By the time the last of the mammoths were sinking into Siberia’s sedimentary strata, half a world away ancient Egypt’s great pyramids had already been built. Long familiar with ivory in the form of hippopotamus teeth and elephant tusks, Egyptian artisans had been using it since before the Dynastic era.
Ivory was now treasure. This expansion of its meaning had begun in prehistory, when the material was first used for adornment and sculpture. In the settled, stratified societies around the Mediterranean ivory also functioned much the way gold did: possessing it signaled status and expressed social differences.
Consider the exquisitely carved ivory neck rest buried long ago with Tutankhamen to help ease the boy king’s journey to the afterworld. It is a telling example of both the artistry of the period (ca. 1325 BCE) and the importance ivory had attained. The rounded crescent, proffered by a crouching figure flanked by resting lions, is one of thousands of ivory objects that decorated the royal tombs of Egypt. These included game discs, perfume flasks, seals, combs, knife handles, inlaid tomb furniture, and so-called concubine figures, which varied from crude dolls to graceful sloe-eyed sylphs. (It’s thought that these slim, hourglass-shaped ivory statuettes were intended to magically assist in providing sexual solace for the departed king in the afterlife, but their interment in female burials as well rather complicates this idea.)
For Egyptians the ivory that first came to hand was probably from the hippopotamus, which lived along the wetlands of the Nile. Eleven feet long, five feet high at the shoulder, and weighing seven thousand pounds, hippos are the heaviest land animal after the elephant. Hippopotamus amphibius, the “river horse,” is immense and piglike, hairless, amphibious, and dangerous when cornered, an impressive creature to Egyptians. It was regarded as a symbol of rebirth and was often pictured in Egyptian art. Its substantial teeth, both upper and lower incisors and canines—especially the strongly curved foot-long lower canines so evident in the hugely gaping jaws territorial bulls threaten one another with—were important sources of ivory. Each type of tooth is distinctive in cross section, triangular or round, with faint, tightly packed concentric lines and its own characteristic central interstitial zone where developing dentin converges.
The heavy armorlike enamel cladding of hippo teeth made carving difficult, particularly with the simple tools then available. Hippo ivory is also relatively small and, although opaque, the innermost layer of dentin is mottled in appearance. As early as the fourth millennium BCE, Egyptians were turning to elephant ivory, a much superior medium with no enamel to speak of, a uniform color, and an even grain. What’s more, elephant ivory was large enough to be used for small statuary and other sculpture in the round, and provide flat panels up to five inches or more across and a foot or two in length for bas-reliefs or small boxes.
Local sources of elephant ivory were limited and dwindling, however. Elephants once ranged unimpeded all over the continent, including the Sahara before it became desert, as Neolithic rock paintings there show. Some 5,000 years ago the drying up of the Sahara forced early peoples and elephants to its edges—the Mediterranean in the north, the sahel, or “shore,” in the south. Evidence suggests that this north African population was the smaller forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis) rather than the savannah or bush elephant (L. africana), but in any case they persisted for some time in Egypt, where they were hunted, even tamed; as early as the First Dynasty (ca. 3,000 BCE), different hieroglyphs were used to distinguish between wild and trained elephants. The arid climate and lack of trees and water eventually forced the elephant population farther south, deep into Nubia (today’s southern Egypt and northern Sudan).
As historian Edward A. Alpers puts it,
The Egyptian evidence makes it quite clear that ivory was a major product of the central and eastern Sudanic regions from very remote times. We cannot know how deeply this demand needed to penetrate into the heart of the continent, nor what impact the Egyptian demand may have had on the elephant population of those regions that supplied successive dynasties. We do know, however, that elephants disappeared from the eastern Sahara after 2750 B.C. and around 2000 B.C. in the central Sahara.
Here, another historical pattern emerges: the relative scarcity of ivory was now adding preciousness to the appeal inherent in the material itself, making this luxury item a status symbol fit for high officials and pharaohs. It became part of the natural wealth of Africa that successive Egyptian dynasties sought to control and acquire.
Increased demand inspired direct action. As far back as the Sixth Dynasty (2420–2258 BCE) in the Old Kingdom, during the reign of Pharaoh Merenre, Harkhuf, the governor of Elephantine, the island trading post (and probable ivory depot) at the first cataract of the Nile, sent ivory-gathering expeditions beyond Nubia’s borders.
Ivory in the form of tribute would also make its way from the interior down the Nile to Memphis and Thebes. The Tomb of Rekhmire (ca. 1450 BCE), one of the largest in the necropolis at Thebes, features a tribute scene in which ivory figures prominently. Rekhmire was the vizier of Thutmose III, charged with ensuring the proper payment of taxes in the form of goods from vassal states. The fading wall painting depicts a procession of foreign delegations from Nubia, Syria, Punt (modern-day coastal Sudan or Eritrea), and others bearing incense trees, skins, gold, baboons, an elephant—and shouldering ivory, in the form of pale crescent tusks.
For the Eighteenth Dynasty (c.1570 to 1293 BCE), however, these offerings were clearly insufficient. Both Thutmose I and Thutmose III extended the Egyptian empire by invading Syria. One benefit of the newly expanded borders was a supply of ivory from the population of Asian elephants in the region. While on a military campaign there, Thutmose III took time out to conduct a hunt, slaying over a hundred elephants. His stepmother, Queen Hatshepsut, had five ships, each seventy feet long and accommodating some two hundred men and rowers, built on the Nile and transported across the desert from Thebes to the Red Sea, where they sailed as a fleet to the “land of Punt” for ivory, incense, and other riches. An obelisk erected by Hatshepsut at Karnak bears an inscription attesting to their having brought seven hundred elephant tusks, panther skins, and other goods from Tjehenu (eastern Libya, western Egypt), additional evidence of the wide and significant trade in this material.
