east, cattle ranching across the high desert grasslands, and irrigated agriculture fed by reservoirs and canal systems. The seal's designers put all three on the official emblem.

The seal has remained essentially unchanged since statehood. Arizona Revised Statutes § 41-851 defines the official design and governs authorized uses.

The Great Seal of Arizona is an economic argument in visual form. The miner, the rancher, the reservoir, and the irrigated fields document what Arizona depended on in 1912 and what its founders believed would sustain it. Unlike seals that use classical allegory — goddesses, shields, or crowns — Arizona's seal uses literal depictions of actual industries, showing workers at their tasks rather than abstract symbols of them.

The motto Ditat Deus — "God enriches" — frames the whole image theologically. Arizona's wealth was understood by its founders as a gift of geography: the copper ore in the mountains, the grasslands that fed cattle, the rivers that could be dammed to irrigate desert soil. The motto attributes those gifts to divine provision rather than human effort alone, placing Arizona in a long tradition of American providential rhetoric about the land.

The Great Seal of Arizona organizes its imagery in foreground, middle ground, and background — a landscape read from bottom to top, from human labor to natural setting to divine benediction.