Furniture plaque carved in relief with window and sphinx

This curved ivory plaque 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 scene in two registers: above, a window with a three-part niched architectural frame and a balustrade; below, a falcon-headed winged sphinx is shown walking to the right. The registers are divided by a thick, plain border, and each small scene is framed on four sides with a thin raised strip. The sphinx wears a type of Egyptian headdress called a nemes headcloth, topped by a version of the Egyptian double crown. An apron decorated with a chevron pattern covers its chest. The scene at top is familiar from other ivory plaques, including several in the Metropolitan’s collection (57.80.12, 57.80.13, 59.107.18), which show female figures wearing elaborate jewelry looking out from windows with balustrades. However, the window on this plaque is empty, and it is not clear whether there is any connection between this imagery and the other plaques with similar windows and balustrades. The relationship between the window and sphinx, if any exists, remains mysterious, since this object is fragmentary and would have been set into a framework together with other decorated plaques, which might have given more context for understanding both registers as part of a larger scene. Carved ivory pieces such as this were widely used in the production of elite furniture and luxury objects during the early first millennium B.C., and could be overlaid with gold foil or inlaid to create a dazzling effect of gleaming surfaces and bright colors.

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.