IVORY, LIKE OTHER luxury materials, now commonly passed through many hands after it left its source. The structure, mechanisms, and volume of the trade in ivory in the eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age, when the use of metals first began (roughly 3000–1000 BCE), is not all that well known, but the outlines of its beginning are clear by the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600–1000 BCE).
It operated something like this. Ruling elites such as the pharaohs and the kings of minor city-states desired both raw tusks and worked ivory objects for themselves and to use as diplomatic gift exchanges with other powers to show their loyalty, pay tribute, or open trade. This stimulated the expansion of the nascent market in ivory as both bulk material and luxury product by merchants who often functioned as foreign envoys. There were complex trade circuits, and layered interests, which meant ivory was stored here, carved there, delivered somewhere else. Archaeological findings of tusks, blanks, roughouts, pegs and dowels, and waste—bits left over from inlay work, flakes and chips from carving in the round or in high relief—as well as unfinished and finished ivory pieces are the evidence we have of ivory workshops (typically associated with palaces and sanctuaries) in the Aegean, on Cyprus, in Syria, Palestine, Anatolia, and elsewhere.
With no one society dominating trade in the Mediterranean, the Late Bronze Age became increasingly international and cosmopolitan. Specialists—physicians, scribes, sculptors—were exchanged among royal courts and major trading centers. A complex web of political and economic interactions motivated the extraction of ivory as a natural resource from herds of pachyderms and encouraged the culture of craft specialists who exploited the possibilities of the material and adapted it to a wide range of art forms created in variety of styles.
All this makes it difficult (and often misleading) to puzzle out distinct traditions in ivory carvings of the period. We know craftsmen used styles almost like patterns for various clients, often appropriating foreign motifs and iconography without regard to the meanings they originally carried. What’s been called the “Egyptianizing” style of much ivory carving in the eastern Mediterranean region may more properly reflect a kind of agglomeration of styles emanating from various carving centers. A common symbolic language began to emerge. A good example of this is the duck-shaped ivory (or partly ivory) container, featuring either a forward- or a backward-pointing head and a winged or oval lid, found in numerous Mediterranean and Middle Eastern sites. Fashionable and popular, it became almost standardized.
One could linger long over ivories from the many minor kingdoms and greater empires that waxed and waned in this region. Syria alone was ruled by Egyptians, Babylonians, Hittites, Chaldeans, Persians … but it’s enough to look at a few instances of ivory use in the Late Bronze Age, some of which are based on written evidence, to flesh out the archaeological picture.
The Phoenicians, with their city-states along the coast of what is now Lebanon and modern-day Syria, their vast maritime trading network, and their skilled craftsmen, supplied King Solomon with the ivory, precious metals, and experience needed to build and decorate the temple at Jerusalem (ca. 1000 BCE). Solomon entered into a commercial treaty with King Hiram of Tyre. “For the King had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks. So King Solomon exceeded all the kings of the earth for riches and for wisdom,” according to the Book of Kings. He sat on “a great throne made of ivory,” with six steps and fourteen lions, and the whole overlaid with gold.
Now firmly entrenched in the pantheon of precious materials, ivory began to gain metaphorical power. In the Song of Solomon, ivory is invoked for flesh (“his belly is as bright ivory”; “thy neck is as a tower of ivory”). Ahab, a later king, added an air of decadence to the substance. He is portrayed in the Old Testament as a sinful ruler—among his various failings, he married the wicked Jezebel, the king of Sidon’s daughter, who persuaded him to worship the false idol Baal. Ahab also built an entire palace lavishly decorated with ivory in Samaria, his capital, which doubtless helped link ivory with the idea of sensual extravagance. Certainly the connection was apparent to the Hebrew prophet Amos. “Woe to them … that lie upon beds of ivory,” he warned. “The houses of ivory shall perish.”
SYRIAN ELEPHANTS WERE the prime source of ivory in the Middle East, supplying Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, and Phoenician craftsmen. Ivory was a revered material during the roughly three centuries of Assyrian supremacy. Ashurnasirpal II (883–859 BCE) made Nimrud, on the east bank of the River Tigris, the capital of the Assyrian empire, which eventually spanned the Mediterranean to western Iraq. (All that is visible today of the once great city is a series of earthen mounds south of present-day Mosul in northern Iraq.)
Ivory in the form of elaborately carved objects and wooden furniture inlaid with intricate ivory panels had adorned the lavish royal apartments at Nimrud, and not surprisingly ivory carvings and fragments were found scattered throughout the palaces, temples, and private dwellings excavated by Austen Henry Layard starting in 1845. His great find was the Northwest Palace of Ashurnasirpal II. British archaeologist Max Mallowan reopened the dig in 1949, and over the next thirteen years he subsequently uncovered thousands of ivory carvings along with bronzes, seals, and stone sculpture.
Mallowan’s wife, mystery writer Agatha Christie, accompanied him on all his digs. She photographed and worked on the wealth of ivory carvings found at the bottom of wells in the southern wing of the Northwest Palace, thrown there during the sack of Nimrud in 614 BCE. (The empire itself was overthrown two years later by the Medes and Babylonians, who burned and destroyed nearly all Assyrian palaces and public buildings.) In his memoirs Mallowan described the triumphant discovery at the bottom of a “beautifully built brick-lined well—over three hundred courses in depth, with a corkscrew bend in the middle of it.” Nearly eighty feet down, his team found “a king’s ransom in the sludge under water.”
