1
MAMMOTH TEETH
In 1956 the 28,000-year-old Paleolithic site Sungir was discovered on the outskirts of Vladimir, east of Moscow. It is one of the oldest sites in which ornaments have been found on human skeletons. At least three of the site's inhabitants were buried there, including a sixty-year-old man, a girl of about eight, and a boy of thirteen. Interred in shallow graves dug into the permafrost, they were laid on their backs, hands folded at the hips; the children rested head to head.
Workers who unearthed the three were stunned to find that they were buried with thousands of intricately crafted ivory beads, crisscrossed in strands that might have been sewn to long since disintegrated clothing. The bones of the man's arms were hooped with twenty-five polished mammoth-ivory bracelets. At the boy's throat was an ivory pin that may have once held a cloak; under his shoulder was an ivory sculpture of a mammoth. A massive eight-foot-long ivory lance made from a straightened mammoth tusk lay at his and the girl's side.
The sight of these skeletons showered in tiny bits of ivory must have been startling enough, but the amount of labor necessary to produce the adornment is simply staggering to contemplate, and clear evidence of the deceased's high status. According to paleoanthropologist Randall White, the beads were produced in a methodical, step-by-step fashion; they were, in effect, standardized. There was more.
They were scored across each face so that when strung they would fall into an interlocking, criss-cross pattern. Careful analysis shows that the scoring was done on each blank bead before the hole was drilled, indicating that the creator had the desired aesthetic effect in mind at even the earliest stages of production.
White's experiments later showed that it would have taken more than an hour to make each bead. The old man's beadwork, then, would have taken more than three thousand hours of labor, and each child's more than five thousand hours.
All the themes that run through the history of human fascination with ivory are present, in embryonic form, in this prehistoric site: the lure of the material; its artistic employment, symbolic power, and value; its use as a means of conferring status; the desire and trade required to obtain it; efforts at mass production; consciousness of its source; its embrace in adornment even to the grave—they are all destined to be replayed through millennia to come.
IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO know the circumstances in which ivory's properties were first revealed. We can imagine a firelit corner of a cave, the bank of a thawing river at midday, or a hundred other scenes, crowded or solitary. We can picture the thin creamy streaks left by scraping a flint very hard across a flake of mammoth tusk, or the shallow holes that could be made by twisting the sharp point of a stone tool into the surface. But we can only speculate about the first attempts to work ivory, how early humans unlocked the allure of this unique organic substance and stirred the urge to use, keep, and treasure it.
We know that humans began carving skillfully in ivory in prehistoric times. Ivory figures dating back roughly 25,000 years have been known for some time, but in 2007 archaeologists from the University of Tübingen, Germany, announced the oldest ivory find yet. It is a tiny exquisite rendering of the very animal from which the carving material itself came: a woolly mammoth. Less than an inch and a half long, the softly rounded form is complete with massive trunk, stumplike legs, pointed tail, and strange details—a half dozen incisions on the head, cross-hatching on the soles of its feet. Radiocarbon analyses push its origins back some 35,000 years. It's one of more than a dozen figurines made from mammoth ivory unearthed at the Vogelherd cave in southwest Germany, a dazzling discovery that joins a clutch of similar small carved ivories discovered four years previously at another Swabian cave, the Hohle Fels, and thought to date to perhaps 33,000 years ago. These groups of powerful and puzzling ivory carvings may constitute the oldest body of figurative art in the world, an array that includes a horse's head raked with lines, a lovely wing-tucked diving duck, and an enigmatic high-shouldered half human–half cat torso. Their mottled surfaces, burnished smooth and sometimes pierced for suspension, suggest they were amulets, kept close; their precise meanings and purposes are not entirely clear but their animal and human themes are familiar from all subsequent prehistoric art. Indeed, these were created at roughly the same time the first great cave paintings began appearing in Europe.
The profusion of ivory carvings that followed emerged in a period that saw an explosion of plastic expression. Those early uses are not merely the first instances; they are the formative ones, and tell us what to look for as we trace ivory's luster through history.
IT'S NOW COMMONLY accepted that modern man—Homo sapiens—arose roughly 150,000 years ago in Africa and eventually set out to colonize the world; 100,000 years later they were supplanting earlier hominids (such as H. erectus and H. neanderthalensis) who began to migrate out of Africa over a million years before. After H. sapiens moved into Europe, Neanderthals, who certainly looked the part of cavemen—their powerful, heavy build was well adapted to the harsh waxing and waning ice age conditions that prevailed throughout this period—disappeared, perhaps in as little as a thousand years in southern France, although they may have overlapped for much longer in northern Europe. Neanderthals had stone tools and possibly a concept of decoration (pierced fox teeth have been found in the Neanderthal site of Grotte du Renne in France), but though that's a sign of more intellectual capability than they are often given credit for, it pales next to the arresting evidence of human consciousness on display on the walls of more than two hundred caves in southwest France and northeast Spain decorated in Paleolithic times.
The art of these anatomically modern humans, still referred to as Cro-Magnons, says more than anything else that those who created it were not so different from us. We sense, intuitively, that it taps into shared imagery. Although the art refers to a world of experience far removed from ours, full of long-gone megafauna—cave bears, huge bison, saber-toothed cats—and shows the pentimenti of various forgotten symbolisms (spots, dots, tridents, handprints), it has a freshness and power that speak directly. Even looking at photographs of the powerfully rendered aurochs painted on the white calcite walls of the Hall of the Bulls in Lascaux, France's most famous prehistoric cave, we feel that our reaction cannot be completely different from that of those who first created them. We see that those painters saw what we would have seen. They traced the bow of a horse's neck, the scooping curve of a tusk, or the spear of a horn the very way we would, using outlines that cut out the animal from its background along the boundary between what it was and what it wasn't: they used drawing, as we do, as an act of definition.
Those little figurines from Germany and all the later ice age carvings that have come down to us are, admittedly, just as shorn of context as cave paintings when seen in reproduction. But by their nature they were designed to carry their meanings with them. Studied directly—even if one has to view them behind protective glass, propped on little pedestals in museum displays, far from where they were created—they still evoke a sense of what it must have been like to hold and carry them, which in turn gives us a glimpse into what it must have been like to make them. As stand-alone, portable, hand-sized pieces worked from chunks and slabs of rock, lumps of clay, and pieces of bone and ivory, they were meant to be handled, caressed, stroked, and pondered by flickering fires, clutched under furs and skins, worn around the neck. The touch of these pieces was surely as important as their appearance, for what can be detected under the ball of the thumb or probing fingertips is apparent even in the dark. What was felt in them surely had to be part of their nimbus of meaning. So many of them were made of ivory.
WHAT WAS IT about ivory that made it a desirable material to early man? There were others at his disposal, from antler and amber to shells and stone. And ivory in substantial quantities—from mammoths or, possibly, in some regions, mastodons—may not have been widely available, although some 15,000 years ago entire shelters on the east European plain were made of mammoth skeletons either scavenged from dead animals or gathered from humans' own kill sites of these creatures. Bones from the huge, impressively furred creatures were used like lumber. Over a foundation of skulls, nearly a hundred mandibles might be arranged around a yurtlike hide tent that used femurs and tusks as tent ribs. As building posts, tusks had certain disadvantages: they could crack, warp, and be chewed by rodents.
Yet surely chunks and flakes from broken mammoth tusks first fell to hand after the hunt, and it would require no elaborate testing to discover what the material had to offer. Ivory's density was obvious from its weight, but its surface was not implacably granitic. Ivory wasn't easy to work, but it didn't split like bone or wood, which made it useful for spear points, needles, and other small tools.
Its primary creative use in Paleolithic times, however, appears to modern eyes to have been artistic. Any flake of ivory was potentially a plaque on which an exquisitely detailed drawing might be laboriously scratched—often images of mammoths, as evocative examples that have been unearthed demonstrate. A chunk of ivory slowly yields to determined gouging, scoring, and chipping with a sharp tool and can be rounded and smoothed by rubbing with fine abrasive substances known to early man, such as red ocher (hematite), which, as White points out, is no different from the jeweler's rouge in use today. It is the last stage of polishing, of course, that unlocks ivory's tactile appeal; something is brought out in the silken surface that makes those who touch it want to touch it again. That was all it would take. The magic of ivory had wormed its way into the human psyche.
NOT ONLY IS ivory a perfect vehicle for plastic expression, but in the right conditions it can last indefinitely. That is why we still have small ice age carvings whose iconography covers not only the range of then extant fauna—ibex and aurochs, hook-jawed salmon and migratory birds in flight, horses and cave lions, mammoths, reindeer and woolly rhinoceroses, all the bountiful and terrifying life that surrounded early man—but also forms used to mirror humans back to themselves. Unlike animal carvings, which are often carefully observed and delicately crafted, many (though not all) of these latter figures are highly abstract. Some are little more than simple forks or wishbone shapes, elongated trunks and pairs of splayed legs with vulva-like notches that seem to mark them female.
Other woman forms are contrastingly bulbous. These so-called Venus figures often feature faceless checkered knobs for heads, tiny feet and swelling torsos, all breasts, belly, buttocks, hips, and thighs, now and then showing carefully detailed navels and genitals. Their adipose, steatopygous shapes were first thought a racial characteristic and, later, evidence of their use as fertility figures, although their precise symbolism is now an open question. Among various possibilities, they may have been created as objects of veneration, as obstetrical models, or simply to stimulate arousal. While the most famous, the Venus (or Woman) of Willendorf, is limestone, many others—including the Venus of Brassempouy or La Poire ("the Pear"), a headless, bulging female torso from the Grotte du Pape in Périgord; and the highly abstracted, wonderfully geometric, almost ballooning Venus of Lespugne, found in the Haut-Garonne—are both carved from mammoth tusks.
That many of these little statuettes were made from ivory suggests something about the meanings that began to accrue to the material. If they were objects of reverence or simple teaching tools, ivory, with its perfect workability, would have been an obvious choice for careful sculptural expression; if they were Paleolithic sex toys, as some have suggested, then too there would be no better material than ivory, with its slip and warmth, to fondle in recalling the pawing and stroking of sex.
