Ivory Furniture Element with a Stylised Palmette Tree
Unknown · Neo-Assyrian period, eighth century BC
A strip of ivory eleven centimetres high and three wide is carved as a stylised tree whose trunk is a succession of lotus flowers topped by palmettes. Knife marks are visible where the carver cut the outlines. The sacred tree is one of the oldest motifs of the Near East, a sign of fertility and divine order, and here it is reduced to pure ornament, a vertical element to separate scenes or frame a panel. Compare it with the smaller lotus tree beside it and with the trees on the figured plaques.
The piece was found in room fourteen of the Building of the Ivories at Arslan Tash, the Assyrian provincial residence at ancient Hadatu in northern Syria, in the 1928 excavations led by François Thureau-Dangin. It came to the Louvre in the partage of 1929. The Assyrian kings collected ivory furniture from the Phoenician and Aramaean cities as tribute; when the empire fell in the late seventh century before our era, the buildings were looted and the ivories were left behind as worthless once their gold was stripped.
Did You Know? Looters who stripped the gold from the furniture left the ivory behind, which is why so much survived.
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