| 介绍（英） | This ivory panel 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. Like many other panels from the same storage room, it was part of a chair or couch back or the headboard of a bed. Twenty pieces of furniture were discovered stacked in orderly rows in this room, where they had been stored before the destruction of the Assyrian palaces in 612 B.C.
The panel is decorated with four stylized trees, each combining a trunk made up of symmetrical volute stalks below a pair of curling voluted branches. Palm fronds extend from the volutes. A palmette sprouts from the top of the uppermost tree. This panel, and others like it found in the same storeroom, seem to have been used together with the ivory panels decorated with male and female figures to make up pieces of furniture. Several chair backs whose ivory inlays were still in place were arranged with one voluted palmette tree plaque on each outer edge, and four figural plaques in the center, making a total of six plaques used to ornament the back support portion of the chair. Only one furniture element in the storeroom had a back decorated entirely with plant forms, a piece that was likely part of a couch or bed, which is also in the Metropolitan Museum’s collection (59.107.1).
Built 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 decorative elements. However, some pieces do not fit easily into any of these three styles. Most of the ivories were probably collected by the Assyrian kings as tribute from vassal states, and as booty from conquered enemies, while some may have been manufactured in workshops at Nimrud. The ivory tusks that provided the raw material for these objects were almost certainly from African elephants, imported from lands south of Egypt, although elephants did inhabit several river valleys in Syria until they were hunted to extinction by the end of the eighth century B.C. |