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Elephant ivory was treasured
in antiquity as a rare and beautiful material. Especially during the almost
three hundred years of Assyrian supremacy, sumptuously carved ivory objects
and wooden furniture inlaid with decorated ivory panels adorned the royal
apartments. From the first days of Austen
Henry Layard's excavation at Nimrud, such ivory carvings were found
in large numbers scattered throughout the broken mud brick. During Max
E. L. Mallowan's excavations, thousands of ivories—both whole and
fragmentary—were carefully recovered from the rooms of the palaces,
temples, and private houses on the citadel and from the chambers of Fort
Shalmaneser. These ivories were then painstakingly reconstructed and restored.
Particularly fine ivories were
discovered at the bottom of two wells in the southern wing of the Northwest Palace,
one in Room NN and the other in Room AB, where they were thrown during the destruction
of Nimrud. The only ivories left undisturbed by the armies that sacked the city
were the remains of a group of nineteen chairs with curved backs decorated with
carved ivory panels. These had been carefully stacked in Room SW7 of Fort Shalmaneser,
probably by the survivors of the first destruction of Nimrud in 614 B.C.
Originally, much of the carved surface of the ivories was covered with gold
leaf. Little remains of the precious metal today because the Medes and Babylonians,
when they descended on Nimrud, stripped away the gold before throwing the
ivories, worthless to them, into a heap or down a well. Many of the ivories
found at Nimrud were brought there as booty or tribute from the vassal states
to the west of Assyria, where elephants were native and ivory carving was
a long-established craft. Other ivories were carved at the Assyrian capital
either by local craftsmen or by craftsmen who were conscripted for the royal
workshops. This variety in craft traditions is reflected in the iconography
and style of the images carved on the ivories.
Three styles of ivory carving have been identified, each corresponding to
a region within the Assyrian realm: an Assyrian
style, a Syrian style, and a Phoenician
style. Distinct workshop traditions have been identified within the
Phoenician and Syrian styles. Some ivories combine elements of these styles
with motifs that originated during the second millennium B.C. in the Aegean
regions, particularly in Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece.
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