Furniture elements

These dark blue strips of glass were found at Arslan Tash, together with a large group of carved ivory furniture inlays. The color of these pieces suggests that a metal ore such as copper or cobalt was added to the glass matrix. They may have been intended to imitate lapis lazuli, a dark blue semiprecious stone mined in northeastern Afghanistan that was prized by the Assyrians. These pieces were probably manufactured by Phoenician craftsmen who were expert at inlaying glass into ivories. Two pieces take the shape of long feathers, although the tip of one does not survive. These pieces may have been inlaid into cloisons (walled cells) within the wing of a fantastic creature such as a sphinx on a carved ivory furniture inlay, which was then joined to a piece of wooden furniture. The two rectangular strips may have been set directly into a piece of furniture.

Arslan Tash, ancient Hadatu, was an Aramaean town located in northern Syria just east of the Euphrates River, close to the modern Turkish border. French archaeological excavations at the site in 1928 revealed city walls and gates in addition to a palace and temple that were built when the Neo-Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser III (744-721 B.C.) turned the town into a provincial capital and military outpost. During the excavations, over one hundred ivory furniture inlays were found in a building near the palace. Gold foil, paint, and semiprecious stone and glass inlay embellishments enlivened these magnificent works of art. Today, the ivories and decorative elements from Arslan Tash are housed in museums in Paris, Aleppo, Jerusalem, Karlsruhe, and Hamburg, as well as The Metropolitan Museum of Art.