An area for further investigation is if the ivories such as combs with Indus writing also had traces of iron oxide or gold paints to posit a hypothesis that the Nimrod ivories were a continuum of the Indus bronze-age artistic legacy.
Kalyanraman
Here is a quote from Mallowan:"Methods of manufacture. The tools and workshop conditions of ivory carvrs in ancient Mesopotamia, as in Syro-Phoenicia are unknown. Mallowan (1966, Nimrud and its remains, London, : 483-4) attempted to remedy this deficiency by recounting the practice of ivory carvrs in modern India: 'I was told that the tusk was only considered mature at 50 years -- that is the half-life of the male elephant. The craftsmen, incidentally, were all of humble origin; they were poorly paid and their workshop was equipped only with a bare minimum of furniture; a single patron employed about twenty fo them...the patron averred...that African were better than Indian tusks...in Jaipur...the craftsman was only using chisel, file, fine saw and a nail with a sharp point, and a small tool with a flat paddle-shaped blade at each end..His practice was to saw a section longitjudinally, cutting the tusk in two halves and then to make two similar figures after having sketched the object intended on the convex side. The technique explains the fact that many of the Nimrud ivories were carved in pairs...At Jaipur the craftsmen said that the most delicate and tricky part of the operation was cutting out the open and ajoure parts of the figures...if an accident happened, then the free standing parts were altogether cut away, and only the solid figure was produced...' The oldest surviving textual source for ivory-working appears to be an eleventh-century AD illuminated manuscript which illustrates the working of ivory at that time, though only the first process and the final product." (PRS Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: the archaeological evidence, p.126)
![]()
Volume 91 Issue 20 p. 8 News of The Week![]()
This Phoenician sculpture made of ivory was once gilded.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ac4006167?source=cen
Kalyanraman
Here is a quote from Mallowan:"Methods of manufacture. The tools and workshop conditions of ivory carvrs in ancient Mesopotamia, as in Syro-Phoenicia are unknown. Mallowan (1966, Nimrud and its remains, London, : 483-4) attempted to remedy this deficiency by recounting the practice of ivory carvrs in modern India: 'I was told that the tusk was only considered mature at 50 years -- that is the half-life of the male elephant. The craftsmen, incidentally, were all of humble origin; they were poorly paid and their workshop was equipped only with a bare minimum of furniture; a single patron employed about twenty fo them...the patron averred...that African were better than Indian tusks...in Jaipur...the craftsman was only using chisel, file, fine saw and a nail with a sharp point, and a small tool with a flat paddle-shaped blade at each end..His practice was to saw a section longitjudinally, cutting the tusk in two halves and then to make two similar figures after having sketched the object intended on the convex side. The technique explains the fact that many of the Nimrud ivories were carved in pairs...At Jaipur the craftsmen said that the most delicate and tricky part of the operation was cutting out the open and ajoure parts of the figures...if an accident happened, then the free standing parts were altogether cut away, and only the solid figure was produced...' The oldest surviving textual source for ivory-working appears to be an eleventh-century AD illuminated manuscript which illustrates the working of ivory at that time, though only the first process and the final product." (PRS Moorey, Ancient Mesopotamian Materials and Industries: the archaeological evidence, p.126)
Volume 91 Issue 20 p. 8 News of The WeekIssue Date: May 20, 2013 Web Date: May 17, 2013
Archaeology’s Hidden Secrets
Ancient Ivory: Metal traces on Phoenician artifacts show long-gone paint and gold
By
This Phoenician sculpture made of ivory was once gilded.Credit: Courtesy of Musée du Louvre/R. Chipault
Ancient ivory carvings made by Phoenician artists some 3,000 years ago have long hidden a secret, even while being openly displayed in museums around the world: The sculptures were originally painted with colorful pigments, and some were decorated with gold.
Researchers based in France and Germany report chemical analyses showing that 8th-century B.C. Phoenician ivory artifacts bear metal traces that are invisible to the naked eye (Anal. Chem. 2013, DOI: 10.1021/ac4006167).