What was safely recovered was remarkable. Apparently, the Mede and Babylonian soldiers had stripped off the gold leaf that covered many of the ivory carvings and then simply tossed the ivory into wells. Christie worked on their restoration. Ivory is hydroscopic; it absorbs water. It swells and shrinks as moisture moves into and out of the material; thus a change of relative humidity—and temperature—can warp an object, or even cause it to split. Christie devised a method of slowly drying out the ivories to prevent cracking. “I had my own favorite tools,” she wrote in her autobiography: “an orange stick, possibly a very fine knitting needle … and a jar of cosmetic face cream.” This proved useful “for gently coaxing the dirt out of the crevices without harming the friable ivory.”
The carvings, many the color of brown silk, proved an interesting mix, evidence of how widespread ivory carving was across the region. Some, created in Assyrian workshops, featured warfare, snarling lions, processions, and other familiar motifs on incised panels or in low relief. Others clearly had been brought to Nimrud as tribute from vassal states with ivory-carving traditions. The Phoenician-style ivories, primarily busily detailed furniture panels with delicate openwork carved on both sides, showed a strong Egyptian influence. The restored Syrian-style ivories revealed bug-eyed, large-nosed figures; wavy-stemmed plants; and nude female figures with curling tresses.
Mallowan reflected on what lay behind the ivories.
It would be impossible to summarize the variety and range of these carvings, but among the most beautiful are the animals, open work, in the round, of oryx, gazelle and other horned beasts. It is surprising that no rendering of the elephant was ever found, the source of the expensive luxuries with which the Assyrian Court was so well endowed. Up till now it has been generally believed that the majority of the ivories came from the tusks of Syrian elephants.
The decimation of elephant populations, which began early in the Mediterranean world with Egyptian demand for ivory, had reached Syria, which would harbor the last herds of elephants in the Middle East. They would all be gone by 500 BCE. Mallowan blamed Assyrian zeal for organizing grand battues. A stele of ca. 879 BCE boasts that Ashurnasirpal II himself slew thirty elephants, along with more than four hundred lions and two hundred ostriches.
THE IMPACT OF evolving ivory traditions on elephant numbers was more complicated in the Aegean. Among the ivory-bearing foreigners pictured in the Tomb of Rekhmire are a delegation from Keftiu (Crete), which had no native ivory (a dwarf species of elephant had died out on the island before the arrival of Neolithic man). That a Cretan is shown with a tusk, however, is a clear sign that ivory was an item of exchange and, probably, significant trade.
The Tomb of Rekhmire dates from the end of the Minoan civilization on Crete in the middle of the second millennium BCE. Minoan society was structured around the palaces and courts of priest-kings, of which the one at Knossos is the most famous. There are a number of Minoan ivory carvings, including crocodiles and snake goddess figures with ruffled skirts, exposed breasts, and serpents entwined on their arms. The wonderfully free-form ivory acrobat from Knossos, crafted in a pose similar to that shown in Minoan bronzes of young men vaulting over charging bulls, is far looser in style than the comparatively stiff Egyptian figures of the period.
The seafaring and trading people of Crete were probably crippled by the volcanic eruption of Thera (ca. 1630–1550 BCE), but in any case their island culture was brought to an abrupt close shortly thereafter by conquering Mycenaeans, the Greek-speaking people of the Late Bronze Age.
The Mycenaean period is the historical backdrop for the Iliad and the Odyssey, which mention ivory in a number of contexts. These epics are literary works, but there is enough verisimilitude in the details to make us feel that what’s said about a precious material corresponds to the meaning it bore in the Aegean. Ivory, Homer tells us, ranks with riches such as bronze, silver, gold, and amber; it’s used for a horse’s cheek pieces (stained) and as “enrichment” for its reins, as well as for scabbards, furniture inlays, and key handles. One charming passage in Book XVIII of the Odyssey has the goddess Athena shedding grace and beauty over the sleeping Penelope, making her more statuesque and “washing her face” with the ambrosial loveliness of a dancing Aphrodite; finally, she gives her a complexion whiter than “sawn ivory.” All of this is complementary to the set of meanings (luxury, preciousness, skin tone, etc.) that similarly accrued to ivory in the Middle East.
And what were the kinds and sources of ivory in the Aegean? The hippopotamus that once flourished in the prehistoric Mediterranean (pigmy hippos long persisted on Cyprus) was now confined to watered areas of Egypt and Syria, and declining there, but its tusks were important in the brisk Late Bronze Age trade in the eastern Mediterranean, which swept in all manner of goods, including ostrich eggs, copper ingots, stone lamps, swords, daggers, and scarabs. Elephant ivory from the same regions (and almost certainly from North Africa as well) was equally important. The ivory trade probably piggybacked on the metals trade as complementary cargo on larger ships. Both hippo ivory and elephant ivory were utilized in the Aegean for seals, inlays, combs, and the like, sometimes side by side in the same craft environment.
But there was another ivory source, widespread throughout ancient Greece: wild boar, Sus scrofa scrofa, the ancestor of domestic pigs, originally found all over North Africa and Eurasia. Males of this tough-skinned, bristle-maned, solid-as-a-barrel species can reach four hundred pounds in weight and are quick and formidable when cornered, armed as they are with upper and lower curling tushes sharpened against each other. These are carried at the perfect height to rip into the groins of hunters who get too close; that is why boar hunting was long a test of Greek bravery.
The modest size of boar ivories—on the average, perhaps six-inch-long crescents—limited their artistic employment. But they had other uses. In the Iliad, Homer describes the military value of pig ivory: young warriors wear plain hide helmets, sans plume or crest, reinforced with leather thongs and armored with “wild boars’ white teeth,” placed “strategically and well.” Surviving Mycenaean examples show that lower tusks were split into curved, gleaming plates with holes drilled in the corners.
