Lioness head

This flat piece of ivory 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. It depicts a stylized lioness’ head, seen from above, with a central disc on the forehead framed by two symmetrical curved vertical lines. The ears and nose are small and the focus is on the large eyes, emphasized by a pair of curved eyebrows. Carved ivory pieces such as this were widely used in the production of elite furniture during the early first millennium B.C. They were often inlaid into a wooden frame using joinery techniques and glue, and could be overlaid with gold foil or inlaid to create a dazzling effect of gleaming surfaces and bright colors. This piece is one of many elaborately carved ivories with motifs adapted from Egyptian art that have been attributed to Phoenician workshops, as Phoenician art shows strong Egyptian influence. The carved spaces in the eyes and eyebrows, and the disc on the forehead with its brackets, were originally inlaid in brightly colored glass or stone, in a style called “cloisonné” after the enameling technique of the same name. This head was one of twenty nearly identical examples found in the same storage room, produced in unusually large quantities for an unknown purpose. One clue to the image’s meaning comes from a pair of exquisitely carved ivory plaques that had been thrown down a well in the Northwest Palace at Nimrud, showing a young man with an elaborate hairstyle, jewelry, and golden kilt who is being mauled by a lioness in a papyrus thicket (see the example in the British Museum: 127412). The head of the lioness on the plaque closely resembles the Metropolitan Museum’s lioness head and other examples from the same storage room. It is possible that the lioness heads were intended to evoke a connection with the story or concept communicated by the powerful scene depicted on the plaque, although we no longer understand its underlying meaning.

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.