The Nimrud Ivories

Nimrud sits on the east bank of the Tigris, south of modern Mosul, on the mound the Assyrians called Kalhu. For a stretch of the ninth and eighth centuries BCE it was the capital of an empire that reached from the Zagros to the Mediterranean, and its palaces filled up with the tribute that empires collect: gold, textiles, timber, and, in enormous quantity, carved ivory. Thousands of ivory plaques, furniture panels and inlays came out of the ruins of Nimrud's royal buildings - and a good number of them were not made in Assyria at all. They were made in the Levant, in workshops working a style of carving that shows up nowhere more clearly than in the wrecked ivory fittings of the northern kingdom of Israel's own royal palace.

Museum display of carved ivory plaques from Nimrud, showing winged figures, horses, and decorative panels — Carved ivory plaques from the Assyrian palace stores at Nimrud, showing the variety of Levantine carving styles - including winged creatures, horses and patterned panels - recovered from the 612 BCE destruction layer. British Museum, London. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Photo by SpeakingArch, Wikimedia Commons

What came out of the wells

Austen Henry Layard opened the first trenches at Nimrud in the 1840s and found ivories almost immediately, but the bulk of the collection came out a century later. Excavations directed by Max Mallowan for the British School of Archaeology in Iraq worked the site from 1949 into the early 1960s, and it was there, in the choked wells and storerooms of the Northwest Palace and the outlying building known as Fort Shalmaneser, that the great majority of the ivories turned up - many thousands of pieces and fragments, thrown down wells or left in ash when Nimrud was sacked at the fall of the Assyrian empire in 612 BCE. Some had been burned; some had been used as veneer on furniture and beds; some were small enough to have been inlays for boxes, chairs and horse trappings. Almost none of it was made locally. The carving is Levantine work, in styles scholars have long grouped loosely as "Phoenician" and "Syrian" - and within the Syrian group, a smaller cluster that carries its own name: the South Syrian, or Samaria, style.

Stone Most of the excavated ivories were divided between Baghdad, London and other institutions in the mid-twentieth century under the arrangements of the day. The British Museum holds one of the largest single collections outside Iraq, alongside significant groups in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and elsewhere.

The Iraq Museum in Baghdad held the largest share of the original finds. A portion of that collection suffered serious damage and loss during the looting of the museum in 2003; the rest remains in Iraq. The ivories now spread across several museums are, in that sense, one excavated body of material now dispersed - which is part of why comparing pieces held in different cities matters so much to the scholarship.

9th to 8th century BCE (carved) · 612 BCE (deposited)The record

The Nimrud Ivory Hoards

Several thousand carved ivory plaques, furniture panels and inlays excavated at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu), in northern Iraq, principally by Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s to 1850s and by the British School of Archaeology in Iraq under Max Mallowan from 1949 to the early 1960s. Found in the Northwest Palace and in the storerooms and wells of Fort Shalmaneser. Carved largely in Levantine workshops - Phoenician and Syrian styles predominate - and brought to Nimrud as tribute, plunder or trade goods. Deposited in their final context around the destruction of Nimrud in 612 BCE. Now held chiefly by the British Museum, the Iraq Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

British Museum, London

The Samaria style

The Hebrew Bible mentions ivory furnishing a royal palace exactly once, and it names the place. The Book of Kings records that Ahab, king of Israel, built "an ivory house" in Samaria; the prophet Amos, condemning the excesses of the northern kingdom's elite, mocks those who lie on "beds of ivory" in houses of ivory. For a long time that was a literary detail with nothing to check it against. Then excavation of Samaria itself, in the royal quarter built by the Omride dynasty, turned up fragments of carved ivory inlay from the floor of the palace - burned, broken, but unmistakably fittings of the same kind found at Nimrud. Comparing the Samaria fragments against the Nimrud hoards, scholars identified a distinct carving style within the Syrian group - open, somewhat plain backgrounds, a particular treatment of lotus and palmette motifs - that appears at both sites. It has come to be called, informally, the Samaria style.

The implication is not subtle. A palace in Samaria was fitted with ivory furniture cut in a recognisable regional style; ivories cut in that same style also turn up, in quantity, in the palace stores of the empire that eventually conquered Samaria's kingdom. The ivories did not walk to Nimrud on their own. They arrived as tribute paid by Israelite and other Levantine kings buying off Assyrian pressure, as loot carried off after military campaigns against those same kings, or as ordinary trade in a luxury good that moved along the same routes as everything else. Whichever route any particular piece took, the presence of Samaria-style carving inside Assyrian palace stores places the biblical description of an "ivory house" in Samaria alongside a body of physical carving that answers to it directly.

None of this requires a single dramatic act of looting to explain it, and the site does not need one. Assyrian kings extracted tribute from the kingdom of Israel across more than a century of contact, from the payments recorded in Assyrian royal inscriptions through to the annexation of Israelite territory and the eventual fall of Samaria in 722 BCE. Ivory, as a portable luxury good, was exactly the kind of item that moved along that channel - handed over year on year rather than seized once. The Nimrud ivories are evidence less of a single raid than of a working relationship between a smaller Levantine kingdom and the empire it could not outlast: taxed, then eventually absorbed, with its furniture ending up, piece by piece, in the treasuries of the power that taxed it.

A palace fitted with ivory in Samaria. Ivory cut in the same style, by the thousand, in the storerooms of the empire that conquered it. The furniture crossed the border before the kingdom did.

9th century BCEThe record

The Samaria Ivory Fragments

Fragments of carved ivory inlay recovered from the royal quarter at Samaria, capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, built by the Omride dynasty in the ninth century BCE. Found broken and burned within the palace area during excavations of the early to mid twentieth century. Compared against the far larger Nimrud hoards, the fragments share carving conventions with the group known as the Samaria style, and are the closest physical match to the "ivory house" and "beds of ivory" described in 1 Kings 22:39 and Amos 3:15. Held today by the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, and the Rockefeller Archaeological Museum.

Israel Museum, Jerusalem

9th century BCE

The Omride dynasty builds its royal quarter at Samaria, fitted with ivory-inlaid furniture.

9th to 8th century BCE

Levantine workshops, including the group later called the Samaria style, supply carved ivory to Assyria as tribute, plunder or trade.

722 BCE

Assyria conquers Samaria and ends the northern kingdom of Israel.

612 BCE

Nimrud is destroyed. The stored ivories are burned, dumped in wells and abandoned in the ruins.

1840s to 1960s

Layard, then Mallowan's British School of Archaeology in Iraq expeditions, excavate the ivories from Nimrud's palaces.

Today

The ivories are held chiefly by the British Museum, the Iraq Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.