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO think of Athens in the fifth century BCE without conjuring up an image of the Doric-columned Parthenon, still glorious today in its ruined state atop the city’s acropolis. The temple, dedicated to the goddess Athena, was the site of one of the most extraordinary uses of ivory in history, the great forty-foot-tall cult statue of Athena Parthenos (or “virgin”) that formerly stood within. It was a masterwork designed by the sculptor Pheidias, who also supervised both the building of the temple and its sculptural decoration; he began work on it around 447 BCE.
Athens was at the height of its power, and under the leadership of Pericles its citizens raised the funds for the lavish building project, which took over five years. Its purpose was to reflect religious devotion to the goddess who represented wisdom, including the arts of war and weaving, and, more important, to demonstrate the city-state’s might to its rivals. The Greek geographer Pausanias wrote that the helmeted deity was depicted in a full-length tunic, holding a spear in one hand and a statue of Nike (itself the size of an actual person) in the other; at her feet lay a shield and a serpent. The gigantic figure’s clothing and armor were formed of sheets of gold. The smooth skin of Athena’s face, neck, bare shoulders, and arms, however, was made entirely of ivory.
This towering artistic achievement is long gone and we are left wondering how it could have been made. Greek artisans of the period were using sophisticated techniques to maximize the size of pieces that could be cut from the most substantial tusks available—elephant teeth—but the sheer size of the statue would have presented enormous challenges. Could Pheidias have somehow glued together a vast quantity of ivory chunks before sculpting, or affixed thousands of small ivory tiles on a wooden form? No matter how carefully the pieces were joined and matched in color, surely either method would have created a distracting mosaic effect, which would have defeated the very raison d’être for the use of ivory: the subtlety and translucence that make it a more nuanced, more sensual medium than the finest marble—just the thing to represent the flesh of a goddess.
This wasn’t the first chryselephantine sculpture—i.e., one that combined ivory and gold. Such pieces have a long history going back to Egypt. Prior to Pheidias, a number of Greek artists and craftsmen had incorporated carefully sectioned pieces of elephant (and hippo) tusks into their gilded wooden sculptures to create the faces and limbs of figures. For Greeks who wanted to create nearly life-size statuary, a number of ivory pieces had to be assembled, like the parts of a mannequin—a section of tusk for an arm, one with greater girth for the head, others for the hands and feet, and so on. To avoid spoiling the overall effect, the joins where sections met were hidden by bracelets and necklaces, under drapery, and at hairlines.
Clearly, Pheidias had to go much further to adapt chryselephantine techniques to the unprecedented scale of a colossal cult statue. He may have accomplished this feat by employing furniture-makers’ methods of softening large sheets of ivory and molding them to the required shapes. Techniques for the production of ivory veneers for furniture as thin as an eighth of an inch—a few millimeters—had been in use for centuries.
Art historian Kenneth Lapatin claims that the ancients may have known how to split ivory thinly, like “unrolling a papyrus,” by some now forgotten method of peeling a tusk. Certainly they had a number of recipes to soften and shape ivory by steaming or boiling or soaking it in various liquids, including oil, beer, and especially vinegar. Once a thin sheet of ivory was softened, it might have been trimmed and draped over the form of the Athena Parthenos and doweled or glued into place.
A daunting task, certainly, but for Pheidias there would have been no shortage of resources to help him bend ivory to his creative will. He had teams of woodworkers, bronzecasters, and goldsmiths and other specialists. Price was no object—an estimated 40 talents (perhaps a quarter ton) of gold was used in making the cult statue, a staggering treasury in itself. The ivory used may have been nearly as costly.
The stature was built around an armature, which Lucian, Pheidias’s nephew and briefly his apprentice, described as “a tangle of bars and struts and dowels driven right through, and beams and wedges and pitch and clay, and a quantity of such ugly stuff housing within, not to mention legions of mice and rats that sometimes conduct their civic business there.” No matter; it was the exterior that counted. It may sound as if all that ivory and gold would have been garish in effect. But those who saw the cult figure in the play of torchlight, its visual impact redoubled in the reflecting pool in front of the statue’s base, found it wondrous and spiritually moving. More than three hundred ancient replicas of the statue were made, and the image appeared on coins as far away as Turkey. Over the centuries, despite the extra moisture given off by the reflecting pool, Athena’s ivory visage began to crack. In the fifth century CE the statue was looted and taken to Constantinople, where it was later destroyed, perhaps during the Fourth Crusade.
After Pheidias, there would be much great art made of ivory but never again on such a stupendous scale.
EARLY GREEKS KNEW very little about the creature from which large ivory came; the word elephas was first used solely as the name for ivory. Only after they encountered elephants in the vastly expanded Greek world opened up by Alexander the Great’s conquests was the name extended to the animal. The iconic image of this astounding figure and his brutal, meteoric rise is captured perfectly for us in the young warrior portrayed in the “Alexander mosaic” from Pompeii. His thick hair flying, beardless jaw firmly set, and dark eyes fixed on the prize, he rides his wild-eyed steed, Bucephalos, into the spear-cluttered clash of forces at the battle of Issus. There, in 333 BCE, his army crushed that of Darius III, the Persian king.
Across a vast area long raked by empires, Alexander created one more. The son of Philip II of Macedon, he was leading troops as a teenager. Following his father’s assassination in 336 BCE, he transformed the Greek world, welding it together and taking his armies eastward to the Indus valley, north nearly to Russia and south to Egypt. He died at the age of thirty-two in Babylon in 323 after a drinking bout, although some think he may have succumbed, more prosaically, to malaria. Too vast to be sustained, his sprawling new empire broke into quarreling kingdoms run by his generals. But his short-lived dream served to spread Greek ideas and art, establish cultural links with various Eastern states, and, through new military tactics that were developed as well as trade links that were established, facilitate the flow of elephants and their ivory across several continents.
