I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM
The Nimrud Ivories
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Empire concentrates other people's work. These ivory plaques were carved in Phoenicia and Syria, then travelled to Assyria as tribute, gift, or loot.
At a glance
- Date
- 9th to 7th centuries BC
- Origin
- Levant and Egypt
- Found
- Nimrud, Iraq
- Collection
- National Museum of Iraq; British Museum
Look closer
Phoenician inscriptions on work found far from Phoenicia
Several ivories carry Phoenician script, and the decorative motifs — sphinxes, lotus flowers, figures in Egyptian dress — are typical of Levantine and Egyptian workshops. Nothing about the carving style is Mesopotamian. These are imports, not local work, though exactly which city produced which piece remains uncertain.
Fragments of furniture, not standalone art
The plaques are small, often just a few centimetres across, and most are broken. They were never meant to be seen alone. They decorated chair backs, bed frames, horse harnesses, weapon handles — high-status objects whose wooden or metal frames have long since rotted or corroded away. What survives is ornament without its structure.
Stripped before burial
Many ivories show signs of having been inlaid with gold leaf or set with semi-precious stones. Those additions are gone. Someone removed them, either when the objects were still in use or during the city's final days. The plaques were then stored unused or thrown down wells when Nimrud was sacked in the early sixth century BC.
The story
The Assyrian Empire, at its height in the ninth and eighth centuries BC, stretched from the Mediterranean coast to the Iranian plateau. It was a system built on extraction: tribute, deportation, and the movement of goods and people toward the imperial centre. Nimrud, ancient Kalhu, was one of those centres — a royal city south of Mosul, on the Tigris, where the empire's wealth accumulated.
Among that wealth were ivory plaques, over a thousand significant pieces and many more fragments, excavated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from palace storerooms and wells. The ivories are small, intricate, and unmistakably foreign. Their motifs — sphinxes, palmettes, figures in Egyptian costume, scenes of animal combat — belong to the visual language of the Levant and Egypt, not Mesopotamia. Several carry Phoenician inscriptions. They are attributed to Phoenician workshops, though the attribution is complicated by the fact that no comparable ivories have been found in Phoenicia itself, nor in major Phoenician colonies like Carthage.
The plaques were not made to stand alone. They decorated furniture, chariots, weapons, and other portable high-status objects. The wooden and metal components have perished; what remains is the applied ornament. Many would originally have been enhanced with gold leaf or inlaid stones, but those additions were stripped away at some point before the ivories were buried. Some were found in what appears to have been a palace storeroom for unused furniture. Others were discovered at the bottom of wells, apparently discarded when the city was destroyed.
That destruction came between 616 and 599 BC, during the collapse of the Assyrian Empire — a collapse poorly recorded in surviving texts. The ivories, by then already old, were abandoned or thrown away. They stayed buried until modern excavation brought them back.
How they reached Nimrud in the first place is uncertain. Tribute is the usual explanation: subject states sending luxury goods to the imperial court. Gift exchange between kings is another possibility. Outright plunder is a third. Assyrian reliefs depict the transport of tribute, including furniture, and royal inscriptions list ivory among the goods received. But the inscriptions do not distinguish between voluntary gift and coerced payment, and the reliefs do not tell us whether a particular ivory plaque arrived as diplomacy or theft. The ivories themselves are silent on the matter. They record only the fact of movement: Levantine craftsmanship ending up in Mesopotamian hands.
What is clear is that the Assyrians valued them. They were kept, stored, and used to furnish royal spaces. They represent an empire's capacity to gather the work of distant workshops and concentrate it in a single city.
Why it mattered then
The ivories were luxury goods in a world where luxury signalled power. Ivory itself — elephant tusk, imported from Africa or India — was rare and expensive. Carving it into intricate plaques and applying gold leaf multiplied the expense. To own such objects, and to furnish a palace with them, was to demonstrate reach and wealth. For the Assyrian kings, the ivories were proof of empire. They showed that the court could command or extract goods from across the known world. The fact that the work was foreign may have added to the value: it marked the objects as tribute or spoils, evidence of submission or conquest. The ivories were not just decoration. They were a material record of the empire's extent.
Why it matters now
The Nimrud ivories are foundational to the study of Phoenician art, despite — or because of — the fact that they were not found in Phoenicia. Almost no comparable work has been discovered in the Phoenician heartland or its major colonies. If we want to understand what Phoenician workshops produced, we are forced to look at objects found elsewhere, in the hands of their customers or conquerors. That absence poses questions. Were the ivories made for export from the start, or were they local work that happened to travel? Did Phoenician cities keep different objects for themselves, or has the archaeological record simply not survived? The ivories do not answer these questions. They show us what left, not what stayed. They also demonstrate how empire redistributes culture. The plaques are Levantine in style, Assyrian in context, and now dispersed across museums in Iraq, Britain, and elsewhere. Their history is one of repeated displacement: made in one place, used in another, excavated by a third party, and now held by institutions far from both origin and findspot. That pattern is not unique to the Nimrud ivories, but it is unusually clear in their case. They are a worked example of how objects move, and why.
The surprising detail
Many of the ivories were found at the bottom of wells. When Nimrud was sacked, someone — perhaps the city's inhabitants, perhaps the attackers — threw luxury goods down the wells, either to hide them or simply to discard them. The wells preserved the ivories by keeping them waterlogged, which prevented the ivory from drying out and cracking. It is an odd form of survival: saved by being abandoned.
What is disputed
The attribution to Phoenician workshops rests on stylistic analysis and the presence of Phoenician inscriptions on some pieces, but no ivories with equivalent features have been found in Phoenicia or its major colonies. Scholars also disagree on how the ivories reached Nimrud — whether as tribute, diplomatic gifts, or plunder — and the surviving Assyrian records do not clarify the distinction.
How it got here
The ivories were excavated from Nimrud during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many were taken to the United Kingdom and deposited in the British Museum, which acquired most of the British-held pieces through donation and purchase in 2011. The Museum has stated its intention to return some ivories to Iraq. A significant number remained in Iraqi institutions, but many have been lost or damaged through war and looting in recent decades. Other museums worldwide hold smaller groups.
Remember this
Empire gathers other people's craftsmanship. These ivories show the process in miniature: Levantine work, stripped and stored in Assyria, then buried and scattered again.
Test yourself
Why are the Nimrud ivories considered foundational to the study of Phoenician art, despite the fact that almost none have been found in Phoenicia itself?
Because they are among the few surviving examples of work attributed to Phoenician workshops, even though they were discovered far from Phoenicia. The Phoenician heartland and its major colonies have yielded almost no comparable ivories, so scholars studying Phoenician art are forced to rely on objects found in other regions — often in the hands of customers or conquerors. This creates a paradox: we define Phoenician style largely through objects the Phoenicians made for export or that were taken from them. The absence in Phoenicia itself may be an accident of preservation, or it may indicate that different objects were kept locally, but either way, the Nimrud ivories are what we have. They show us not what Phoenicia kept, but what it sent or lost.
Go deeper
Image: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg), CC BY-SA 4.0. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source.