Lenticular Cosmetic Box with a Rosette
Unknown · Late Bronze Age, circa 1550 to 1150 BC
A round, lens-shaped box of ivory, seven centimetres across and barely two and a half high, made from the tooth of a hippopotamus. Its lid is engraved with a rosette, and if you look carefully at the petals you can see that they were laid out with a compass: the arcs intersect with the regularity of a geometry exercise. Traces of blue pigment survive in the engraved hollows, so the pattern once stood out in colour against the cream of the ivory. The flattened, lentil-like shape gives the box its name, lenticular.
The box was found in a deposit numbered two hundred and thirteen at Minet el Beida, the harbour of Ugarit, during the third campaign of the French excavations in nineteen thirty-one, and came to the Louvre in the division of finds with Syria. Small ivory boxes held eye paint and perfumed unguents, and their decoration with rosettes, a motif shared by Egypt, the Aegean and the Levant, made them the height of Late Bronze Age fashion. Compare it with the duck-shaped box beside it: two containers for the same purpose, one playful and figurative, the other precise and geometric.
Did You Know? The rosette on the lid was drawn with a compass, its intersecting arcs still perfectly regular after three thousand years.
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