Alexander’s military brilliance met a singular challenge during his invasion of India: the full-scale use of elephants in battle. Porus, the king of Pauravas, refused to surrender to the advancing “god-king” and confronted the Macedonian army on the east bank of the Hydaspes (today’s Jhelum river) in the Punjab with a unit of two hundred armored elephants, spaced some thirty yards apart like towers on a garrison wall. All were draped in protective armor and ridden by their handlers and may have carried miniature bunkers of additional warriors on their backs as well. A tamed elephant was more than a powerful beast of burden; it could be turned into a living tank. Much ingenuity went into devising elephants’ armor, which often utilized fire-hardened leather and chain-mail drapery. Swords were attached to their trunks, poison-dipped points to their tusks. Elaborate training was required to control an elephant and direct its power against masses of armed men and horses, such as teaching it to sweep up an enemy soldier in its trunk and hand him up to the warriors riding it for quick dispatch. To opposing troops who had never seen them before, the sight of these striding behemoths in full battle regalia was terrifying.
Had he not previously confronted some in Darius’s forces five years before, Alexander might not have been prepared to deal with elephants on the battlefield. Impressed, he had taken trained ones as war booty from his Persian campaigns, but never used them directly in battle. Instead, he devised deadly countertactics to deal with war elephants. When Porus left his right flank exposed, Alexander sent more cavalry behind the elephant line and then directed his archers to kill the elephants’ mahouts and target the animals’ eyes and trunks in a hail of arrows. “So a blood bath then ensued,” wrote the military historian Arrian in a later account. The terrified elephants “attacked indiscriminately both friend and foe, trying to beat a path for themselves by any means and trampling and killing everything.” His army crushed, Porus surrendered at last.
After the carnage of the battle of Hydaspes, Alexander’s exhausted men refused to advance farther east. As his army marched south and eventually back through Mesopotamia, however, Alexander continued to incorporate trained Asian elephants, eventually two hundred of them, into his military machine. When he died in Babylon, his mourning pavilion featured an honor guard of elephants.
Alexander recognized that, as weapons of war, elephants were a two-edged sword. Their appearance alone could unnerve enemy forces, but once wounded they were uncontrollable and could be equally damaging to their own troops. Alexander’s successors, however, were enamored of them. Elephants represented the latest in war weaponry, a means of tipping the balance during the bitter power struggles over control of the godking’s empire. The ancient world’s arms race was on.
Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals, ended up ruling Egypt from his base in Alexandria and fought for control of southern Syria against Seleucus, who held all of Mesopotamia and Persia. Both relied heavily on war elephants. The Seleucids bordered India and thus were able to add to their corps of fighting pachyderms. Ptolemy’s Indian elephant corps could not be replenished; overland routes were not in his control and ships that could transport elephants on long ocean voyages had not been invented. His son, Ptolemy II, turned to a local source: Africa. He had previously set up hunting outposts along the Red Sea coast to exploit the elephant herds in Ethiopia where, the Greek historian Polybius reported, elephants’ tusks were so common they were used as doorposts in houses. Although Ethiopian hunters relied on stealth and venom-tipped arrows shot from powerful bows to ambush elephants, such opportunistic hunting practices could not have had the impact on the herds that relentless pursuit by organized hunting parties of encircling lancers, archers, and cavalry must have made. A volley of arrows, a few well-placed spears, or a hit-and-run hamstringing with an ax and the beast would be down, gurgling and gasping its last.
But the pressing need to replenish the dwindling stable of the Ptolemies’ war elephants suddenly gave the Ethiopian herds value over and above the ivory they carried and the mounds of meat they could provide. For the first time, elephants were now worth something alive.
Ptolemy II founded a new elephant-hunting station, Ptolemais Theron (“Ptolemais of the Hunts”), some two-thirds the way down the Red Sea coast, to begin capturing wild elephants, an enterprise that the Ethiopians, with their hunting traditions, disdained. The complexity of this undertaking was enormous. It may have required up to a thousand men to locate, surround, and drive wild elephants toward an enormous walled corral over the course of weeks or months. In this vast enclosure, trained elephants (presumably bred in captivity from the original Ptolemaic herd) and expert handlers recruited in India and lured to make the voyage by promise of high pay would calm the animals. With great difficulty, these animals were then transported on ships from the Red Sea coast, which required engineers and crews to rebuild port structures and docks to handle animals that weighed four or five tons. In addition, naval architects had to design an entirely new vessel, a sailing ship that could carry elephants for a voyage of at least a week and perhaps as long as a month, with stops at the hunting stations along the way to take on new fodder for the always hungry animals. “Obviously beasts fresh from the wild could hardly be coaxed up a gangplank onto a ship, much less be kept restrained once aboard,” one scholar wrote. “They needed a certain amount of preliminary training first, and bases had to be equipped to provide this.” Next to all this, the final step of the journey, marching them all across the Eastern Desert to the Nile and eventually to Memphis, where elephant stables had been established, seems almost a cakewalk.
Was this gigantic effort worth it? The Ptolemies used African elephants successfully in battle during the mid-third century BCE, but they fared less well against the Asian elephants deployed by the Seleucids during the Battle of Raphia in Palestine in 217 BCE. The African elephants in that clash were forest elephants, L. cyclotis, smaller in stature than the Asian species, and in any case outnumbered. “Unable to stand the smell and the trumpeting of Indian elephants, and terrified, I suppose, by their great size and strength,” wrote Polybius, “they immediately run away.” The Ptolemies finally soured on using elephants in warfare. But elsewhere in Africa elephants were still considered the key to conquest.
