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Ch. 1: Ancient Carved Ivories

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ANCIENT CARVED IVORIES 11
lines, but most of them cut to represent jointed canes or straws.*
In the Cairo Museum are a few ivory amulets, three of them figuring serpents' heads, the carving being very rudely executed. These are small objects measuring respectively 55 mm., 59 mm., and 49 mm., or from 1 3/4 to 2 1/4 in.f
Early Egyptian ivory carving is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, by several char­acteristic examples. The finest and the best preserved are two pieces which probably formed the feet of a state chair, a throne, or a couch. They are shaped into the form of the hoof and ankle of bulls ' legs. The ivory is in appearance as fresh as though only recently worked, although these specimens, found at Abydos, are attributed to the period of the First or the Second Dynasty (about 3400 B. C. or 3000 B. C). Much less well preserved, but even in its present deteriorated condition showing the work of an artist's hand, is the small figure of a lion, considered to be a carving of the First Dynasty (about 3400 B. C.) ; this came from the old Osiris Temple at Abydos (Thebes). Another ivory, from the same early period, and equally deteriorated by long exposure to injury either by soil or weather, is a female figure, the lower part of which has been broken away; this was also brought from the ruins of the Osiris Temple at Abydos. With this minute figure as well as with that of the seated lion, time has dealt so unkindly that the ivory has lost all its beauty of hue and smoothness, and at the first glance one would suppose that wood was the material employed.
While the old Assyro-Babylonian civilization goes back as far as that of Egypt, the facilities for securing ivory were
»Stewart Culin, "Chess and Playing Cards," Washington, 1898, pp. 812, 814, Figs. 132, 183, 134; pp. 665-942 of Rep. of U. S. Nat. Mus. for 1896.
fG. A. Beisner "Catalogue générale des antiquités égyptiennes du Musée du Caire," "Amulets," Le Caire, 1907, pp. 38, 39; Nos. 5481, 5482,5492.
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