Whatever their intended purpose, the considerable effort required to carve an ivory figurine with flint tools would have imbued the resulting object with importance and value. In fact, it's something of a puzzle as to how early man, lacking anything like a saw, managed to reduce mammoth tusks (which could be up to sixteen feet long) into portable pieces. Tusks don't fracture easily, and splitting and wedging techniques—the kind used to split logs—won't work with ivory that isn't already thoroughly desiccated. Whacking a fresh tusk with a stone tool accomplishes little. But segments of mammoth tusk evidently intended for later carving have been unearthed and show that more careful methods, albeit enormously time-consuming, were devised. A flaked hammer stone was used to stipple a guideline around a section of tusk, which was then laboriously widened into a channel. A stone knife would be drawn around and around to deepen the groove, and finally the section was broken free by blows of one hammer stone on another held against the remaining core.
IVORY IS DENTIN, an essential component of teeth.
Teeth are not bones; the two substances are different in their biology, though both are composed of collagen and minerals. Teeth, which lack the blood vessel system of bones, are denser and although connected to the skeleton are exposed, poking through the skin in some fashion. A tooth consists of a root (or roots) and a crown. The roots, which are covered by cementum, an acellular material, are fixed in the bony sockets of the jaws. All teeth feature a pulp cavity in the root, a chamber filled (in the living tooth) with soft, pulpy tissue well supplied with blood vessels. The crown, which is distinguished by its covering of hard enamel, is what's on display in the mouth of most animals.
There are further details but we needn't linger over them; we're after the main mass inside the tooth, underneath the crown's surface: dentin. This "very tough and resilient tissue," as one scientist puts it, is "familiar as the precious material ivory." In nature there is no shortage of teeth, but there are only a few significant sources of this "precious material."
A mere half dozen animals have teeth big enough to yield a significant mass of carvable ivory: the hippopotamus, the walrus, the narwhal, various pigs, a few whales, and, most important of all, the elephant and its ancestors, notably the mammoth.
An elephant or mammoth tusk is an enlarged upper incisor. It's all dentin except for a thin layer of cementum on the surface (called "bark") and a tiny crown of enamel at the tip or distal end; as a result, virtually the entirety of its bulk can be utilized. A large tusk can be more than six inches in diameter and nearly three yards in length. The "lesser ivories" not only are far smaller in comparison but have various drawbacks, including heavy enamel cladding, different layers of dentin density, and uneven coloring. Each of these examples has had an historic role—hippo teeth were carved in ancient Egypt, pig teeth have been used since ancient Greece, walrus and narwhal ivory were important in medieval Europe and still are in Inuit culture, and whale teeth remain Oceania's sole native source of ivory—yet all pale in significance next to "true ivory," which comes from ancient or modern elephants and needs no qualifier.
The exceedingly compact, uniform structure of ivory derives from the network of minute tubules, each about one-fifteen-thousandth of an inch in diameter, that radiate in clusters outward from the pulp cavity. These tiny dentinal structures are surrounded by a meshwork of collagen, whose gelatinous quality contributes to its carvability and polish. It may be difficult to imagine tusks, as solid and weighty asthey are, growing, but that's exactly what they do, from the root out. Throughout a creature's life span, specialized mineralizing cells called odontoblasts line up on the growing surface of the dentin that outlines the funnel-shaped pulp cavity, forming tubules that inexorably deposit layer upon layer of calcified tissue, like adding to a stack of cones from the bottom. An elephant's immense incisors grow some seven inches a year.
"HERE, HOLD THIS. Be careful, it's heavier than it looks," Christopher Norris said as he handed me a two-foot-long tip of a stained and mottled mammoth tusk, one of a trove of similar specimens from excavations at Fairbanks Creek in Alaska in the 1950s.
It was surprisingly heavy and hard, a deep mahogany color, and streaked with fissures toward the broken end. It wasn't at all like a mammoth tusk that a cave artist would have used. That would have been fresh, or nearly so. This one was tens of thousands of years old, rough and rocklike.
Norris and I were standing in the Childs Frick building at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, whose seven floors house the largest mammal fossil collection in the world, some 400,000 specimens. On this, the fourth (or "bison") floor, Norris, who is the director of collections and archives in the museum's Division of Paleontology, had laid out some ancient tusks on a table flanked by aisles of metal shelving. They were filled with boxes and crates of specimens, notably eight hundred skulls of the extinct steppe bison.
"I wanted to bring you down here. It's kind of like a little shrine in this corner to the mass extinction of Pleistocene megafauna." Norris is short, with thinning close-cropped black hair, and was dressed in jeans. As he sorted through the specimen boxes and trays, he spoke in rapid-fire paragraphs, weaving an overview of fossil collection issues, but let me steer the conversation toward the subject of ivory.
"Most of what you have on this floor are fossils. It may have once been bone but it's gone through a process of petrification, so that what was once organic material in the bone has been replaced chemically by inorganic components. What you have looks like a bone, may even have the texture of a bone, and you might even be able to slice into it and see the bone structure, but what it is, essentially, is rock."
Was it the same process for fossil ivory?
"It might take longer, because ivory's denser than bone, but over the kind of time scales we are talking about"—he shrugged—"it wouldn't be significant."
The mammoth tusk in my hands was actually a subfossil, in which the organic material hadn't been totally transformed; it was mostly weathered. The ivory had lost some fats and oils but most of the dentin was intact.
Norris poked in a tray of small tusk ends. "The problem with these guys is that they've been soaked in water, frozen, buried. The major problem with a subfossil is that when it's dug up it gets dried out far too quickly. Any salts dissolved in the water crystallize," he explained. Ivory will crack and delaminate if dried out too rapidly. Previously, when tusks would begin to crack, "people used to slather on shellac to try and cope with the fact that most of the crucial damage had been done in the first few days after digging them up."
True fossils don't change much, however. Norris offered me another specimen.
"This is a piece of tusk from Gomphotherium from the Snake River in Nebraska, ten to twelve million years old." It felt like stone. Gomphotherium, which had both upper and lower tusks, was one of roughly three hundred species in the order Proboscidea (named after their obvious proboscis, or trunk), which consists of elephants and their relatives. Most of the earlier evolutionary experiments, like the fearsome-looking Deinotherium ("terrible beast"), which had tusks that hung out of the lower jaw like a giant two-pronged hoe, fell by the wayside. But a million years ago there were still eleven or so species of giant proboscideans roaming the earth's continents on their pillarlike legs, including stegadons and mastadons. The latter went extinct only about 10,000 years ago, as did their widespread relatives the mammoths, of which the best-known species, the woolly mammoth (Mammuthus primigenius), lasted somewhat longer. All have disappeared, leaving only three species of Elephantidae: the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) and two African elephants (current thinking recognizes two distinct species on the continent, the savanna or bush elephant, Loxodonta africana, and the forest elephant, Loxodonta cyclotis).
I put the Gomphotherium tusk fragment back in the tray. "Most fossils we never see," Norris said as he repacked the box, "they just get eroded away."
Meaning?
"Most of the mammoths found have a tusk or bone or two removed, and the rest stays in the ground and gets eroded and washed down a river and added back into the environment. The natural life cycle of these objects does not include being arrested in time so they can sit on shelves and be studied. Despite the fact that we call this a natural history museum, what we basically do to this stuff is actually very unnatural. We try to stop this process, arrest it by treating it with various things, padding it to prevent mechanical damage, et cetera, so that at the end of the day we can stretch out the process for our purposes.
"The material," he sighed, "always wants badly to degrade."
AFTER MY MEETING I stopped in the fossil halls to look for the mounted skeleton of Mammuthus jeffersonii, a non-woolly type dug up on an Indiana farm. Its huge dark tusks looked almost circular from below and crossed over each other at the tips. Norris had told me to take a careful look and, sure enough, they had been wrapped in loops of thin wire in a vain effort to keep them from cracking.
My eyes were also drawn to the mural on the wall behind the skeleton, an ice age scene by Charles R. Knight, the early-twentieth-century illustrator. Knight's evocative re-creations of prehistory have been reproduced so frequently that his iconic images have seeped into our collective consciousness. This panorama features a line of mammoths, their long tusks held out like curled pikes, roaming over the frozen wastes of the open tundra and ice-age bogs. Reindeer resting behind trees give way to the approaching herd.
Mammoths must have been primarily walking mountains of meat to early humans, only secondarily sources of ivory. We know they hunted them successfully; we have the evidence of spear points embedded in their bones. It's difficult enough to bring down far smaller prey consistently, as the practices of any number of hunting cultures demonstrate. It can't have been easy to knock off such towering creatures with clubs and wooden spears or even the advanced bow-and-arrow weaponry later used that made possible slaying from a safer distance.
I couldn't help picturing what Knight implies lies just outside the edges of his mural: hunters hidden in the forest, squinting through face-stinging sleet at shaggy beasts plowing closer and closer through the scattered white drifts. I imagined them watching as the herd crosses below them, narrowing into a single, shuffling file between the slopes and the half-frozen river below, trunks unfurling and testing the wind, the young struggling to stay close to their mothers. They see the animals' steaming breath, the snow clinging to the fringes of their fur. Hearts pounding, gripping their stone-tipped spears and their fur cloaks tighter, the hunters remain motionless in the forest above save for their silent shaking in the deep cold. They tense as the marching line pulls away from a floundering young cow, her small eyes glittering with fear beneath a snow-matted topknot. The silence is rent by screams as the spear-shaking hunters burst out from behind firs and boulders and hurtle down the slope like the crumbling edge of an avalanche …
In reality, we don't know if our human ancestors were daring, spear-chucking predators, clever herders who harried their prey over cliffs and finished them off below, or opportunistic carrion feeders, hacking off what chunks of flesh they could before the arrival of saber-toothed cats, dire wolves, short-faced bears, and other assorted rivals forced them to beat a hasty retreat from a tasty carcass. It's likely all these strategies, and others, were put to use in the struggle to survive.
Still, they were successful enough. In fact, many researchers believe that early hunters were so skillful they can be blamed, at least in part, for the extinction of the mammoth and other megafauna across Eurasia, the Americas, and Australia. Others say that's preposterous, for a number of reasons. To pick one: the shift in climate after the last ice age is thought to have had a negative impact on vegetation, the herbivores that fed on it, and the carnivores that fed on them. A creature like the mammoth, so well adapted to cold, might have followed the retreating glaciers northward, then become trapped on the alternately thawing and snow-covered, ever-shrinking tundra left between growing forests and the thick ice sheets. But what appears to be a connection between the rapid disappearance of a number of species from the fossil record and the appearance of the first modern humans makes many theorists think that the drying up of their food supply alone can't account for such a sudden collapse of species.