The belief in the advantages of war elephants had spread from Egypt to Carthage, the powerful city-state founded by Phoenicians in what is now Tunisia. The Carthaginians captured forest elephants then found in the coastal plains along the Mediterranean and the foothills of the Atlas mountains. Modeling their elephant corps after the Ptolemaic model, and using Indian trainers possibly obtained from Ptolemy II, they built up a powerful force, best remembered for its use in the Punic Wars against Rome, especially Hannibal’s daring invasion of Italy in 218 BCE, in which he brought thirty-seven elephants through Spain and France and across frozen passes in the Alps to the Po Valley without losing a single one—although nearly half his men, some twenty thousand infantry and horsemen, perished. Once in Italy the elephants began succumbing to disease, starvation, and the many battles of Hannibal’s fifteen-year campaign, which brought him to the gates of Rome. But Roman troops figured out how to harass and maim the elephants and by 204 BCE were taking the offensive to Carthage itself. At the battle of Zama near the city of Carthage two years later, Hannibal deployed a phalanx of eighty war elephants but was outmaneuvered by the legions of Scipio, the Roman general. Hannibal was defeated and, as part of the peace struck with Rome, all of Carthage’s elephant corps had to be surrendered.
The enormous demand for African elephants as a substitute on the battlefield for those from Asia was waning fast in the Mediterranean world, but its impact lingered far, far longer. In the effort to obtain elephants, new avenues for accessing ivory had been opened in the African continent. A steady trade in tusks obtained from existing herds continued long after the time when the animal itself was deemed of military interest. After Alexander, African ivory would come to rival that from Indian sources, and would soon overtake it in importance.
THE PEOPLES IN and around the Indus Valley in the western Indian subcontinent were probably the first to domesticate the elephant. They had developed an exceedingly complex relationship with Elephas maximus from very early times; for example, there is a carved steatite seal from Mohenjo-Daro from the third millennium BCE showing an elephant wearing a saddle blanket. An elephant’s intelligence and great strength make it possible for it to be trained to undertake a wide array of heavy tasks, from pulling trees and hauling timber to towing huge carts and lifting heavy loads. But elephants may have first been used symbolically—there could hardly be a more impressive mount for a ruler to sit on than a tamed elephant—and as a fearsome weapon of war; early Sanskrit texts extol elephants primarily for their military value. Elephants can be made to do gory jobs—directed to execute prisoners by squashing them or pitted against other elephants in fights to the finish—so it’s not surprising that by the first millennium BCE they were being used in battle to smash through infantry and push down wooden fortifications, all the while operating as mobile platforms for archers. Indian potentates kept the tradition of war elephants alive many centuries after it had been abandoned elsewhere, primarily for prestige, the way mounted cavalry units are maintained in modern armies and trotted out for parades.
The elephant functioned as a symbol of power and other noble attributes in many cultures. In India the creature would go beyond that to became the focus of religious devotion, even worship. By the second millennium BCE there was a deeply entrenched Indian elephant culture, regarding not only the animals’ capture and training and use in warfare but their role in religion. Elephants are everywhere in Hinduism: they serve as the pillars of the world, carrying the earth on their heads; thunder-bolt-hurling Indra rides on the back of Airavata, the mighty elephant born of the primordial sea of milk; corpulent Ganesha, the one-tusked elephant-headed demigod, is the beloved Lord of Beginnings, invoked at the commencement of all undertakings. Buddhist lore, too, is full of elephant legends and imagery; the Buddha’s reincarnation as the historical Prince Gautama took place when the chaste Queen Maya was impregnated by being touched on her side with a white lotus held in the trunk of a divine white elephant.
It is far too simple to say that from the beginning of history “Asia preferred its elephants alive and Africa, dead,” as one writer put it, but it seems clear that the value elephants had been given in India through domestication and the regard in which they were largely held were incompatible with the kind of wholesale eradication of herds that was taking place in Syria and North Africa. In fact, elephant protection in India was first articulated in the Arthasastra, a treatise on statecraft from the third century BCE. It proposed the setting up of elephant sanctuaries, and even suggested the death penalty for anyone killing an elephant within their borders. In any case, the hunting that went on would have had a negligible effect, because in the ancient world India’s forests were teeming with elephants.
And those elephants supplied substantial quantities of ivory. The long tradition of ivory carving in India goes back to the third century BCE in the Indus Valley, where an ivory workshop and pieces of ivory used for small items such as combs and boxes have been excavated at Lothal (“mound of the dead”) in the state of Gujarat. One ivory object of great interest is a 5-inch-long scale, marked with tiny divisions, the smallest known in Bronze Age civilization: 27 graduations over 1.8 inches, each marking a mere 1.7 mm. The object illustrates that ivory’s ability to take tiny uniform markings was recognized early on, foreshadowing its later ubiquitous use as dials on European scientific instruments.
Archaeological excavations at Begram in Afghanistan have brought to light a number of objects indicating that within a few centuries there was a brisk trade in Indian ivory carvings. Begram, northwest of Kabul, was an important stop on one of the routes of the Silk Road, the vital trade route that wound across central Asia from China to the Mediterranean and played a key role in Eurasian cultural exchange from the first century BCE on. The ivory (and bone pieces) found at Begram include animal, human, and mythological subjects in an eclectic range of styles and techniques: high and low relief, open work, double faced. They may have entered the trade route at various points from China to India but also from the opposite direction, the Greco-Roman West. Some of these ivories may have been produced locally in Begram’s cross-cultural environment by itinerant Indian artisans. In any case the Indian ivory carving tradition would be impressively far-flung; one Indian ivory statuette was even discovered in the ruins at Pompeii.
