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Although the narrative of the sacred Scriptures does not, with the exception of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, reach back so far as the known history of the kingdom of Egypt, it may be best to mention, first, some places in the Old Testament in which reference is made to works in ivory.

King Solomon, we are told, “made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it with the best gold.” “The ivory house which Ahab made,” is particularly mentioned among his memorable acts. The Psalmist speaks of garments brought “out of ivory palaces,” or from what may rather be translated wardrobes. The original text is ﬤﬢﬣיﬤﬥישׁן. In the earlier Hebrew the word ﬣיﬤﬥ meant a small house or palace; in the later,—and the 45th Psalm is not of early date, and was moreover written in a foreign country,—it meant more commonly a wardrobe, or what we now call a vestry or sacristy. The prophets Ezekiel and Amos tell us of “benches of ivory brought out of the isles of Chittim,” of “horns of ivory,” and of “beds of ivory.” There are other evidences in the Bible of the value and high estimation in which ivory was held by the Jews; and its beauty of appearance, its brightness, and smoothness are used as poetical illustrations in the Song of Solomon. From a verse in the fifth chapter of this last book we also learn that the ivory was sometimes inlaid with precious stones.

It is quite evident that in those days works in ivory were regarded in Judæa as a possession only to be acquired by very great and wealthy persons; nor may it be too much, perhaps, to say that they were looked upon as insignia of royalty. We may entirely agree with De Quincy, in his book upon the statue of Jupiter at Olympia: “L’ivoire constitua les ornaments distinctifs de la dignité royale chez les plus anciens peuples. L’antiquité ne parle que de sceptres et de trônes d’ivoire. Tels étaient selon Denis d’Halicarnasse les attributs de la royauté chez les Étrusques. A leur exemple, Tarquin eut le trône et le sceptre d’ivoire, &c.”

But, as has been already observed, there are specimens and remains of Egyptian works in ivory still existing which date by many centuries from an earlier time than the days of Solomon or Ahab. These must be, of course, of excessive rarity: partly because of their antiquity and fragile nature; partly because of the smallness of their size, owing to which they must have been frequently overlooked or thrown aside. The collection in the British museum includes some examples, a few of which, particularly two daggers inlaid and ornamented with ivory, are of the time of Moses, about 1,800 years before Christ. Several chairs, ornamented in a like manner, may be attributed to the sixteenth century b.c. Some woodcuts are given of chairs and stools ornamented with ivory, in Sir Gardner Wilkinson’s account of the ancient Egyptians.

Among the Egyptian antiquities in the British museum may also be mentioned the handle of a mirror in hippopotamus ivory; an ivory palette of about the same period; two ivory boxes, in the shape of water fowl; and a very remarkable figure or statuette, a woman, of perhaps the eleventh century b.c.; and, again, a very curious casket of considerable size but of much later date; probably of the first century of the Christian æra: Roman work and decoration. This was found at Memphis, and is made of ivory plaques laid upon a framework of wood. The plaques are incised with figures and coloured. The shape is oblong, with a sloping cover; it measures about twelve by ten inches.

The use of ivory for ornament and the adapting it to works of art must have been known by the Egyptians from a most remote antiquity. There is a small ivory box in the Louvre, which is inscribed with a prænomen attributed to the fifth dynasty. Labarte, quoting De Rougé, mentions another of the sixth dynasty:—“On voit au musée Égyptien du Louvre une quantité d’objets d’os et d’ivoire. Ce sont de petits vases, des objets de toilette, des cuillers dont le manche est formé par une femme nue, et une boîte ornée d’une belle tête de gazelle. La pièce la plus curieuse est une autre boîte d’ivoire très-simple, mais d’une excessive antiquité, puisqu’elle porte la légende royale de Merien-ra, qui est placé vers la sixième dynastie.” Dr. Birch in a paper printed among the transactions of the Royal society, on two Egyptian cartouches found at Nimroud, refers to a tablet of the twelfth dynasty, which describes a figure whose “arms are to be made of precious stones, silver and gold, and the two hinder parts of ivory and ebony. In a tomb at Thebes record is made of a statue composed of ebony and ivory, with a collar of gold.”

The date of the Egyptian statuette in the British museum and of numerous smaller objects in that and in the great foreign collections, such as spoons, bracelets, collars, boxes, &c., most of which are earlier than the twenty-fourth dynasty and long before the time of Cambyses, brings us to about the same period as the famous Assyrian ivories, which were found at Nineveh, and which are also preserved in the British museum.