Early man, it is hypothesized, had the means (lethal, pointy weapons and a brain large enough to plot deadly teamwork) and the motive (hunger) to be considered the prime suspect. It's a major point of contention among scientists, quite a few of whom line up on the side of the "overkill" or "blitzkrieg" hypothesis, while others join the doubters who find overkill too problematic to be plausible.
Did early humans expand in population so rapidly that they permeated every pocket of entire continents? Were they remorseless enough to run every last beast to ground? Even if mammoths and other megafauna were primary sources of nutrition in the harsh conditions of the ice age, it's hard to imagine that there would have been any point to killing more than what was needed. It would have been a waste of time and energy and unnecessarily risky. Whole herds, it seems safe to assume, weren't being slaughtered for their livers—or, for that matter, their tusks. A valuable byproduct of the hunt, like bone, skin, and hair, mammoth teeth would be something to carve and use and even trade. For early humans, it seems unlikely that ivory could ever have been the sole motivation behind a hunt. That would happen later, although soon enough in history.
ROSS MACPHEE, a curator in the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Vertebrate Zoology, has his office far from the fossil halls, at the other end of the two-block-long building. But the fossil record is much on his mind. MacPhee studies the causes and consequences of the massive late Pleistocene extinctions in the Americas and northern Asia. We talked in his high-ceilinged, comfortably cluttered office, with its dark wooden cabinets stuffed with books and papers, a huge old globe, and a yellow MAMMOTH CROSSING traffic sign, complete with a silhouette of the long-gone ice-age giant.
Born in Scotland and raised in Canada, MacPhee taught at Duke before joining the museum. His curly gray hair and beard are a lot trimmer than they appear in the AMNH Web site photographs of him on location in Siberia, peering out of a fur-trimmed parka.
I asked MacPhee if he thought early humans had a role in wiping out the mammoth. "I'm comfortable with the idea of early peoples hunting them. I just don't see how they could have concentrated themselves in such as way that it could have had such an impact on populations."
Mammoths, he pointed out, were distributed all across northern landmasses in the Pleistocene. "It's just inconceivable to me that people with their kind of tool kit could have made any kind of difference whatsoever." He paused. "With respect to extinction, we still don't understand even the most rudimentary facts about how losses of this kind occur."
I thought about one sizable denizen of the ice age that's still with us: the musk ox. How did it manage to survive climate change and possible hunting pressure?
"The salient facts are that musk oxen originated in Asia, crossed the Bering Strait, and were quite successful." But they "have reduced genetic variability—obviously went through a bottleneck. Something bad happened, at least that's what appears. Musk oxen pulled through; mammoths didn't."
Why not?
"The usual: bad luck or bad genes. Sometimes species go down for what look like random reasons. Others persist. Rhinos survive in subtropical regions, but the woolly rhino goes down. We had bison surviving in North America and Asia but mammoths went down."
The twilight of the mammoths apparently took place on the bleak, windswept tundra of Wrangel Island north of the Arctic Circle between the Chukchi and East Siberian seas. In the 1990s, scientific expeditions there found mammoth tusks and molars in remarkable states of preservation resting in small rivers running to the Arctic Sea. On a 1998 expedition MacPhee himself stumbled across the only mammoth ulna (forelimb bone) ever recovered on Wrangel. The bone oozed grease, as if it had come from a freshly killed animal. The remnant population of these shaggy survivors managed to defy time, clinging to existence until just 3,700 years ago; the arrival of humans on the island a few centuries before may have sealed their fate. Their tusks would be unearthed in many regions, by accident and design, for millennia after their demise.
AFTER TALKING WITH MacPhee, I got to thinking that there was something else about the overkill hypothesis that made it hard for many to resist, despite its explanatory shortcomings. Killer cavemen on an unstoppable "blitzkrieg" is an image that taps into contemporary feelings of collective guilt that we've been mucking up the environment since we dropped from trees. One doesn't have to subscribe to the notion of "man the destroyer" to be dismayed by how humans have begun polluting their earthly nest, for themselves as well as for other creatures that share the globe. But MacPhee is surely right that, from a planetary point of view, species extinction is a natural process, not just something that's exclusively caused by what people do or set in motion. Humans haven't been around for most of the earth's biological history. Before we came on the scene, all manner of large and small creatures that once roamed the land and swam in the seas had already become fossilized echoes of former life.
Still, that doesn't get us off the hook now, not when we are conscious of our various effects on other species—not just our own predation but the introduction of species alien to specific environments, habitat destruction, and even climate change. The mere possibility that Pleistocene overkill might have happened as some say it did lingers in the conscience as a cautionary tale warning of our capacity for snuffing out entire species, as many in the 1980s had said could happen with the African elephant.
STUDIED CLOSELY, A polished cross section of a mammoth or elephant tusk reveals a complex and unique pattern. In the center of the disc there's always a hole, a large one if the tusk has been sectioned across the pulp cavity, a tiny one if sawn across the central or tip portion where only the nerve channel remains. Surrounding the hole are concentric circles, like tree rings. Less than half an inch apart, these rings are layers of dentin formation, each representing six to eight years of tusk growth. (If the tusk had been cut lengthwise, these rings would have appeared as faint waves, like the moiré patterns on the endpapers of fine old books.) Look again at the surface of the ivory, this time closer to the outer edge of the disc, and you can see a more complex pattern, a characteristic weave of intersecting lines reminiscent of fussy banknote engraving. To scientists of a century ago, these alternating arcs were reminiscent of the delicate scalloped, engine-turned whorls on the cases of pocket watches of the period.
This delicate cross-hatching is known as the Schreger pattern, named after the odontologist Bernhard Schreger, who first described it in 1800. The nineteenth-century biologist Sir Richard Owen regarded it as a defining characteristic: "The name ivory is now restricted … to that modification of dentine or tooth substance which in transverse sections or fractures shews lines of different colours or straie proceeding in the arc of a circle, and forming by their decussations minute curvilinear lozenge-shaped spaces."
The Schreger pattern is a visual reflection of ivory's structure of microscopic dentinal tubules—microcanals that radiate in rows from the center of the tusk. The tusks of pigs, hippopotami, walruses, and narwhals show no such pattern, which means its presence can be used to distinguish proboscidean (mammoth and elephant) ivory from other ivories, and, in fact, it can even be used to distinguish between mammoth and elephant ivory. If you look at the easily seen lines closest to the outside of a mammoth tusk, they create crosshatched sprays of tiny diamond shapes, like stacked chevrons or a sharp herringbone pattern. In elephant ivory, the lines toward the outer edge of the tusk section appear loosely woven, more open, like stretched netting or soft circumflexes.
At first I saw the crisscrossed matrix of this organic material's internal structure as an intriguing oddity, nothing more. Much later I came to think of the tightly interlocked design as curiously emblematic of ivory's story, with its far larger, endlessly repeating historical pattern binding together art and passion, commerce and greed, humans and elephants, down through the ages.
2
TRIBUTE AND TREASURE
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-ge 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."
3
THE MASTER CARVERS' MEDIUM
On the colorful, elaborate chart of the East African coast published in Frederick de Wit's Zee Atlas of 1675, ships with billowing sails ply the waters of the Arabian Sea between the Horn of Africa and India's Malabar coast. They had been doing so for a millennium or more, drawn by what the map's decorative cartouche, with its cornucopia of animal and vegetable life and sumptuously garbed figures, symbolizes: the fabled riches of Africa, especially its seemingly endless supply of ivory.
In the story of ivory's global spread, common themes in its use and trade emerge again and again. But none is more constant than the ongoing impact of that trade on Africa and its once numberless herds of elephants.
FROM ANCIENT TIMES coastal commerce around the Indian Ocean had linked the East African coast to Arabia and the Persian Gulf and beyond. Arab traders in search of ivory and other goods took advantage of the seasonally alternating monsoon winds to sail to the coast south of the Horn of Africa. Arriving in ports in their lateen-sailed dhows, they bartered trinkets for tusks with the "people of Zanj" (the local inhabitants) and traded for slaves. The ivory supply, however, was limited to what local hunters could obtain from elephant herds near the coast. In the tenth century, the Arab geographer al-Masudi wrote:
It is from this [Zanj] country that come tusks weighing fifty pounds and more. They usually go to Oman, and from there are sent to China and India. This is the chief trade route, and if it were not so, ivory would be common in Muslim lands.
Why would African ivory find a market in countries that had their own indigenous supply? India's sources of ivory were limited. Both male and female African elephants carry tusks, but only male Asian elephants normally have them, and these are usually smaller than those of their African cousins. And in Africa, elephants were hunted, but the peoples of India chose to domesticate many of theirs. As a result, elephants and their ivory were controlled largely by the wealthy and powerful for their own princely purposes. Yet there was a steady demand for tusks to provide the usual dagger and sword hilts, boxes, and handicrafts, and also to make the traditional and indispensable ivory marriage bangles worn by virtually all Hindu women. "In the days of sati," writes Abdul Sheriff, "the widow followed her dead husband into the funeral pyre bedecked with her bridal ornaments. After the abolition of sati, the bangles were nevertheless broken as a demonstration of her grief. If the wife happened to predecease her husband, she was of course cremated together with her bridal ornaments." This created an enduring market for imported African ivory, which was larger in diameter and provided more bangles per tusk and was often less brittle to work than Indian ivory.
In China, al-Masudi assured his readers, "the kings and their military officers use carrying-chairs of ivory; no official or person of rank would dare visit the king in an iron chair, and ivory alone is used for this purpose." Such uses were nothing new. There is evidence that Chinese officials in the Tang Dynasty (618–907) used ivory tablets as emblems of their office. By al-Masudi's time China's ever-shrinking elephant population had long since been inadequate to supply the empire's need for this status-symbolizing substance. But far-flung trade routes made African ivory available.
After the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632, the new religion of Islam spread rapidly east and west from Arabia. Propelled by the hereditary caliphates and later by religious reform, Islamic states stretched from what is now Pakistan to the Atlantic, taking in the Middle East, all of North Africa, Sicily, and much of Spain by 850. Muslim Arab conquests across North Africa established powerful kingdoms and trade routes across the Sahara in search of gold and ivory. Camel caravans linked Marrakesh and Fez with Timbuktu and other entrep?ts where Africans exchanged elephant tusks for salt and swords and pots and pans. These new sources of ivory helped take up the slack in supply caused by the Roman extirpation of North African herds, although tusks were still being shipped east and west from the Horn of Africa. In 991 a Berber prince was able to send the caliph of Córdoba "eight thousand pounds of the most pure ivory."