ASIAN ELEPHANTS, ALSO native to China, were its first source of ivory. Among that civilization’s oldest examples of worked ivory is a carved plaque with sun and bird imagery excavated in Zhejiang Province and dating from the sixth millennium BCE. By the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600–ca. 1046 BCE) a highly developed ivory carving tradition had taken hold. One impressive bit of evidence for this is a nine-and-a-half-inch-long intricately carved ivory handle in the British Museum with much the same hooked and spiraling motifs found on the great bronzes of the period.
Ivory was prized in China but elephants were not. Still, they were first tamed during the Shang Dynasty and used for work and for war. They are represented with some realism in that dynasty’s art. By the next dynasty, the elephant is depicted more fancifully (in one case, like a long-nosed piggy bank), evidence that it was becoming more and more unfamiliar. China’s growing human population diminished the herds through habitat loss. Hunting, not simply for meat but for ivory, thinned out the rest. The Zuo Zhuan, a historical narrative of events between 722 and 468 BCE, speaks of the elephant’s tusks as the reason for the creature’s demise. As a revered material second only to jade in the Chinese imagination, ivory was suitable tribute and its use signaled luxury. Hairpins, chopsticks, bow tips, and inlays in furniture and on chariots were made of ivory, as was an entire bed presented to the prince of Chu in the third century BCE. Dwindling numbers of elephants lingered longest in southwest China, but it was always possible to meet the demand for ivory from southeast Asia, where an elephant culture analogous to India’s had developed, and of course from India itself. In fact, ivory appears to have been a familiar, if scarce, luxury commodity across the whole of Eurasia, flowing in several directions at once, from land and sea, from source to artisan to end user.
By the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) China was engaged in world trade. Small carved ivory objects were included in caravans sent out along the Silk Road, along with the lighter-weight luxury export items in which China specialized, such as lacquer as well as silk, which it effectively monopolized. Under the emperor Wu (141–87 BCE), the western limit of the Han empire reached the Ferghana Valley (modern Uzbekistan), but the final destination of the silks that changed hands farther west in Parthia (modern Iran) long remained a mystery; it was, of course, the Roman empire. Eventually, envoys from both east and west made direct contact in the first and second centuries ce. The Hou Hanshu (“History of the Later Han”) records that in 166 ce, a Roman embassy to Emperor Huan arrived by sea from southeast Asia bearing gifts of rhinoceros horn, tortoiseshell, and ivory.
MOST ROMANS THOUGHT silk grew on trees, like a kind of arboreal fleece. Along with other luxury products of Asia it found its way on the caravan and sea routes to centers and ports such as Antioch and Tyre, and finally to Rome, becoming costlier with each mile. Silk was an extravagance, scandalously used. Seneca the Younger (ca. 4 BCE–65 CE), Roman statesman, playwright, and adviser to Nero, was disgusted by the sheerness of silk clothing then fashionable—“If materials that do not hide the body, nor even one’s decency, can be called clothes,” he sniffed. Seneca clearly had a selective view of decadence; he looked askance at diaphanous garments yet felt no compunction about owning five hundred ivory-legged tables. But then, by Seneca’s time, lavish display was the order of the day among the ruling elite, and ivory, like precious metals, was an ideal material to flaunt: scarce, sensual, and unmistakable.
Ivory had been important to the Romans from early on; an ivory scepter and an ivory chair were part of the insignia of power of the early Etruscan kings. Later it was a fixture in triumphs granted to military commanders who had been victorious in foreign campaigns. Scipio Asiaticus paraded 1,231 ivory tusks along with assorted prisoners, gold, and silver in his procession in 188 BCE; Julius Caesar’s triumph in 46 BCE included ivory models of captured towns. In imperial Rome, ivory was not only a traditional signifier of high office and the booty of conquest but, increasingly, the agent nonpareil of extravagant display. The wealthy and powerful vied with one another to find ever more conspicuous uses for it and could not seem to get enough of its waxy, cool feel and its aura of luxury. The emperor Caligula’s favorite horse, Incitatus, ate from an ivory manger; the vaulted ceilings of Nero’s Golden Palace were covered in ivory. Chariots, couches, chairs, beds, birdcages, back scratchers, doors, dolls, dice, statues, stools, shoe buckles, writing tablets, and toilet articles, including discernicula (rods for applying hair pomade) and the useful strigil (exfoliating scraper), were made from it or decorated with it.
Even Roman poets and writers utilized ivory—for its metaphorical suggestiveness. In Ovid’s telling of the story of Pygmalion, in which the sculptor carves an ivory statue of a beautiful girl and then falls in love with his own creation, it is the material’s fleshlike surface that encourages Pygmalion’s delusion.
The flesh, or what so seems, he touches oft,
Which feels so smooth, that he believes it soft.
Interestingly, Ovid, Catullus, Horace, and Martial often referred to ivory as dentibus Indis, or Indian teeth (i.e., tusks), a term that points to the Middle East and Asia as Rome’s principal source of the material. Still, poets are not geographers. Historian Anthony Cutler suggests that the “choice of place names seems to have been largely determined by a concern for meter.” He argues that by the second century CE Africa “offered the richest lode of ivory to the Mediterranean world.” Rome gained control of the ivory trade throughout the Mediterranean after the destruction of Carthage in the third Punic War in 146 BCE as well as unhindered access to the remaining North African elephant herds in the Atlas Mountains. With the conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE, Rome was able to extract ivory directly from Ethiopia, much of it shipped from Adulis, the Red Sea port for the kingdom of Aksum. Finally, when the empire wrested Syria from the Parthians in 64 BCE, it enjoyed an unfettered flow of ivory from the East to supplement African sources.
