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Part VII. Chemical Investigations on Ivory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2013

Hugh Taylor
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Extract

This research project of Roger Moseley, a fourth-year undergraduate student in Princeton University arose out of conversations between Sir Hugh Taylor, Dean of the Graduate College, Princeton, and Dr. A. J. B. Wace of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in April 1954 in Philadelphia. The questions were directed to the properties of ivory when subjected to the conditions obtaining in houses destroyed by fire as, for example, in the houses excavated by Wace in Mycenae, where, in one case, many fragments of ivory which had obviously been in the fire were discovered.

Samples of old ivories were subsequently provided by Wace and others for examination. These included:

(1) Ivory fragments from Mycenae from houses destroyed by fire. Date: thirteenth century B.C.

(2) Ivory fragments from Syria in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. Pratt Gift. Date: twelfth century B.C.

(3) Ivory fragments from Nimrud, Mesopotamia. Date: ninth and eighth centuries B.C.

An experimental programme on ‘modern’ ivory was put into effect to provide data against which the properties of the ancient ivories could be examined.

Type
Mycenae 1939–1954
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 50 , November 1955 , pp. 248 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1955

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References

1 Mr. C. K. Wilkinson of the Metropolitan Museum and Mr. R. D. Barnett of the British Museum.

2 The ivory used by the Mycenaeans was presumably imported from Syria, for the elephant then still existed there (Barnett, , PEFQ 1939, 4 ff.Google Scholar). In the Palestine Museum there are two elephant tusks found in Palaeolithic deposits and another was found by Miss Bate at Bethlehem. The elephant does not seem to have existed in Egypt, and consequently Syria would have been the source of ivory nearest to Mycenae. Some Early Dynastic ivories found in Egypt are said to be of rhinoceros ivory. Research on the Syrian elephant is much to be desired and also on the characteristics and use of elephant, rhinoceros, and walrus ivory and possibly also mammoth ivory.—A. J. B. W.