Islamic Spain, like every other major court in the medieval Mediterranean region, commissioned ivory objects. Córdoba, the capital of the Umayyad caliphate, became the most sophisticated city of Europe and a center for the production of luxury goods, including ivory vases, chess sets, and caskets to hold perfumes. Fussily detailed, deeply carved reliefs of humans, animals, and birds, looping knots, and elaborate borders typically fill the ivory panels of these portable expressions of power. Many carry informative inscriptions; from these, scholars know that the ivories were largely commissioned by members of the ruling family. A pyxis (cylindrical container) made for Ziyad ibn Aflah, the caliph's prefect of police, is replete with images of authority. It shows a seated figure (probably Ziyad himself) riding on an elephant among a riot of other animals and attendants. But such objects were put to poetic as well as propagandistic purposes. The shape of a pyxis topped with a domed cover lent itself to use in Arab poetry as a metaphor for a beloved's breast. One such lovely rounded ivory pyxis covered in vegetal designs from the workshops of Madinat alZahra carries its own interpretation in an inscription on the lid.
The sight I offer is the fairest, the firm breast of a delicate girl.
Beauty has invested me with splendid raiment,
which makes a display of jewels.
I am a receptacle for musk, camphor, and ambergris.
When elephant ivory was scarce, thin panels were used to maximize the material; they were decorated with painted scrolling arabesques in lieu of carving. When ivory was abundant, it could be used to create "oliphants," elaborately carved hunting horns made from elephants' tusks; their sheer weight makes it unlikely these were ever used for anything other than ostentatious display.
SHIPMENTS OF IVORY to Byzantium were disrupted by its war with Persia in 540. Thirty years later, after the Persian conquest of southern Arabia closed off Red Sea trade routes to Constantinople for ivory from both Africa and India, they largely halted. Ivory carving in Byzantium didn't resume on a large scale until the late ninth century, about the same time as the first extant ivories from Islamic Spain. Ivory was then coming to Constantinople on Arab vessels, as it was to Spain. But the material would never be as abundant in Byzantium as it once was, and its scarcity increased its preciousness.
Ivory became a vehicle for Christian religious art, which turned to new styles of expression. Classicism, with its fidelity to nature, fluidity of form, and delicacy of expression, lingered on in the secular art of luxury objects for centuries after the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire. In religious art a derived naturalism was still being used—there's the splendid sixth-century carving representing the Archangel Michael in the British Museum—but even that style would fade, spurned as if inappropriate for the sacred subject matter. Figuration became less gracile and began to wear its symbolism heavily, as if artists were uncomfortable depicting the body. Doubtless it had something to do with the eighth- and ninth-century doctrinal struggles with iconoclasm—the rejection of religious image making—that preoccupied the empire and finally ended in a cultural stance that rejected the religious images of others as idols but regarded Christian images as icons worthy of veneration.
Yet despite the shifting depictions, the ivory carver's exacting, time-consuming craft remained the same. How best to utilize the structure of the tusk had been known even in prehistory. There was no way to predict what subtle interior grain patterns might show up in the final piece, but they were more prominent toward the exterior of the tusk and almost un-noticeable in the milkier center surrounding the nerve canal. Small plaques could be cut with their backs to the pulp cavity, but large slabs had to be cut vertically from the thick section of tusk above that. To ensure matching color and similar grain pattern, slabs for diptychs had to be cut from the same tusk.
None of this was easy before the ancient world added metal tools—saws, burins, scrapers, chisels—to the carver's kit, which made it possible to extract the largest-size slab from a tusk, cut pyxides, and execute precise patterns and minute details.
Some carving was surely done freehand, but elaborate pieces were planned with care, the design for reliefs drawn on and then lightly scored. A groove was carefully incised around a face or the bordering frame as a precaution when undercutting the surrounding ivory with an inshave. Although it was possible to disguise a minor scratch or draw the eye away from an imperfectly proportioned foot, slicing through the ear of an emperor or nicking the halo of a saint with a slip of a sharp tool would ruin months of work. The carver's guidelines were always smoothed away with a bit of abrasive fishskin before polishing with emery, but these are sometimes still noticeable as ghostly marks in angled sunlight.
I picture these artisans at their benches, working with infinite patience over their commissions in a demanding craft whose traditions and skills were centuries old. As time went on, however, fewer got to practice it. Although ivory remained available (in ever-smaller quantities) in the workshops of Constantinople through the eleventh century, as Cutler notes, "it all but disappeared thereafter." The only known ivory pyxis from the later Byzantine empire is a diminutive version created for the imperial court, a mere inch and half in diameter.
AFTER THE FALL of Rome in 476, elephant ivory was scarce in Europe for centuries, and even the detailed knowledge of the animal that the ancient world possessed was largely lost. Instead, many objects were carved from the poor man's ivory: bone. Bone is always available, wherever animals are slaughtered, and although it can be worked with some effectiveness its variable, sometimes spongy structure, flecked through with minute telltale channels that once held nerves and blood, make it of interest primarily as a cheap carving material. To be fair, the compact outer area (as opposed to the inner, cancellous part) of, say, the leg bones of cattle or horses is hard, dense, smooth, and workable and was widely utilized from the fourth century on for utilitarian items such as knife handles, buttons, spoons, pins, and boxes. The carvable part of bone is thinner and more brittle than ivory, but as it can be polished and waxed to give it a shine it was often used in combination with ivory—for example, to provide passable inlays and minor marquetry when there wasn't enough costlier ivory available to completely cover a small casket.
However, there was another dentin available in Europe: walrus tusk. The walrus ("whale horse"), also called "morse," did for the medieval world what the hippopotamus had done for the early eastern Mediterranean—provide an alternative source of ivory. The ponderous Atlantic walrus, Odobenus rosmarus rosmarus, moves its substantial oneton bulk clumsily on land but gracefully in the water, diving to depths of three hundred feet in search of mussels, snails, crabs, and fish on the sea bottom. Native to the polar north from the Canadian to the Russian Arctic, it inhabits coastal pack ice, migrating with the seasons and heaving its wrinkled, bulbous body onto land in herds that can number in the thousands. Its most striking feature is great spikelike tusks, which both bulls and cows have. These large canines are bigger in the bulls, reaching two feet or more in length and up to twelve pounds in weight.
Viking traders were probably the first to introduce walrus ivory into Europe. Following settlement by Iceland in the late tenth century, Norse society in Greenland traded polar bear skins, gyrfalcons, and walrus ivory for iron, wood, silk, and silver. The king of Norway, who later received walrus ivory in tax payment, distributed it as gifts to other rulers. Volga Bulgars even brought walrus ivory to central Asia, where it reached the Muslim world as "fish-teeth" and was prized for the crafting of sword hilts and dagger handles. The availability of the material was helped by the fact that walruses ranged much farther south during the Middle Ages than they do now, reaching Scotland and the North Sea. In fact, walrus tusks provided the material for nearly all the ivory carving done in northern Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and remained an important source. Not surprisingly, walruses were ruthlessly hunted to meet the demand, and their numbers declined drastically as a result.
The primary limitation of walrus ivory, like that of hippo ivory, is its relatively small size, which restricts its use to plaques that fit in the palm of the hand and modest sculpture in the round. In addition, the tusks are oval in cross section with a cementum covering over an outer layer of primary dentin (which shows virtually no grain) and a secondary or inner dentin, marbled in appearance, which can sometimes be noticed on the backs of relief carvings. But these material restraints were hardly drawbacks for northern European artisans of the period. This was the age when monastic foundations were principal centers of artistic production, and where scribes, hunched over copies of the Gospels in their scriptoria (workshops), created jewel-like worlds within the confines of a capital letter. The effort it took for a monk to wheedle and worry a recalcitrant bit of dentin into a lustrous relief that glowed with religious feeling was inseparable from his vocation and devotion. The arts of manuscript illumination and ivory carving were closely allied, and the fact that many small ivories share imagery with these manuscripts—and were often painted similarly—makes it likely that they were produced side by side in workshops.
Ivory sculpture, especially reliefs of sacred book covers and diptychs, which functioned as small shrines, achieved great importance in Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries. The pair of tenth- or eleventh-century carved ivory plaques of David dictating Psalms and the Judgment of Solomon now in the Louvre are indicative of the genre. Each is crowded with figures—the latter squeezes in King Solomon with four soldiers, two pleading women, and another pair of soldiers about to cleave in half the disputed baby, held upside down by his feet—and still makes room for borders of acanthus leaves, all on plaques little bigger than index cards. The inward-looking and spiritually intense vision here is squirming for room in these reliefs; the exactitude of medieval art is all about the exquisite delineation of meanings for which the visual is often simply a shorthand of significations.
It is true that most ivory carvings of the period—altar crosses, bishops' croziers, reliquaries, book covers—were religious in nature but secular impulses were also expressed in dentin. In the lower Rhine, walrus ivory gaming pieces were being made and exported across Europe. The Lewis chessmen, a group of small twelfth-century walrus ivory carvings that form parts of several chess sets and were probably made in Norway, were found on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides in 1831. Stolid, simple, and blocky, the figures feature lidless stares and a monumentality all out of proportion to their size.
Many of these early ivories have disappeared. Over time, most fell victim to fires and pillage, Viking raids, later revolutions and robberies, or sheer neglect—the usual winnowing of history. What we have left, however, is of great interest and makes up for the paucity of monumental sculpture that remains from 500 to 1050. "By turning to the art of the ivory carver," writes historian Paul Williamson, "it is possible to reconstruct, almost without a break, the stylistic and iconographic changes that occurred in the Middle Ages."
THE CRUSADES REINTRODUCED elephant ivory to Europe. Christian forces conquered Jerusalem on the First Crusade in 1095, and remained in the Middle East until 1291. Soldiers, pilgrims, and merchants came into contact with a refined Eastern culture and its luxury goods: silks, inlaid metalwork, painted glassware, ceramics, and ivory. European interest in elephant ivory stimulated shipments of tusks from East Africa along the Red Sea to Alexandria and from trans-Saharan routes to Tunis and other ports and then on across the Mediterranean to Venice, Genoa, and Marseille. After being largely unobtainable in northern Europe for several hundred years, by the middle of the thirteenth century elephant ivory was supplying a massive, religiously based carving industry in Paris.
