Champlevé furniture or cosmetic box plaque with a griffin and a floral frieze

This slightly curved, rectangular plaque depicts a sun-disc crowned griffin, a fantastic animal with the head and wings of an eagle and the body and tail of a lion. The griffin stands on its hind legs, resting its left foreleg on a papyrus flower and raising its right foreleg. Found in a large storeroom at Fort Shalmaneser, a royal building at Nimrud that was used to store booty and tribute collected by the Assyrians while on military campaign, this piece was probably used to decorate a round cosmetic box or as an inlay for a piece of wooden furniture. It is carved in the champlevé technique, characteristic of the Phoenician style, in which recessed spaces cut into the ivory would have been filled with colored inlays. Traces of Egyptian blue, a vibrant artificial pigment made of silica, lime, copper, and alkali, survive in the recesses cut for the griffin’s body and the petals, buds, and stems of the floral frieze. Red inlay is preserved in the bases of the flowers and buds. Carved traces on the edges of the plaque suggest that it was attached to additional plaques on either side which were also decorated with papyrus blossoms and other floral elements.

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.