Openwork furniture plaque with winged sphinx ca. 9th–8th century Assyrian This ivory plaque was found in a storage room in Fort Shalmaneser, a royal building at Nimrud that was used to store booty and tribute collected by the Assyrians while on military campaign. It depicts a sphinx, a fantastic creature with the body of a winged lion and a human head, in profile facing right. The sphinx wears an Egyptian-style headdress called a nemes headcloth, topped by the Egyptian double crown. A patterned apron hangs down over the sphinx’s chest. Parts of the wings and crown, and all of the tail, ha

Openwork furniture plaque with winged sphinx ca. 9th–8th century Assyrian This ivory plaque was found in a storage room in Fort Shalmaneser, a royal building at Nimrud that was used to store booty and tribute collected by the Assyrians while on military campaign. It depicts a sphinx, a fantastic creature with the body of a winged lion and a human head, in profile facing right. The sphinx wears an Egyptian-style headdress called a nemes headcloth, topped by the Egyptian double crown. A patterned apron hangs down over the sphinx’s chest. Parts of the wings and crown, and all of the tail, have broken off the delicate plaque, which is carved in the openwork technique, in which the background is cut away and remaining elements are carved in the round. A tenon projects from the bottom edge of the frame and would have been inserted into a slot in a separate frame, probably as part of a piece of furniture. Carved ivory pieces such as this were widely used in the production of elite furniture and luxury objects during the early first millennium , and could be overlaid with gold foil or inlaid to create a dazzling effect of gleaming surfaces and bright 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

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