"In liturgical prayers ivory was a synonym for the chastity of the Virgin," as one researcher observes, "and the luminous quality of its surface, particularly desirable from the latter half of the thirteenth century, naturally affected viewers' perceptions of space and mood." Ivory's qualities no longer embodied the kind of luxurious decadence the Romans exulted in—its voluptuousness had been appropriated to worship, prayerful reflection, and praise of the divine, and not necessarily in the context of a church. Williamson notes:
It is significant that when ivory was used again in vast quantities, patronage had changed. In the late thirteenth century the ivory carving industry in the Ile-de-France was totally geared towards producing large numbers of object for private devotion, such as small diptychs and triptychs with scenes from the Passion of Christ, and ivory statuettes of the Virgin and Child. The richer the patron, the grander the object.
Some ivory sculptures pushed the limits of the size and shape of the tusk. The Sainte Chapelle Virgin (ca. 1250), now in the Louvre, is more than sixteen inches tall; a demure Mary puts her weight on one leg while supporting the Christ child on the same hip, a very natural stance and one that takes advantage of the typical curve of the tusk. These leaning Virgin and Child poses adopt a kind of Gothic contrapposto that was originally ivory-driven but proved so popular they were replicated in materials that didn't require it, such as wood and stone, and even show up in manuscript illumination of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Yet Gothic ivory carving was never entirely in thrall to the church. Commerce and courtly love were among the increasingly secular concerns incorporated into ivory products in the 1300s. Medieval merchants used small hand scales to confirm the weight of coins, a sensible precaution in an age that commonly clipped them. These balances and weights were kept in boxes. Fancy ones were made of ivory, with fitted compartments and religious subjects on their covers, perhaps as a way for traders to increase customers' confidence by means of a modest display of piety during their worldly transactions.
Luxury materials like ivory were appreciated openly, albeit often in the context of religiosity. An ivory casket decorated with carved panels addressing the biblical tale of the prodigal son allowed the artist to dwell on the subtheme of lust by remaining ostensibly within the moralizing narrative framework of the traditional parable. This visual cat-and-mouse game also allowed the imagination and eye of the casket's owner to linger on the earthly aspects of the story and the sublimated sensuality of the softly carved figures, confident the tale closed with a moral lesson as neatly as the lid on the box itself.
IN MEDIEVAL TIMES any number of fanciful ideas were taken as gospel. One of them was belief in the existence of the unicorn. Today it's pictured as a white horse with a pointed spiral horn sprouting from its forehead, but the mythic creature of the Middle Ages was smaller, shown with a goatlike beard, a lion's tail, and cloven hooves. It was also swathed in lore; it was immortal, only the pure heart of a virgin could tame it, and so forth. No matter—the important thing for credulous kings was that the unicorn had protective powers: its horn could counteract poison. The availability of a trickle of narwhal teeth through Arctic trade created an opportunity for middlemen to sell these hitherto unsuspected, scarce tusks for far more than their weight in gold, not just as evidence of the unicorn's existence but as magical objects in their own right.
The narwhal (Monodon monoceros) is an fifteen-foot-long cetacean that looks like a mottled blubbery torpedo tipped with a long straight, spiraling spear. Related to the beluga whale, it inhabits icy channels of the Arctic in large pods, pursuing cod, squid, shrimp, and similar prey and disporting itself at the surface, often waving its single tusk in the air. Males (and occasionally females) grow one of these spectacular teeth from the left side of the upper jaw. Six to nine feet long, and tightly twisted counterclockwise (if viewed from the proximal end), the tusk is a great curiosity of nature. Narwhal ivory is as hard as that of the hippo and in cross section it exhibits concentric, wavy bands. On the other hand, its long pulp cavity renders much of it hollow and offers small working space for the carver. Cut into pieces, it looks barely suitable to make napkin rings, gaming pieces, or saltshakers, but short sections made handsome sword hilts and longer ones impressive scepters for likes of the doges of Venice and the Hapsburg emperors.
The twelfth to the sixteenth centuries in Europe were the heyday of this vast collaborative fiction. It was possible, of course, only because the narwhal was virtually unknown in Europe. Informed Scandinavian merchants wisely kept any details of the animal's tusk a trade secret. They understood perfectly that the narwhal was insignificant as a source of ivory, but its extremely limited supply was nicely in step with what was coveted and known to be rare: unicorn horns. They found a way to supply them. Such "horns" found ready acceptance in ecclesiastical contexts. Their spiraling forms were associated with divine potency and became magnets for sacred attributes. What more impressive processional staff could there be than that made from a unicorn's singular spike?
But it was emperors and kings, those who feared poisoning and could afford this wildly expensive antidote, who most craved unicorn horns and had them made into cups to foil assassins and ward off illness. The last reigning duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold (1433–77), had a number of them and was careful to use a piece of one to test the dishes he was served. When the wealthy Renaissance art patron and collector Isabella d'Este died in 1539, an inventory of her possessions listed a "unicorn horn" and a "fish's tooth 'three palms long'"—clearly narwhal and walrus tusks. By Elizabeth I's time a narwhal tusk that had been presented to her was added to the crown jewels as the Horn of Windsor and valued at ￡10,000—the cost of a castle.
In 1646 Sir Thomas Browne wrote, "Great account and much profit is made of Unicorns horn, at least of that which beareth the name thereof; wherein notwithstanding, many I perceive suspect an Imposture." Actually, a Danish naturalist, Ole Wurm, had unmasked these mythenshrouded "horns" as narwhal teeth eight years before, but belief in their medicinal powers lingered for over a century more.
UNBURDENED BY ANY precise knowledge of the elephant, the medieval world was free to imagine rather strange things about the creature. In any case, the artists of the bestiaries of the period were more concerned with depicting the supposed character of the beast, which presumed traits of restrained strength, constancy, and levelheadedness. It took several more centuries before exposure to accurate accounts or direct experience of the animal began to influence the artistic imagination.
Here and there, live elephants showed up in Europe, mostly as diplomatic gifts. The caliph of Baghdad gave one to Charlemagne in 802. It created a sensation whenever the Frankish king brought it with him on his travels. In 1254, Louis IX, king of France, sent to Henry III, king of England, an African elephant, which he kept in his royal menagerie at the Tower of London and allowed to slurp wine. Matthew Paris, a Benedictine monk and historian, made a naively charming but well-observed pen-and-wash illustration of it. But even in the 1500s illustrations of elephants in books could be highly creative. Conrad Gesner's Historia animalium, published in Zurich in the mid-sixteenth century, shows a pachyderm with puddling pylons for legs, a segmented trunk like a vacuum hose, and ears that unfolded like a lady's fan.
These notions about the elephant evolved in tandem with the development of science and changing European views toward the animal world. But something else was afoot. Attitudes toward the elephant were developing separately from how ivory was regarded; it was as if the animal product and its source species occupied different worlds.
In many ways they did. Ivory was being removed, transported, and reshaped far from its "original ecological context," allowing the elephant to become conceptually distanced, even uncoupled, from its own teeth. Ivory's increasing availability did not bring familiarity with the elephant along with it. As a rare material obtained from distant lands, ivory lacked the kind of immediate association with its origins that was made, say, between fine wood and forests. To Europeans the elephant was an exotic creature that inhabited faraway realms. Before it was ever seen, it was as fabled as a unicorn and just as unknown, and even after it made an appearance it still seemed a walking marvel. How ivory was obtained for trade remained mysterious and largely stayed that way, far into the future. By then the elephant would be clothed in a whole new set of meanings, valued in ways that in effect gave it a new identity. Eventually, when the connection between ivory and where it came from was made inescapable, this altered regard for the elephant would change everything about ivory—or perhaps just painfully sharpen the issue.
THE SECULAR USE of ivory in Europe proliferated after 1400. It was not only employed for the expected—inlays and panels in furniture, mirror backs and buttons, hilts and handles, knobs and nit combs—but, increasingly, incorporated into new forms of weaponry and musical and scientific instruments. Given ivory's long history of use in the decoration of spears, bows, knives, and swords, it would inevitably be worked into newer weaponry, such as the lavishly produced matchlocks and similar newly invented firearms for rulers such as the emperor Charles V (1500–58), who doted on them. Years of collaborative effort on the part of metalsmiths, engravers, and carvers might be needed to join ivory, rare woods, steel, and gold to make the sets of pistols and bird guns used by monarchs of the day, who had a taste for eye-catching scrollwork and nymph-laden inlays of hunting scenes drawn from classical mythology.
Ivory was used in flutes, lutes, guitars, and harpsichords. In the hands of a seventeenth-century master craftsman such as Matteo Sellas, the back of a guitar could be enveloped in a dizzying geometric pattern of ebony and ivory zigzags. Ivory would be used for complicated folding compasses, rulers, and sundials not simply because of the decorative possibilities it afforded, but because its surface could be scored precisely, leaving tiny markings that could be filled with ink to create a compass rose, detailed graduations for measurement, or indeed any kind of dial desired for the scientific instruments then being invented. Sundials were widely used to set the unreliable timekeeping devices of the period. Nuremberg in particular became famous between 1500 and 1700 for its ivory sundials—pocket-sized, folding diptychs, some of which could be used in different latitudes. Other uses for ivory aided personal hygiene. Ornate ivory flea traps became an aristocratic fashion accessory in the eighteenth century; these hollow, perforated cylinders, baited inside with blood or honey, were worn around the neck as a pendant.
By contrast, the artistic use of ivory became less inspired after 1400 and more standardized in spite of growing refinement. The production of small sculpture and reliefs that reworked a small set of familiar subjects gradually ceased, although workshops continued to turn out derivative altarpieces and formulaic marriage caskets. It's curious that Renaissance artists showed comparatively little interest in ivory, although any number of factors might have been at play. Perhaps it was that ivory carving seemed by then a minor art more suited to the hermetic expression of religious feeling than the expansive ideas of the new humanism. For some, the material might have been too restrictive in size, but the kind of monumentality in miniature in which Benvenuto Cellini, using gold, so brilliantly excelled would surely have been possible in the right hands. In the end, the lack of interest might have been largely a matter of fashion. But by then the idea of ivory had embedded itself in the European imagination, along with its inevitable associations. Ginevra de' Benci, the famous young beauty whose portrait was painted by Leonardo da Vinci in the 1470s, was described by her contemporaries as having "fingers white as ivory." It was only a matter of time before ivory would make its artistic comeback.
