Plaque

This ivory panel was found in a storage room in Fort Shalmaneser, a royal building at Nimrud that was used to store booty and tribute collected by the Assyrians while on military campaign. Like many other panels from the same storage room, it was part of a chair or couch back or the headboard of a bed. Twenty pieces of furniture were discovered stacked in orderly rows in this room, where they had been stored before the destruction of the Assyrian palaces in 612 B.C.

Shown here is a beardless male figure, probably a youth, wearing an elaborate headdress. His hair resembles Egyptian wigs, and his headdress incorporates Egyptian motifs, including the central element called an atef, worn by the god Osiris, and the two cobra and sun-disk elements, called uraei (singular: uraeus). He wears a robe with fringed hem that is belted at the waist over a short skirt, and strides forward on bare feet. With his left hand, he holds a pitcher from which a plant stalk topped by a palmette rises; with his right, he raises a scepter in the form of the head of a ram crowned by a sun disk. The left edge of the plaque is cut off, and a plain border runs around the other three edges, with a mortise at bottom by which the piece may have been inserted into a wooden frame. The figure’s association with thriving vegetation suggests concepts of abundance and fruitfulness connected with the agricultural cycle. Although the other ivory panels from this storage room were carved in a North Syrian style (such as 59.107.3), this piece can be classified as a Phoenician style ivory because of its delicate carving style; static composition, with large areas of empty space and lack of energetic movement; and abundance of imagery inspired by Egyptian motifs. Traces of bitumen, a tar-like compound, remain on the surface, and may have been used as an adhesive to attach gold sheet to areas of the plaque.

Built by the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, the palaces and storerooms of Nimrud housed thousands of pieces of carved ivory. Most of the ivories served as furniture inlays or small precious objects such as boxes. While some of them were carved in the same style as the large Assyrian reliefs lining the walls of the Northwest Palace, the majority of the ivories display images and styles related to the arts of North Syria and the Phoenician city-states. Phoenician style ivories are distinguished by their use of imagery related to Egyptian art, such as sphinxes and figures wearing pharaonic crowns, and the use of elaborate carving techniques such as openwork and colored glass inlay. North Syrian style ivories tend to depict stockier figures in more dynamic compositions, carved as solid plaques with fewer added decorative elements. However, some pieces do not fit easily into any of these three styles. Most of the ivories were probably collected by the Assyrian kings as tribute from vassal states, and as booty from conquered enemies, while some may have been manufactured in workshops at Nimrud. The ivory tusks that provided the raw material for these objects were almost certainly from African elephants, imported from lands south of Egypt, although elephants did inhabit several river valleys in Syria until they were hunted to extinction by the end of the eighth century B.C.