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Ch. 3: Oriental Ivory Carvings

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CHAPTER IV
ELEPHANTS, HISTORICAL
Early Egyptian art offers a few representations of the elephant, which was probably better known in pre-dynastic and early dynastic times than at a later date. A very small statuette of black stone in the Egyptian collection of the Berlin Museum unquestionably represents an elephant, and some more doubtful instances appear in certain ivory reliefs, as on a comb in the First Egyptian Room of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. All of these, as well as the statuette, date from before 3000 B. C. Of the various ob­jects made of ivory, such as combs, bracelets, pendants, spoons, statuettes, etc., and found in tombs dating from 3600 B. C. to 3000 B. C, a certain number are of hippopotamus ivory. While the elephant appears to have become less familiar to the Egyptian of the third millennium before Christ, ivory was still secured and worked and an inscription at Elephantine, on the tomb of a noble of the Sixth Dynasty (c. 2475-2025 B. C.)> relates that on his return from an expedition to the southward he sent to the king a tusk 5 ft. long, retaining for his own use one 10 ft. long. Another noble, of the Twelfth Dynasty (2000-1788 B. C), captured a live elephant which may have been brought to Egypt. The chief source of supply seems to have been the "land of Punt," the Somali Coast and Libya, whence in the fifteenth century B. C. 700 tusks were brought. Of the 2,500 scarabs in the Metropolitan Museum only one or two are of ivory,
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Ch. 3: Oriental Ivory Carvings Page of 681 Ch. 4: Elephants Historical
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