IN OCTOBER OF 1582, an expeditionary band of well-armed Cossacks led by the Volga River pirate Yermak Timofeyevich defeated the army of the Tartar khanate in western Siberia after a three-day battle. Yermak had been hired by the Stroganovs, a powerful merchant family, to protect their trade in the Urals against attacks by the Tartars. The khanate's forces revolted three years later, wounding Yermak, who tried to escape by swimming a river but, dragged under by the weight of his chain mail, drowned. But the counterattack was ineffectual; Siberia was retaken, colonized, and eventually annexed into the Russian empire. One bit of lore attached to Yermak is the claim that he saw a large hairy creature while exploring the wind-swept taiga. Later speculation had it that he had seen a mammoth. This is pure legend; that mammoth ivory began to be shipped to Moscow after the time of his conquest is not. It even reached London by 1616. Cossacks, hunters, explorers, soldiers of fortune had set out to explore the vastness of Siberia after the Russian conquest, and when the fur trade waned they discovered yet more riches in the shape of tusks.
Mammoth ivory—mamontova kost in Russian—had been unearthed in Siberia since ancient times. Indigenous peoples there would come across tusks emerging from the banks of rivers during spring thaws and would pull them out and barter them in village outposts. But they feared digging further, unsure as to what kinds of creatures the great bones and parts of frozen carcasses belonged to and the forces that might be disturbed. The Yakuts thought they might be the remains of giant rodents that made the earth shake as they tunneled underground with their immense horns; other peoples imagined the beasts were aquatic. Still, Siberians had made use of this fossil ivory, carving pendants and other figurines, and they knew others found the tusks valuable. Since the ninth century, Arab and Asian merchants had sought it.
The tusks had also made their way to China, where they provided an additional source of ivory to supplement what could be obtained locally and by land and sea from Africa. Emperor Kangxi, who was fond of expounding his learning, addressed his ministers in the last year of his reign, 1722, on the subject of the "great animal of the rat kind" found "in the northern regions, under the ice layers." He reminded his audience that the Russians who had recently presented themselves at court had confirmed the presence of year-round ice, and went on:
Now, in Russia, near the shores of the Northern Ocean, there is a shu [rat or rodent] resembling the elephant, which makes its way under ground, and which dies the moment it is exposed to light or air. Its bones resemble ivory, and they are used by the natives in manufacturing cups, platters, combs, and pins. These we have ourselves seen, and we have been led thereby to believe in the truth of the story.
The idea that the tusks were the fossilized remains of a long-extinct ancestor of the elephant is a modern one. At first, many Europeans thought that the various fossils that had been dug up by then were "figured stones" or "sports of nature" or, of course, evidence of unicorns. The Dutch traveler Nicolaas Witsen used the word "mammoth" for the first time in Europe in his North and East Tartary (1692); he heard the term spoken by Russian settlers in Siberia, who used it to describe the kind of giant bones and teeth he was shown.
Its puzzling origins did nothing to discourage Europeans from making serious use of mammoth ivory by the early eighteenth century, although it was typically more brittle and yellowed than that of elephants. In the mid-nineteenth century one naturalist estimated that two hundred tons of it had been sold during the previous two centuries; this amount would have required that the tusks of a hundred mammoths be recovered annually. That would not have been difficult, considering that Siberians, sparked by greed for the tusks, had long had centers specializing in the trade in tusks from the tundra.
The mammoth had reentered history—preceded by its ivory.
AS THE APPETITE for ivory spread across the whole of Eurasia, merchants from Europe to the Far East turned to Africa to obtain more tusks through trade. Whenever that proved insufficient to meet the demand, elephant-rich regions were often simply plundered, typically as part of a larger scheme of colonization.
Both coasts of Africa were affected. India and China had been the major markets for the East African trade since the tenth century and remained so into the nineteenth. For the Africans, it was an economy based on the exchange of their raw materials—ivory—for manufactured goods and luxuries: bolts of cloth, brass wire, bright beads. By the fifteenth century elephants were disappearing from the Indian Ocean coast and had to be sought hundreds of miles inland. There is abundant evidence of ivory trading and ivory-working centers deep in the interior, such as those on the north bank of the Zambezi (in today's Zambia) and in the Limpopo Valley (modern South Africa). A similar push inland occurred in Abyssinia (Ethiopia), bringing new ivory-producing lands into existing trade networks. The Indian Ocean ivory trade became increasingly international, taking ivory to Europe as well to as the East.
The ivory riches on the other side of the continent were sought as well. The trade vastly increased following Portugal's pioneering voyages of exploration in the mid-fifteenth century. The Portuguese were not seeking ivory when they traveled down Africa's Atlantic coast, but they were quick to recognize its value, along with gold, peppercorns, and slaves. Dutch, English, Spanish, French, Swedish, Danish, and German traders soon followed, naming chunks of the coastline after the products they found: the Grain Coast (modern Liberia), the Gold Coast (Ghana), the Slave Coast (Togo, Benin, and western Nigeria), and the Ivory Coast. (Curiously, the last is the only one of the names that has stuck, an impressive geographic reminder of ivory's potency in the history of world trade.)
These riches—gold, ivory, and slaves—traded places in importance. The slave trade grew in the sixteenth century as the Portuguese and Spanish developed overseas plantations. It came to dominate the transatlantic trade after the Dutch elbowed the Portuguese aside in the seventeenth century and, along with the British and the French, developed slave plantations in the Caribbean and, later, America. In general, the ivory trade as a whole never approached the value of the slave trade and was less important than gold from the Gold Coast. But in areas such as the Ivory Coast, where the slave trade was not as developed, the export of tusks was the key to obtaining prized European imports. Among the desirable goods were firearms; in the mid-eighteenth century, the city of Birmingham in England was producing a hundred thousand muskets annually for the West African trade. What did the Europeans get? From the evidence in Dutch and English shipping records, at least 2,500 tons of ivory—over a quarter of a million tusks—left West Africa in just the twenty-six-year period between 1699 and 1725.
The European-driven ivory trade piggybacked on the modest trade in elephants' teeth that local rulers had controlled. As the system of exports cranked up, traders dealing through African middlemen were able to exploit herds close to the coast. The trade in tusks was so heavy, and the competition so keen between the English and the Dutch along the Upper Guinea coast, that in 1663 a Portuguese missionary was astonished to see an English ship loaded with what looked like thousands of tusks, some weighing as much as four arrobas (128 pounds). "Every year, a ship comes to take a similar cargo," wrote André de Faro, adding,
This does not take account of the ivory that is purchased in the other rivers of Guinea, where there are similar factories, which dispatch other ships; and the Dutch are also buyers in the ports of these rivers. There are, therefore, more elephants in Guinea than there are cattle in the whole of Europe.
At first the supply of ivory seemed to be endless. The elephant-hunting Vili people of the coastal kingdom of Loango above the mouth of the Congo River had been trading ivory with the Europeans as far back as the 1570s. In 1608 they were selling twenty-three tons a year to the Dutch alone from the tusks they could obtain on their forays into the equatorial forest. Eventually, the impact of the trade on elephant populations began to be felt. By the 1660s Vili hunters had to undertake journeys of three months' duration in the middle Congo before they could return with the ivory needed.
AND WHAT OF the Africans?
Many of the peoples on the continent had been hunting the elephant from prehistoric times. The animal was an immense prize: meat from a single beast could feed an entire village, its hide could be made into shields, its tail hair made into fly whisks, and its great incisors carved into any number of handicrafts, jewelry, ceremonial objects, horns, prestige items, totems, and masks.
It's often claimed that ivory use on the part of African peoples never threatened elephant populations, but that may be due to less advanced technology more than to anything else. "It is an urban, and even subtly racist myth," writes John Van Couvering, "to credit indigenous peoples with an intuitive dedication to ecological balance," adding,
The observed equilibrium is not always to the liking of the people who must participate in it, as witness the alacrity with which they abandon their wholesome way of life as soon as they can obtain more certain and effective methods of dominating the environment.
Before European colonization there were countless herds of elephants left in Africa, despite centuries of pursuit by Egyptians, Romans, and others seeking ivory. One obvious reason was that Africans found elephants hard to kill with primitive weapons. Hunting them was exceedingly dangerous and required great skill and planning, and of course the protection only careful rituals could provide. It was not undertaken lightly, and almost always was done by large groups. Some faced elephants armed solely with spears; needless to say, success was difficult to attain and conferred great status. Sometimes traps—pitfalls and deadfalls—were used as well as poisoned arrows or lances. Or hunters perched motionlessly in trees over elephant paths and plunged heavy harpoons into passing animals from above. Sneaking up behind an elephant to sever the hamstring tendon of a rear leg with a light ax could instantly anchor the beast to the spot, but at such close quarters an attacker risked a nasty demise. Whatever the technique, wounded animals that escaped had to be tracked, found, and dispatched if they hadn't already expired.
When an export market developed for ivory, indigenous peoples with elephant-hunting traditions like the Vili gained new economic incentives to pursue elephants specifically for their teeth. Skilled hunters were recruited on both coasts. As elephant herds thinned, hunting parties had to go ever farther afield, pushing into new regions and penetrating deep into the central forest. Elephants had to be located, pursued, and brought down and their tusks cut out and carried long distances to central collecting points before being transported in quantity to the coast for trading.
To improve their odds, muskets obtained in trade were added to African hunters' arsenals by the 1700s. The late-eighteenth-century Scottish explorer Mungo Park described how Bamana hunters of Mali would track a herd for days, following until one animal strayed from the rest and could be cautiously approached.
They then discharge all their pieces at once and throw themselves on their faces among the grass. The wounded elephant immediately applies his trunk to the different wounds, but being unable to extract the balls, and seeing nobody near him, becomes quite furious, and runs about amongst the bushes, until by fatigue and loss of blood he has exhausted himself, and affords the hunters an opportunity of firing a second time at him, by which he is generally brought to ground.
These ivory-gathering expeditions constituted a considerable step up from what had formerly been traditional and self-contained practices. Elephants and their ivory were of great importance in a number of African societies. In the Edo kingdom of Benin, which flourished from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries in what is today southern Nigeria, for example, ivory was a royal monopoly of the oba, a ruler at the head of a system of titled chiefs who claimed divine origins and demonstrated it through his art-laden ceremonies. It was the custom that the oba had to be awarded one tusk from every elephant killed in his realm, making ivory a kind of currency. In 1522 a female slave at the desirable age of seventeen or eighteen was worth precisely two tusks. Huge stocks of ivory were amassed, particularly after hunters gained access to European firearms, which precipitated the widespread slaughter of Nigerian herds.