These were chiefly discovered in the north-west palace; and almost all in two chambers of that building. We cannot do better than listen to the general description of them given by Mr. Layard himself:—“The most interesting are the remains of two small tablets, one nearly entire, the other much injured. Upon them are represented two sitting figures, holding in one hand the Egyptian sceptre or symbol of power. Between them is a cartouche containing hieroglyphics, and surmounted by a plume, such as is found in monuments of the eighteenth and subsequent dynasties of Egypt. The chairs on which the figures are seated, the robes of the figures themselves, the hieroglyphics and the feather above, were enamelled with a blue substance let into the ivory, and the whole ground of the tablet, as well as the cartouche and part of the figures, was originally gilded,—remains of the gold leaf still adhering to them. The forms and style of art have a purely Egyptian character, although there are certain peculiarities in the execution and mode of treatment that would seem to mark the work of a foreign, perhaps an Assyrian, artist. The same peculiarities, the same anomalies, characterise all the other objects discovered. Several small heads in frames, supported by pillars or pedestals, most elegant in design and elaborate in execution, show not only a considerable acquaintance with art, but an intimate knowledge of the method of working in ivory. Scattered about were fragments of winged sphinxes, the head of a lion of singular beauty, human heads, legs and feet, bulls, flowers, and scroll work. In all these specimens the spirit of the design and the delicacy of the workmanship are equally to be admired.”

There are altogether more than fifty of these Assyrian ivories in the British museum: a detailed account of nearly all is given by Mr. Layard in the appendix to his first volume. Dr. Birch says they cannot be later in date than the seventh century b.c.; and thinks it highly probable that they are much earlier. Mr. Layard believes that about the year 950 b.c. is the most probable period of their execution.

There can be no doubt that from the year 1000 b.c. down to the Christian æra there was a constant succession of artists in ivory in the western Asiatic countries, in Egypt, in Greece, and in Italy. Long before ivory was applied in Greece to the making of bas-reliefs and statues it was employed for a multitude of objects of luxury and ornament. Inferior to marble in whiteness, and of course greatly inferior in extent of available surface, ivory exceeds marble in beauty of polish and is less fragile, being an animal substance and of true tissue and growth. From the time of Hesiod and Homer numerous allusions are to be found in classic authors to various works in this material: such as the decoration of shields, couches, and articles of domestic use. As to statues, Pausanias tells us that, so far as he could learn, men first made them of wood only; of ebony, cypress, cedar, or oak. The passages from the earlier classics have been referred to, over and over again, by all the later writers on the subject; and it would be not merely wearying but unnecessary to repeat them here.

In the sixth century before Christ, ivory statues of the Dioscuri and other deities were made at Sicyon and Argos. Sir Digby Wyatt, in the lecture before referred to, speaks of them as having been rude in character, but there is no evidence left for so disparaging a decision. Other works were statues of the Hours, of Themis, and of Diana. The names of some of the sculptors have been preserved: among them Polycletus, Endoos of Athens, the brothers Medon, and Dorycleides.

The style in which objects of this kind were executed was called Toreutic: from τορεύω, to bore through, to chase, to work in relief; signifying chiefly working the material in the round or in relief. Winckelman, in his history of art, explains the term at first with insufficient exactness: “Phidias inventa cet art appelé par les anciens toreutice, c’est à dire, l’art de tourner.” In his second edition he corrects this, and rightly says, “la racine de cette dénomination est τορός, clair, distinct, épithète qui s’applique à la voix. C’est pourquoi on donne ce nomme au travaux en relief, par opposition au travail en creux des pierres précieuses.” A long disquisition on the meaning of the word, and its etymology, is given by De Quincy.

One of the most famous of such toreutic works, and of which Pausanias has left us a tolerably accurate description, was the coffer which the Cypselidæ sent as an offering to Olympia, about 600 b.c. It seems to have been made of cedar wood, of considerable size; the figures ranged in five rows, one above the other, along the sides which were inlaid with gold and ivory. The subjects were taken from old heroic stories. De Quincy has given a large plate with a conjectural restoration of the chest; which he supposes to have been oblong with a rounded cover. Others believe it to have been elliptical.

Pausanias, in his description of Greece, mentions the existence in his time of numerous ivory statues and of chryselephantine works. In the first section of the seventeenth chapter of the fifth book he enumerates ten or fifteen, which he says were all made of ivory and gold; and a table of ivory. At Megara he saw an ivory statue of Venus, the work of Praxiteles; at Corinth, many chryselephantine statues; near Mycenæ, a statue of Hebe, the work of Naucydes; in Altis, the horn of Amalthea; and in another treasury there, a statue of Endymion entirely of ivory, except his robe; at Elis, a statue made of ivory and gold, the work of Phidias; near Tritia, in Achaias, an ivory throne with the sitting figure of a virgin; at Ægira, a wooden statue of Minerva of which the face, hands, and feet were ivory. And, to name no more, a statue of Minerva, the work of Endius, all of ivory, long preserved at Tegea, but at the time when he wrote placed at the entrance of the new forum at Rome, having been taken there by Augustus.

There are two men whose travels and the sights they saw we cannot but envy; one was Pausanias, the other our own Leland.

It should be observed that Pausanias believed ivory to be the horn and not the tooth of the elephant: and he has a long argument about it in his fifth book, where he refers to and mentions the Celtic stag. Declaring it to be horn, he says that, like the horns of oxen, ivory can be softened by fire and changed from a round to a flat shape.