The rivers of moving tusks became entangled. In the first century CE ivory was shipped from the Horn of Africa eastward to India and westward from north of Mumbai as well as the Bay of Bengal. The specifics of trade were complex, full of middlemen, craftspeople, and sophisticated arrangements; a century later there is an account of Proclus of Naucratis, an Egyptian Greek sophist and merchant of luxury goods who lived in the Nile Delta southeast of Alexandria, doing a brisk business exporting ivory and myrrh to dealers in Athens catering to the wealthy.
Ivory was so efficiently extracted from its sources during the fourth to the sixth century that it became far more available, and though it was never cheap its price, relative to other precious materials, fell markedly. Diocletian (ca. 245–ca. 312 CE), the emperor who initiated the idea of splitting the empire into eastern and western halves, sought to curb inflation with his Edict of Maximum Prices in 301 CE. It fixed ivory at one-fortieth the price per weight of silver (pure silk was twenty-four times pricier). No longer a rarity, the prized material began to be used not only for religious or imperial purposes but for various baubles, even toys for the children of the wealthy.
MOST OF THE visitors wandering through Gallery 46 between the grand Cast Courts of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum seemed to be on their way to more eye-catching exhibits the day I was there. In a cavernous building full of treasures, it’s easy to walk by a quiet monochromatic piece, even one that repays the attention given to it, as the foot-tall yellowed ivory panel I studied then certainly did.
The famous Symmachi panel, a Roman relief from the beginning of the fifth century CE, depicts a priestess in profile under an oak tree before an altar. She is dressed in a long tunic, part of which is gathered and thrown over her shoulder, and bends her head, intent on the moment, the delicate fingers of one hand poised over the bowl (of incense, perhaps?) that she holds in the other. In the background a small child brings a vase and possibly fruit. The figures are graceful in form and rendered in masterful low relief and are bordered by a repeating lotus-and-palmette frieze that has broken off here and there. The top is inscribed “Symmachorum,” a reference to the Symmachi, a prominent Roman family.
Originally the panel was joined to a similar but, alas, much more damaged one now at the Musée National du Moyen-Âge in Paris, the Nicomachorum, referring to the Nicomachi family. The diptych these two leaves formed is thought to celebrate the marriage of two important families; in both, priestesses offer sacrifices to Dionysus. As the museum’s literature puts it, the panel provides “material evidence of the dying gasp of paganism in aristocratic Late Antique Roman society.” This small souvenir of a fallen empire is a special postcard from the past in more ways than one. It resonates with all the inherited iconography of the Greco-Roman world—the folds in the priestess’s garment alone are a visual treat—and the material itself echoed the loss of all those elephant herds that once ringed half the Mediterranean in the ancient world.
Consider this: it is nearly five inches wide, which means that each of the panels for the original diptych had to be cut from the central girth of a very large elephant tusk. Diptychs of this size were among the largest single slabs of ivory ever carved. The form itself became one of the most popular uses for ivory in the latter stages of the empire, in part because it was the tradition for Roman consuls, on elevation to office, to present carved ivory diptychs to highly placed friends in order to mark their ascension to this dignified plane. In effect, they were ostentatious announcements of political power. Because these diptychs functioned as emblems of office, laws had to be passed to forbid lesser officials who were not consuls from adopting the practice and issuing their own. Consuls in both eastern and western parts of the empire issued a hundred or more of these yearly; over two centuries, the number might have reached a hundred thousand. The late-fourth-century poet Claudian described “huge ivory tusks, which carved with iron into plaques” and engraved with the consul’s name, circulated among “lords and commons. All India stood in speechless amaze to see many an elephant go shorn of the glory of his tusks.”
The amount of ivory used was enormous, for the stupendous tusks that were necessary to produce the most imposing diptychs could have made up only a small fraction of the total ivory collected; the average tusk was far too small. Eventually, there were signs that this natural resource was being overexploited: there were fewer large tusks available as the total supply shrank.
I took a last look at the Symmachi panel before leaving. Now I saw something more in the scene—the tiny frown the priestess wears, perhaps a moment of reflection in the midst of her rites. Her world was passing. The chipped panel of old ivory had the finality of a gravestone.
NOT ALL ROMANS were oblivious of the connection between the extravagant use of ivory and the dwindling numbers of elephants. Pliny the Elder contemplated the eradication of African elephants as early as 77 CE, and by the fourth century Themistius of Constantinople was voicing alarm about the North African herds. By the late sixth century CE not a single elephant could be found in Africa north of the Sahara.
The lust for ivory was certainly a factor in their demise, but there was another Roman taste at work that sped up the process. The Roman military had never been very impressed with elephants as weapons of war, and although its armies used them against their enemies who employed them, their use was abandoned when the empire’s strategic posture became largely a defensive one. The Roman’s interest in live elephants devolved into incorporating them into performances—doing tricks in amphitheaters, and, far less happily, as part of gladiatorial combat. Pliny the Elder reports that the spectacle of slaying elephants could backfire, and he described the reaction to one such event sponsored by Pompey in 55 BCE.
When, however, the elephants in the exhibition given by Pompey had lost all hopes of escaping, they implored the compassion of the multitude by attitudes which surpass all description, and with a kind of lamentation bewailed their unhappy fate. So greatly were the people affected by the scene, that, forgetting the general altogether, and the munificence which had been at such pains to do them honor, the whole assembly rose up in tears, and showered curses on Pompey.
Given the context, the outcry reflects a surprising identification with elephants. Most of the time sensation-seeking crowds not only would be unmoved but would fully expect to be thrilled by human-animal bloodbaths. Most of the time, of course, they were. These “entertainments” were so popular, in fact, that they may well have had a greater impact on elephant populations than that caused by the long-standing addiction to ivory. “It is likely that the use of elephants in the amphitheaters of the late Roman and early Byzantine world,” Cutler soberly concludes, “contributed more to their extinction than did the exploitation of their tusks.”