Nimrud Ivories

Two Excavations, A Century Apart

A. H. Layard began finding ivory at Nimrud on his second day of work in 1845, in rooms A, V and W of the Northwest Palace - the same campaigns that produced the Black Obelisk. W. K. Loftus turned up more in the Central Palace and the Burnt Palace in the 1850s. Then the site went quiet for most of a century. M. Mallowan and his team, digging for the British School of Archaeology in Iraq in the 1940s and 1950s, found large quantities in the Northwest Palace wells and at Nabu's temple and the Town Wall Houses; D. Oates's team pulled literally thousands of pieces out of Fort Shalmaneser in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Iraqi archaeologists added more - S. al-Iraqi in Well AJ in the mid-1970s and M. Mahmoud in a newly excavated well in 1992 - and P. Fiorina's Italian team recovered nearly 1,500 further fragments in 1987-89. Counting fragments, the total runs past six thousand pieces; something over a thousand of them are substantial.

What they are is furniture. Chair and bed panels, plaques, boxes, horse blinkers and harness ornaments, carved in Phoenician, North Syrian and Assyrian styles, some inlaid with coloured glass and semi-precious stone or highlighted with gold leaf, and assembled with tiny alphabetic fitters' marks in inconspicuous places so the pieces could be put together in the right order. Most of it had never been used. Stripped of its gold and stacked in storerooms in the Northwest Palace and in Fort Shalmaneser, it lay untouched for decades and in some cases centuries before the sack of the city in the late seventh century BC scattered it into wells and burnt rooms.

One name attaches to these objects above all others, and the reason is worth knowing. Mallowan's wife, the novelist A. Christie, went out with the expedition every year, registered finds, typed the field catalogue, took and developed photographs, and cleaned some of the ivories - by her own account with an orange stick, a fine knitting needle, a dentist's tool and a jar of cosmetic face-cream, which she found better than anything else for coaxing dirt out of the crevices. The excavation project's own historians note that she was in fact given only a small number of objects, that her failing eyesight meant the delicate work later went to professional conservators, and that Mallowan used his wife's fame to attract sponsors, who were then given ivories from the excavators' share.

Ahab's House Of Ivory

"Now the rest of the acts of Ahab, and all that he did, and the ivory house which he built." "The houses of ivory will perish." "Who lie on beds of ivory, and stretch themselves on their couches." "Out of ivory palaces stringed instruments have made you glad." The phrases are familiar and they are usually read as poetry. They are not poetry. They are descriptions of a class of object, and the Nimrud material is that object by the thousand.

Nobody ever built a house out of ivory. What the phrase describes is furniture and panelling faced with carved ivory inlay - the beds Amos names, the thrones and chairs, the boxes, the wall fittings. Solomon's great ivory throne overlaid with gold in 1 Kings 10:18 is an object of exactly this kind, and after Nimrud we know what one looked like from the inside, down to the fitters' marks.

Assyria's own kings say where it came from. Ashurnasirpal II lists among the tribute he took from Ahunu of Bit-Adini "ivory dishes, ivory couches, ivory chests, ivory thrones decorated with silver and gold," and among the tribute of Tyre, Sidon, Byblos and Arwad, ebony and hippopotamus ivory. His son Shalmaneser III records ivory from Babylonia and from Suhu. The craftsmen were in the small independent kingdoms of the Phoenician coast; the raw material came up from Egypt and Nubia; and the finished goods moved east as tribute and loot. The kingdoms of Israel and Judah sat inside that same world - the Black Obelisk, dug out of this same mound, records Jehu's tribute going the same direction as the ivory.

What The Ivories Do And Do Not Show

Start with what is solid, because it is unusually solid. Amos was describing real objects, and we can hold them. The prophets' vocabulary of luxury - houses of ivory, beds of ivory - is not metaphor and not exaggeration, and the discovery of six thousand pieces of exactly the furniture the phrase names is a straightforward recovery of what an eighth-century audience would have pictured. That much should be said without hedging.