The famous chryselephantine statues of Phidias and his contemporaries were somewhat later than the statues of the Dioscuri and the chest at Olympia. One of the most celebrated was the figure of Minerva in the Parthenon, which was in height nearly forty English feet. It would be wrong to omit all notice of the attempt to reproduce this statue which was made by order of the late Duc de Luynes, and was shown in the Paris Exhibition of 1855. “M. Simart, qui l’a exécutée, s’est montré le digne interprète de Phidias, et a su retrouver, par ses études approfondies, le vrai sentiment de l’art antique. La statue, de trois mètres de hauteur, est d’ivoire et d’argent: la face, le cou, le bras et les pieds, la tête de Méduse placée sur son égide, ainsi que le torse de la Victoire qu’elle tient dans la main droite, sont d’ivoire de l’Inde. La lance, le bouclier, le casque, et le serpent sont de bronze; la tunique et l’égide d’argent ont été repoussées et ciselées.”

Even more colossal than the figure of Minerva was the Jupiter at Olympia; the god was represented sitting, and reached to the height of about fifty-eight feet. De Quincy has some conjectural restorations of this statue engraved in his book.

We remember the destruction of these and similar works with the utmost regret; and the more so, because that destruction was owing in many instances to the mad violence of Christian fanatics; the iconoclasts of the eighth century. The remains which we possess even of smaller objects are not only of excessive rarity, but they cannot with any certainty be attributed to artists working in Greece itself. Ivory and metal have perished under conditions which have left uninjured fragile vases. There are some examples of carvings in ivory in the British museum, and especially in the collection lately purchased from signor Castellani which have been found in Etruscan tombs. Many of these are perhaps the work of Greek artists.

Etruscan sculpture was probably derived at first from Egypt: but the art of the one was entirely and unchangingly conventional, and never seems to vary from a certain fixed style. The Etrurian, on the contrary, soon cleared itself from the bondage of old traditions and, even when rudest, was free and attempted to imitate nature in the representation of muscles, hair, and draperies.

Neither the beauty nor the wonderful spirit of the execution of some of the ivories in the British museum has been exceeded or perhaps equalled in any later time. Among them the following ought to be particularly mentioned:—

A large bust of a woman, of the Roman republican period, and a small carving of the head of a horse, scarcely inferior to the work of any Greek artist of the best time. A very important head of a Gorgon, as seen on Athenian coins, with eyes inlaid in gold, about two inches in diameter; probably the button of a woman’s dress. Two lions, the heads and part only of the bodies, lying across each other, very admirable and full of character; and another lion’s head, the top perhaps of the handle of a mirror. These were chiefly discovered, with numerous other fragments, at Chiusi and Calvi. At Chiusi also were found the panels of two small caskets which have been put together; both are of early date; one it may be of the fourth century b.c. and Phœnician in style. There is also in the same case a fine small ivory statuette, much later, perhaps of the second century: a boy, still partly embedded in the mortar or refuse in which it was found.

The workers in ivory during the first centuries of our æra were, as a class, sufficiently numerous to be exempted by law from some personal and municipal obligations. Pancirolus, in his “Notitiæ,” gives a list of these bodies of artificers. He mentions as exempt, architects, medical men, painters, and others, with references to the various laws under which they were excused; and among them are “workmen in ivory, who make chairs, beds, and other things of that sort.”

Nevertheless, carvings in ivory of the Roman imperial times before Constantine are extremely scarce. In the superb collection in the South Kensington museum there are two only which can safely be so attributed. One is the fragment, no. 299; the other is the beautiful leaf, no. 212.

The British museum (not to mention a large number of fragments chiefly of caskets or decorations of furniture, tesseræ and tickets of admission to theatres and shows, dice, and the like) possesses a few pieces, of which one is extremely fine in character and in good preservation. The subject is Bellerophon, who is represented on Pegasus, killing the Chimæra; and it is executed in open work. The age is somewhat doubtful. Professor Westwood places it as early as the third century, and his judgment must be treated with great deference. Others, of no slight authority, are indisposed to give it an earlier date than the fourth century. This admirable ivory has somewhat of the character of the book-cover in the Barberini collection, engraved by Gori, in the second volume of his great work on diptychs. That famous piece is not perfect, nor is there any name upon it. Gori fairly argues that it represents the emperor Constantius, about the year 357. The Bellerophon is of finer work.

The gradual and uninterrupted decline of art from the days of Augustus is to be traced as distinctly in the ivories which have been preserved as in ancient buildings. But we can scarcely agree with D’Agincourt as regards its rapidity. Speaking of sculpture generally, he says: “On vit celle-ci successivement grande, noble, auguste sous le prince qui mérita ce nom; licencieuse et obscène sous Tibère; grossièrement adulatrice sous Caracalla; extravagante sous Néron, qui faisait dorer les chefs-d’œuvre de Lysippe.” D’Agincourt probably refers to the barbarism of Caligula, who proposed to put a head of himself upon the Olympic Zeus by Phidias; or to Claudius, who cut the head of Alexander out of a picture by Apelles, to replace it with his own. Suetonius has recorded the first of these atrocities (can we speak of them by a lighter name?) and Pliny the last.

In the collection given to the town of Liverpool by Mr. Mayer there are two very celebrated pieces, possibly of the third century; they were originally the leaves of a diptych. On one is Æsculapius, on the other Hygieia.