These metals are found in pigments commonly used in antiquity, such as the copper-based pigment Egyptian blue or the iron-based pigment hematite. The metals are not normally in ivory nor in the soil where the artifacts were long buried, explains Ina Reiche, a chemist at the Laboratory of Molecular & Structural Archaeology, in Paris. Reiche led the research, which was performed on ivory originally unearthed in Syria and now held at Baden State Museum, in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Phoenicians were seafaring Semitic traders who pioneered the use of an alphabet later adopted in ancient Greece, and they controlled the valuable royal-purple pigment trade throughout the Mediterranean during the period 1500–300 B.C.
Scholars had suspected that Phoenician ivory sculptures might initially have been painted, but to date most studies had examined just a few spots on ivory surfaces, Reiche says. Her team used a synchrotron to do X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy to analyze the entire surface of the artifacts with micrometer resolution, revealing the spatial distribution of the lost pigmentation.
“Knowledge of an object’s original appearance can help us understand why it was so visually powerful to ancient viewers,” saysBenjamin W. Porter, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley. And there are plenty of important objects to examine, he adds. “This technique is transferable to other kinds of ancient art whose pigments have been weathered, from the palace wall reliefs of the Assyrian empire to Egyptian tomb paintings to everyday ceramic vessels whose decorations have been worn.”
- Chemical & Engineering News
- ISSN 0009-2347
- http://cen.acs.org/articles/91/i20/Archaeologys-Hidden-Secrets.html
- Metal Paints on Phoenician Ivories (Analytical Chemistry, May 19, 2013) Discovering vanished paints and naturally formed gold nanoparticles on 2800 years old Phoenician ivories using SR-FF-microXRF with the Color X-ray Camera
- <p style=" margin: 12px auto 6px auto; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,Sans-serif; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 14px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; -x-system-font: none; display: block;"> <a title="View Metal Paints on Phoenician Ivories (Analytical Chemistry, May 19, 2013) on Scribd" href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/142431468/Metal-Paints-on-Phoenician-Ivories-Analytical-Chemistry-May-19-2013" style="text-decoration: underline;" >Metal Paints on Phoenician Ivories (Analytical Chemistry, May 19, 2013)</a></p><
![]()
Discovering vanished paints and naturally formed gold nanoparticles on 2800 years old Phoenician ivories using SR-FF-microXRF with the Color X-ray Camera
Anal. Chem., Just Accepted Manuscript
• DOI: 10.1021/ac4006167 • Publication Date (Web): 13 May 2013
Downloaded from http://pubs.acs.org on May 19, 2013
Abstract
Phoenician ivory objects (8th c. BC, Syria) from the collections of the Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Germany, have been studied with full field X-ray fluorescence microimaging using synchrotron radiation (SR-FF-microXRF). The innovative Color X-ray Camera (CXC), a full-field detection device (SLcam®), was used at the X-ray fluorescence beamline of the ANKA synchrotron facility (ANKA-FLUO, KIT, Karlsruhe, Germany) to non-invasively study trace metal distributions at the surface of the archaeological ivory objects. The outstanding strength of the imaging technique with the CXC is the capability to record the full XRF spectrum with a spatial resolution of 48 μm on a zone of a size of (11.9 x 12.3) mm2 (264 x 264 pixels). For each analyzed region, 69 696 spectra were simultaneously recorded. The principal elements detected are P, Ca and Sr coming from the ivory material itself, Cu characteristic of pigments, Fe and Pb representing sediments or pigments, Mn revealing deposited soil minerals, Ti indicating restoration processes or correlated with Fe sediment traces and Au, linked to a former gilding. This provides essential information for the assessment of the original appearance of the ivory carvings. The determined elemental maps specific of possible pigments are superimposed on one another to visualize their respective distributions and reconstruct the original polychromy and gilding. Reliable hypotheses for the reconstruction of the original polychromy of the carved ivories are postulated on this basis.
Metal Paints on Phoenician Ivories (Analytical Chemistry, May 19, 2013)