Ivory Plaque with the Woman at the Window
Unknown · Neo-Assyrian period, eighth century BC
A woman's face looks out at you from a square window. She wears an Egyptian-style wig with heavy locks framing her cheeks, and she rests on a balustrade of small columns with palm capitals, set within a triple-recessed frame like a real window. The plaque is eight centimetres square and was cut in elephant ivory; traces of colour survive on the frame and on the lintel of the balustrade. The face is frontal and serene, with large eyes that were once emphasised with inlay. It is one of the most famous images of Phoenician art.
The Woman at the Window appears on ivories from Nimrud, Khorsabad, Samaria and here, always in the same pose. She may be a goddess, Astarte, looking out from her temple, or a sacred courtesan, and scholars have linked her to the biblical Jezebel, who painted her eyes and looked out of a window before her death. The plaque was found in room fourteen of the Building of the Ivories at Arslan Tash in northern Syria, excavated in 1928 by François Thureau-Dangin, and it came to the Louvre in the partage of 1929.
Did You Know? The same woman looks out of the same window on ivories found hundreds of kilometres apart, a fixed image repeated by Phoenician workshops for their royal clients.
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