Ivory Strip Inscribed with the Name of Hazael, King of Damascus
Unknown · Neo-Assyrian period, eighth century BC
A narrow strip of ivory, under eight centimetres long and only two high, carries a line of Aramaic letters cut into its surface. It is broken into three fragments, two of which join, and the upper edge is intact. The letters are the oldest form of the alphabet, the script the Phoenicians and Aramaeans spread across the Near East. In the museum's reading the text mentions our lord Hazael and a year, so the object belonged to the king of Damascus. The letters are shallow but clean, cut with a fine point.
Hazael ruled Damascus in the late ninth century before our era and is known from the Bible and from Assyrian records as a formidable enemy. The strip is a fragment of furniture veneer, and it was found next to the traces of a bed frame in the Building of the Ivories at Arslan Tash, an Assyrian provincial residence in northern Syria excavated by François Thureau-Dangin in 1928. It suggests that the ivory bed and its fittings were once royal property of Damascus, carried off as booty when the Assyrians took the city in 732. The Louvre received it through the partage of 1929.
Did You Know? The bed this strip once decorated may have belonged to Hazael of Damascus, the king whom the Bible calls the scourge of Israel.
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