Openwork furniture plaque with sphinx striding through a floral landscape

Found in a storeroom at Fort Shalmaneser, a royal building at Nimrud that was probably used to store tribute and booty collected by the Assyrians while on military campaign, this fragmentary plaque carved in the openwork technique depicts a winged, leonine animal, probably a sphinx, striding to the right. It was probably used to decorate a piece of wooden furniture. Two mortises cut into the preserved edge of the plaque on the right side suggest that the now-missing forepart of this hybrid creature, including its forelegs and head, was attached to the body by tenons. The lower hind legs have broken off. The floral stalks growing behind the sphinx’s body and the single palmette preserved below its chest suggest that this hybrid creature was originally depicted striding through a floral landscape. The elegant carving technique, seen in the individually articulated wing feathers and slender body, is characteristic of Phoenician ivories.

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.