The Nimrud Ivories, 1: The Flame and Frond School

Abstract

The volume of ivories found at Nimrud is overwhelming. Nevertheless, this very quantity presents us with unique opportunities to investigate the ivory trade in the early first millennium B.C. It allows us to gather together groups of similar styles and thus, if it can be accepted that a coherent style-group was probably the output of a specific “school” of carving, to define the production of different schools. The principal purpose of this article is to try to reconstruct the output of one of these schools, the flame and frond school, which belongs to the North Syrian tradition of ivory-carving. After bringing together some of its products, another aim is to suggest the school's original location and the time of its floruit.Only a minority of the ivories found at Nimrud were in the easily recognizable Assyrian style, best known from the wall reliefs. The remainder were carved in a variety of styles and techniques and were almost certainly brought to Nimrud as booty or tribute. As early as 1912 Poulsen suggested that these ivories could be divided into two groups, the Phoenician and the North Syrian. The criteria he used to distinguish them were the absence of Egyptian elements on North Syrian ivories and the relationship between North Syrian ivories and reliefs found at Syrian sites such as Carchemish, Zincirli, Maras and Tell Halaf.