The oba supported craftsmen's guilds, including one responsible for the inspired carvings of the court; these artisans were so skilled that they worked directly on the raw ivory, disdaining preliminary sketches. Among the most striking pieces of Benin ivory sculpture were huge ancestral altar tusks, each one covered with elaborate surface carving and curving backward out of a stolid head of cast brass. The evident skill and complex visual language in these pieces give them a timeless quality, but Benin art was never static; it evolved in contact with neighboring peoples, such as the Yoruba and, notably, the Portuguese, after the initial contact with them in 1485.
Among the African products that the Portuguese took back to Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were impressively carved ivories, including oliphants, from the West African coast, the Sapi area of Sierra Leone, and Benin, as well as the Kongo kingdom in Central Africa. These treasures eventually made their way into the collections of the Medici of Florence, Albrecht Dürer, and the elector of Saxony in Dresden, among others. Some of these ivories reflected African artists' efforts to incorporate portrayals of Europeans into their art and iconography, and included carvings made specifically for export that reflected European requests for particular functions (spoons, saltcellars, pyxides) as well as imagery. Afro-Portuguese ivories, as these cross-cultural carvings are called, show a mix of European and African motifs, in which the long-haired, sharp-nosed, jut-jawed Portuguese stand out to non-African eyes.
What is less obvious is the African frame of reference through which these Europeans were reconfigured. For Africans, the arrival of Europeans was akin to having visitors return from the land of the dead: the sickly pallor of their skin, their strange ships and language and superior technology, their homes across the sea—they seemed to have reversed the journey the departed took westward toward the ancestors. The use of ivory adds another layer of meaning to these Afro-Portuguese carvings, particularly those from Benin. There its chalky color was linked to ritual purity, making it appropriate for offerings to Olokun, the god of wealth and the sea, as well as communication with the dead.
These themes mingle poignantly in the beautifully modeled pendant ivory mask in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (and its nearly identical counterpart in the British Museum in London), believed to be a sixteenth-century portrait of the then oba's mother. The face, dignified and haunting, with scarification marks on the forehead, is surrounded by a tiara and a virtual choke collar composed of the bearded faces of Europeans who brought wealth from overseas—and took so much of it away in ivory and slaves.
FROM THE SIXTEENTH century on, the extraction of ivory from elephant-populous lands developed a new pattern that would often be overlaid on the basic trade in tusks. A portion of the ivory was handed back to local artisans to be carved to order for a ready market in the home countries of the colonial powers. The earliest examples of these hybrid art forms, when artisans wrestled with new uses and images, fitting them into their own craft, have the vitality of a visual struggle between different traditions. Later, when locals understood better what was wanted, artistic acquiescence resulted in increasingly formulaic production.
Anglo-Indian furniture is a particularly apt example. The British East India Company based in Calcutta (Kolkatta) in West Bengal soon put the extraordinarily rich ivory-carving tradition in the subcontinent to use. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the company sent skilled workers from Britain with "great quantities of English patterns to teach the Indians how to manufacture goods to make them vendible in England and the rest of the European markets." The effort was so successful that English joiners petitioned against it, fearing the ruin of their trade. Many eventually gave in and signed up with the East India Company, then stayed on to open similar businesses in India, drawing on the carpenter caste for labor. These vadrangis copied the "muster" (model) sent from England "with the most exact and servile fidelity." At the low end of this imitative production were things like small workboxes carved out of ivory in the shape of English thatch-roofed cottages; at the top end, artful East-West fusions, such as the elegant and exquisitely carved solid ivory chair given to the first governor-general of India.
The ivory trade was now far more than commerce in raw material; it was a trade in ivory objects as well, sometimes highly specialized. The Portuguese used their outposts in India and Sri Lanka to put local ivory carvers to work producing Christian religious images for use in Portugal and Brazil. The Spanish took this trend even further, making the Philippines the leading producer of Christian art in ivory from the sixteenth century into the nineteenth. Carvers there made an entire array of somewhat Gothic devotional objects for the Catholic church in Spain, Mexico, and Latin America as well as in other Asian countries.
THE CHINESE HAD gone directly to Africa too, and they returned with ivory. That was merely one of many feats accomplished by Admiral Zheng He, the eunuch commander of the seven extraordinary armadas sent out by the Yongle emperor from 1405 on "to make manifest the wealth and power" of Ming China in foreign lands. That it must have done: there were two hundred ships in each armada and about a third of them were 385 to 440 feet long. Quite unlike the bellicose explorations of the Portuguese and other Europeans, these voyages around Southeast Asia and across the Indian Ocean to the African East Coast founded no colonies, cornered no trade, toppled no rulers, and enslaved no one, despite the fact that there were twenty-seven thousand soldiers in the fleet (although the pirates encountered were crushed). The point was to impress any potentates along the way and draw them into the Chinese tribute system, in which whatever goods offered the emperor as gifts would be outdone by what he would bestow in return, a very grand and roundabout way to initiate trade contacts. Zheng He brought his largest ships back filled with ivory, gold, spices, and lots of exotic animals to amuse the Ming court—lions, leopards, ostriches, even giraffes.
These extravagant voyages came to an abrupt end, perhaps because of intrigues at court; in 1436 even building deep-sea vessels was banned. In any case they had been an aberration. China's traditional foreign policy was always most concerned with its territorial borders, and the empire turned inward for another six centuries. But goods went out—large quantities of Chinese porcelains were exported to the Middle East and the African East coast—and ivory came in.
China needed it, whether it was fresh tusks from Africa or mammoth tusks from Russia. In the late Ming Dynasty (1644) elephants were still found in Yunnan, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Hunan provinces, but their numbers were on the wane, pressed by the growing human population and the spread of agriculture that came with it. Unlike India and the countries of Southeast Asia, where elephants played an important role in religion and culture, in China they were widely regarded as crop-ravaging nuisances. But their tusks were highly desirable; ivory carving flourished during the Ming Dynasty, aided by increased availability from a variety of sources and widespread patronage for decorative arts. During the late Ming, the city of Zhangzhou in Fujian Province on the eastern coast enjoyed relative freedom from government trade constraints imposed on other centers. It had close ties with the Philippines, and some think that Chinese craftsmen there were also encouraged by the Spanish to provide Christian icons for the European market. That may have been the impetus for the ivory figure carving tradition of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties (1644–1911), which focused primarily on divinities associated with Buddhism and Taoism but also on other auspicious deities and legendary heroes.
During the Qing, ivory artisans turned out functional objects as well—table screens, wrist rests, intricately embellished brush holders, and other accoutrements needed for a scholar's desk. No material other than ivory permitted the minutely detailed and precise carving undertaken to satisfy the Chinese fascination for miniature worlds inspired by Taoist notions of paradise and the Buddhist ideal of "seeing the world in a seed."
Ivory retained its long-standing aura as a material fit for royal delectation. The twelve-leaf silk album The Pursuit of Pleasure in the Course of the Seasons, made for Emperor Qianlong (1736–95) by Chen Mei, one of his court painters, addressed the emperor's dual passions: his garden and his women. The coy depictions of court beauties promenading in the imperial gardens so touched the emperor that he commissioned a more permanent duplicate on twelve facing ivory leaves inlaid with jade and gold by five famous artists; the ivory ground, naturally, needed no coloration to depict flesh. (Qianlong apparently also ordered up a more graphic version as a personal pillow book—sex manual—for the instruction of his consorts.) With these kinds of distractions, it's no wonder that when Lord Macartney's delegation arrived at the Qing court in 1792 to discuss a commercial treaty with Britain they were told to go away.
Chinese ivory carving proceeded on its own track, reaching even greater technical refinement with the famous "devil's-work balls," intricate carvings of concentric balls within balls, a specialty of Guangzhou (Canton). These puzzle pieces captivated European viewers, who wondered how such surfaces could be carved, one inside the other. It was, of course, a matter of infinite patience. Conical holes had to be bored into a sphere of ivory, and then tiny, sharp, angled cutting tools were painstakingly worked in the holes to free up the inner sphere and then each successive sphere; finally, they were all incised with patterns in a similarly probing, maniacally obsessive fashion. European fascination with these objects helped inspire entirely new methods of working in ivory.
LACKING INDIGENOUS ELEPHANTS, the Japanese were late to ivory. They may have first become familiar with it in the form of carvings imported from China in the sixth century. By the seventh and eighth centuries ivory had been adopted by the elite as a precious material for sword scabbards, official emblems, name seals, Go pieces, lids of tea caddies, and plectra to play the samisen. By the sixteenth century a steady, if small, supply of raw, unworked ivory was being brought into Japan (most likely from China), although shipments must have been affected after 1639 when trade was restricted, ports were closed to most foreigners, and the Japanese themselves were forbidden to travel under pain of death.
Not surprisingly, the ivory carving of the period was centered on domestic objects, primarily for the wealthy. There were the expected combs, fans, boxes, and the like, but ivory was also a favored material for functional accessories of kimono dress. In the Edo (or Tokugawa period, 1603–1867) kimonos were common. Women carried small items in their sleeves; men overcame the lack of pockets by tying personal items to cords tucked up under the kimono sash and kept from slipping down by means of a toggle. Among the paraphernalia that might be attached were medicine and writing kits, tobacco pouches, money purses, pipe cases, flints, fans, and knives. The complete ensemble consisted of the sagemono (suspended object), ojime (cord fastener), and netsuke (the toggle).
The making of netsuke—miniature sculptures with holes that allowed them to be threaded on cords—became an art form in itself, stimulated by exacting sumptuary laws then in effect that set out strict dress codes for each social class, from aristocrats on down. Merchants, who were constrained in the ways they were permitted to flaunt their wealth, turned to netsuke, which were considered an acceptable form of display. Ivory, like the rare woods and horn also used, was ideal for this purpose—luxurious, but not on the level of the gems and jewelry forbidden to the nonaristocratic rich. Netsuke makers were pushed to test their skills by carving ever more complex items from a single piece of ivory. The range of subjects was vast: demigods, urban scenes, bugs and slugs, fishes and foxes, mythological monsters with wiggling tongues, grotesque hermits and elaborate erotic couplings, a skull with a snake crawling through the eye socket. Netsuke were appreciated for their auspicious references, beauty, and humor, and above all the sheer technical skill of various master carvers.
The Japanese were captivated by the possibilities of the material; a few centuries later they would become the biggest consumers of ivory in the world.
