Kleinfunde aus elfenhein und knochen aus assur.

• Author: Dunham, Sally
• Position: Book review

Kleinfunde aus Elfenbein und Knochen aus Assur. By DIRK WICKE. Wissenschaftliche Veroffentlichungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft, vol. 131. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWRRZ VERLAG, 2010. Pp. xi + 268, plates. [euro]78.

This is the publication of 719 pieces of worked and unworked ivory and bone found during the excavations at Assur by W. Andrae in the early twentieth century and currently held in the Vorder-asiatisches Museum in Berlin. The author presents his subject thoroughly and methodically. In the introduction (pp. 1-6) he gives an overview of the collection in which he notes that the Assur collection is one of the few that spans the spectrum from everyday objects to high prestige objects from the end of the third millennium to the end of the first millennium B.C. (p. 1). He notes some of the problems in dealing with such an old collection, such as the ordering of the finds and find numbers where tags have become unreadable over the decades the collection has been in the museum. Here he also explains the arrangement of each catalog entry and the proportions of the different kinds of objects and the dates of the objects. The most numerous kinds of objects are needles (p. 244) and inlay pieces (p. 186), while the largest groups of ivories come from the Middle Assyrian (p. 243) and the Neo-Assyrian periods (p. 184).

The second chapter deals first with ivory and bone in a general way--characteristics, how the two are to be distinguished, the techniques for working them. the tools used and how traces of their use might be recognized on finished objects (pp. 21-25); secondary treatments like coloring/painting, cloisonne, gilding; and how worked pieces are mounted. For each of these sections he gives many details and references. In his discussion of the characteristics of bone and ivory he notes that while bone is plentiful from the slaughter of animals, for the 3000-year period covered by the present study, there are only ca. 500 bone artifacts preserved. He attributes this situation to the fact that bone was a "cheap" material, so many of the artifacts made from it were "cheap throw-away products" (p. 9).

Ivory, which is tooth dentine, was available in the ancient Near East only from elephant tusks (upper incisors) and hippotamus teeth (canines and incisors), but it is less brittle and more massive than bone tissue, so that whole objects can be carved from it (Abb. 4). Wicke says that while the identification of elephant ivory as the material of an object is quite clear from the presence of the growth lines around the outer edge of the pupa of the tooth (called "Retziussche Linien," "Schreger's lines," and "Owen's Rings"; see p. 11), the type of...