Now the limit. The Nimrud ivories are not Ahab's. They were carved in Phoenicia and Syria, they reached Assyria as tribute and plunder, and not one of them can be traced to Samaria. They tell us what the phrase meant; they do not touch the king the phrase is attached to.

The ivories that were found in Israel's own capital are a separate assemblage, and their date is argued. Excavations at Samaria between 1908 and 1935 produced more than twelve thousand ivory items from near the palace, carved in the same Phoenician manner. They were originally assigned to the ninth century largely because of the assumed connection to Ahab's ivory house; the range given for them now is the ninth to the eighth century, and many specialists prefer the eighth - which would put them a century after Ahab and much closer to Amos. So the object that most directly illustrates 1 Kings 22:39 may in fact be illustrating Amos 3:15 instead. That is a small correction, and it matters, because the popular version - archaeologists found Ahab's ivory house - is not what happened, and the true version is the better story anyway: a small Levantine kingdom buying Phoenician luxury goods, exactly as 1 Kings and Amos assume, with a prophet furious about it.

The last limit is a modern one. Until Iraqi law changed in 1968, foreign expeditions kept a share of what they dug, and the British School's share was distributed to a dozen or so sponsoring museums and universities, where isolated groups of a few pieces have sometimes sat in storage ever since. The much larger share retained in Iraq was distributed to provincial museums as well as Baghdad, and has been looted or damaged three times in thirty-five years: in the 1991 uprising, when over two thousand museum objects were stolen or destroyed; after the 2003 war, when the Iraq Museum and provincial museums were attacked and a bank vault flooded, waterlogging ivories and other antiquities; and from 2014, when the site of Nimrud itself fell under the control of ISIS. The project that has spent decades reuniting these objects for publication states it plainly: there is still no definitive account of what was lost.

Scripture references

• 1 Kings 22:39 — "the ivory house which he built" - Ahab's palace at Samaria
• Amos 3:15 — "the houses of ivory will perish"
• Amos 6:4 — "who lie on beds of ivory" - the object type recovered at Nimrud by the thousand
• 1 Kings 10:18 — Solomon's great throne of ivory overlaid with gold
• Psalms 45:8 — "Out of ivory palaces stringed instruments have made you glad"

Sources

• Holding institutionThe Nimrud ivories: forgotten treasures — The Nimrud Project (University College London), published on Oracc · The project's object biography of the ivories, with references to the Ivories from Nimrud publication series and to Grayson's editions of the Assyrian royal inscriptionsSupports: The excavation history from 1845 to 1992 and the total of more than six thousand pieces, what the objects are and how they were made and stored, the Ashurnasirpal II and Shalmaneser III tribute passages, the account of Agatha Christie's role and its limits, the division of finds and the 1968 change in Iraqi law, the 2011 transfer to the British Museum, and the three episodes of looting and damage with the statement that no definitive account of the losses exists
• Holding institutionThe Ivory Carvings from Samaria — Claudia E. Suter, Institute of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bern · The project catalogues all ivory objects found at Samaria between 1908 and 1935, amounting to over 12,000 items, dated to the 9th-8th centuries BC when Samaria was the capital of the kingdom of IsraelSupports: The Samaria assemblage - its excavation dates, its size, its Phoenician manner and the ninth-to-eighth-century range now given for it
• ScholarshipJ. W. Crowfoot and G. M. Crowfoot, Early Ivories from Samaria — John Winter Crowfoot and Grace M. Crowfoot, with a note by E. L. Sukenik · Samaria-Sebaste II: reports of the work of the Joint Expedition in 1931-33 and of the British Expedition in 1935. London: Palestine Exploration Fund, 1938. Print onlySupports: The excavation and first publication of the Samaria ivories and their original ninth-century attribution
• Primary textA. H. Layard, Nineveh and Its Remains (1849) — Austen Henry Layard · The excavator's own account of the Nimrud digs of 1845-47. Public domain, full text at the Internet ArchiveSupports: Layard's first-hand account of the earliest ivory finds at Nimrud
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Nimrud ivories

Reflect

Amos was not angry that Israel had beautiful things. He was angry that they lay on ivory beds while the needy were sold for a pair of shoes. Where does that line fall in your own life?