CERTAIN USES OF ivory—combs, thrones, figurines—crop up in every culture and period. Conceptually, the way ivory entrenches itself in the imagination of various cultures follows its own well-worn set of tracks: its color makes it both a religious and a secular symbol of purity and perfection; its rarity and expense make it a marker of luxury and wealth. In European and Asian contexts, the literary counterpart to the sculptor's interest in its fleshy sensuality has long been ivory's use as a metaphor for pale, flawless skin. Shakespeare reached for the comparison in The Rape of Lucrece ("her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue"). By the eighteenth century in Europe it had turned into a corporeal commonplace, routinely applied to faces, fingers, shoulders, thighs, and finally other body parts as well. In John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1749), the heroine gushes over the "maypole" her lover brings to the coital fray ("such a length, such a breadth of animated ivory!").
In Europe, ivory's cluster of associations firmly fixed the importance of the material in its own social and conceptual sphere. Ideas about the elephant were also developing, but in an almost completely separate realm of discourse in which ivory figured little. In his Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London, 1607), English parson and naturalist Edward Topsell says of elephants:
There is no creature among al the Beasts of the world which hath so great and ample demonstration of the power and wisdome of almighty God as the Elephant: both for proportion of body and disposition of spirit; and it is admirable to behold, the industry of our auncient forefathers, and noble desire to benefit us their posterity, by serching into the qualities of every Beast, to discover what benefits or harmes may come by them to mankind: having never beene afraid either of the Wildest, but they tamed them; the fiercest, but they ruled them; and the greatest, but they also set upon them. Witnesse for this part the Elephant, being like a living Mountain in quantity & outward appearance, yet by them so handled, as no little dog became more serviceable and tractable.
The Asian and African elephants that were brought to Europe in the seventeenth century drew huge audiences and reinforced these admiring views. One was taken to Italy and was drawn by Bernini; another was displayed in the menagerie at Versailles (where it dipped bread into buckets of soup) and still more (from Samarkand) were shown at the court of the czars in Russia. By 1850 some fifty pachyderms had gone on view before transfixed crowds in Europe.
AFTER A PERIOD in which ivory carving in Europe seemed wedded to slavish imitation of other art forms, it came to life again in the baroque and reached dizzying levels of virtuosity. Various centers in Germany and Dieppe in France were the engines behind the revitalization of the craft in the early 1600s. A series of inspired carvers combined the refinement of Renaissance modeling with the emotional engagement and grandiose passions of the painting of the period (think Rubens) in a judicious choice of forms: small statuary, medallions, lavish furniture. They even began to sign some of their creations. The soft, satiny surface of ivory was put to striking use in portrait busts and relief medallions by artists such as David Le Marchand (1674–1726), an expatriate Huguenot who fled France for Edinburgh and then London. He developed a well-deserved reputation for creating a sense of monumentality in his small ivories, and Queen Anne, George I, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, and Samuel Pepys all sat for him.
Ignaz Elhafen (1658–1715), who worked primarily in Germany, was only one of many ivory-carving masters. His The Death of Cleopatra relief (ca. 1700) in the Victoria and Albert is a dazzling masterwork: picture looking at a large cylindrical section of tusk cut in half lengthwise and oriented to form a panorama of the last of the Ptolemies in her final agonies, all carved in deep relief within the tusk's concave inner form. Cleopatra—who had once filled a tomb with ivory—is shown nearly nude and collapsing; tiny asps twine about her breasts, while no fewer than seven attending maids in equal states of undress prostrate themselves or writhe in despair. (All this, mind you, plus drapery, pottery, and foliage, in a piece seven and a half by four inches.) The material's own monochrome milkiness softens a scene that would have been garish in full color while bringing to mind the timeless whiteness of ancient marble friezes.
Some of Elhafen's other ivories, like those of his compatriot carvers, explore opposite extremes. At one pole is the marmoreal and rather chilly perfection of his Venus, and at the other the visual excess of his The Rape of the Sabines, a fat tankard encircled by a conglomeration of mythical figures that dissolves into a rather confectionary composition once you look past the superb technique.
In the late eighteenth century, Europe's last major artistic efflorescence in ivory ends. From then on the sculptural use of it will lapse back into a decidedly minor role. Ivory itself took on a different kind of importance.
PETER THE GREAT had been given Chinese silk hangings as an imperial gift from the Kangxi emperor (the mammoth-curious one) after settling a treaty. The designs were apparently not to his taste, but the czar found a use for them: in 1711 he bestowed seven pieces on Cosimo III de' Medici, in return for an ivory turning machine he wanted. He'd had one since 1698, and even ordered up two more six years later. Eventually he had dozens of these lathes, housed in an imperial workshop—the czar's Cabinet of Mechanical Equipment—manned by journeymen and master craftsmen, including the innovative machine builder Andrei K. Nartov.
Why? Peter the Great was a ruler with a passion for putting on a workman's apron, picking up a chisel, and spinning a piece of tusk on a mandrel, sometimes far into the night. Following Nartov's designs, the czar turned out "goblets, candlesticks, measuring instruments and sundials, openwork pyramids with polygonal stars inside, scepters, columns, engraved snuffboxes and polygons, all made of ivory." He wasn't unique in his passion. For some two hundred years, as historian Klaus Maurice has detailed, the crowned heads of Europe—in Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, Italy, France, Denmark—spent untold hours at their lathes turning ivory.
The lathe was not a new invention in Peter's time. Its basic form had been around as long as the bow drill and the potter's wheel, to name two other complex tools known to the ancient world. It was common in Rome and used in medieval times. Cutting a piece of wood, for example, into the desired shape by rotating it while applying a cutting tool was far more efficient than simply carving it. The later addition of the flywheel, which allowed whatever was being worked on to whirl continuously in one direction, was a huge advance. By the seventeenth century lathes had evolved into complicated marvels of metal and wood, full of intricate gearing and articulated parts. Lathes became "rose engines"—ones that had attachments for producing tricky circular and elliptical patterns. The development of adjustable cams that allowed the workpiece to be set at an angle or shuttle back and forth while being worked meant that all kinds of difficult shapes could be tackled.
It might seem surprising that these inventions didn't immediately jump-start the industrial revolution. At the time they were built, however, what they could do for the production of goods wasn't appreciated. They were regarded as useful for the amusement and elucidation of princes. Part of what the aristocracy was then taught (riding, fencing, dancing) went back to feudal times, and part of it (religion, study of the classics) was thought essential mental furniture for rulers. Increasingly, some practical grasp of art and science and manufacturing was deemed a useful addition to court education. Happily for them, the nobility could dabble in activities others worked at for a living. In fact, it was a marker of their class that they could acquire knowledge without the need for financial gain. Turning was an ideal way for fickle princes, beset by numerous distractions, to gain a sense of accomplishment, thanks to the assistance of a machine. And, given its rarity, costliness, and uniformity, what more princely material to play with than ivory? It seemed predestined for the lathe.
The courts of Europe embraced turning and filled their private "wonder cabinets" with hundreds of their own signed creations. Princes first tried simple receptacles that looked like the finials of fat bedposts, then progressed to ever more whirled and twirled ivory fantasies. "Art ennobles the ivory and the originator, Maximilian, Duke of Bavaria, ennobles the art, in the year 1608" reads the inscription on the bottom of his elaborate ivory candlestick. Everything about turning appealed to the nobility. Even the way the lathes could be set up to follow a predetermined course that would lead to an inexorable result seemed to replicate the apparatus of a well-ordered state under absolute monarchy.
As a prescribed noble activity it backfired somewhat: it was too successful. By the mid-eighteenth century advisers at courts began to consider turning a pastime just as idle as the traditional ones. "One must be patient if documents requiring signature remain unsigned for months because of a mistress, a foreign painter, or even a lathe, but is it laudable?" lamented a diplomat.
As might be expected there were always master artisans connected to these court workshops who were available to help the nobility spin their creations. Marcus Heiden, who served under several Saxon dukes and did turning of his own, wrote of his dizzily towering ivory chef d'ouevre—a drinking vessel balanced on an elephant and topped with a ship under full sail—which he began in 1637 and finished two years later. According to Maurice, "Heiden never mentions or describes technical difficulties in his book, other than that the ivory tusk was unusually large and heavy and had been selected in Amsterdam from 300,000 tusks!" The figure is surely an exaggeration, but no doubt an enormous amount of ivory was brought into Europe for the pleasure of princes.
In the end, ivory turning was no more than a courtly rehearsal for the nineteenth-century transformation of ivory carving from an individual undertaking to mass production. Two Frenchmen in particular helped that process along.
WHEN NICHOLAS GROLLIER de Servière (1596–1689), a military engineer who designed movable bridges and similar machinery and served in Flanders, Germany, Italy, and Constantinople, retired to his estate in Lyon he busied himself with the construction of models and machines. These included a "reading wheel" that consisted of a circular drum of shelves, each of which held an open book, a perspective machine for artists, floating bridges, water pumps, and regulator clocks. De Servière was also among the leading turners of his time, creating astonishingly unlikely forms on lathes of his own design.
These pièces excentriques, as he called them, "tended to be tall and precariously thin, like the circular steps that are attached to each other by tiny stems, looking like a pile of coins held together by bits of toothpicks, but all turned from a single tusk." They included a series of illusionistic carved ivory balls within balls, far beyond what the Chinese had ever attempted with their handcraft, some with needle-sharp points and fleursde-lis that baffle the imagination as to how they were carved. But de Servière's interest in turning was not centered on the creation of ivory fripperies. For him his pièces were important demonstrations of what could be accomplished through mechanical design, which inevitably focused attention on the lathes that made these fantastic forms possible.
Charles Plumier, a young friar from Marseille, was among those who came to goggle at de Servière's ivory figures and particularly the machines that made them. In his youth Plumier had been "hypnotized" by the lathe. He wrote a classic and influential work on the subject of turning, L'Art de Tourner en Perfection (1701), which revealed the construction of every lathe he could examine, some of whose blueprints were closely guarded secrets. Plumier's treatise managed to sum up the known technology of turning, thereby laying the groundwork for machine-assisted manufacturing. By the middle of the eighteenth century, interest had shifted from the ornamental products of the lathe—which had always been confined to singular individual objects—to the development of the machines themselves.
Once lathes capable of cutting metal had been harnessed to the production of parts that could be assembled, the possibility of the modern factory was born. The lathe, in all its variants, became one of the vital machines of the industrial revolution, which was shortly to transform the world—and, ironically, the manufacture of ivory products.