Ivory
Ivory is the same thing as elephant tusks. People used to kill elephants in India and Africa and cut off their tusks, and carve the tusks into beads or small statues. Sometimes they sold the tusks to Egypt, Greece, Rome, or China for wine or silk or glass beads. Most things made of ivory have to be pretty small, smaller than an elephant tusk.
But when people wanted to make big
statues out of ivory, they sliced the tusk into thin sheets, and
then pinned the sheets of ivory to a wooden statue, to make an ivory
statue.
(Today it is illegal in all countries to kill elephants for ivory).
This is an ivory carving of the Greek goddess Artemis,
done during the Roman Empire, now
in the Cluny museum in Paris
At first most European and Asian artists used Asian ivory, from Indian
elephants. But then they realized that African ivory, from African
elephants, was easier to carve. Then traders started to buy African
ivory, all along the East
and West coasts of Africa.
Until 1300 AD, people in the Byzantine
empire who wanted African ivory traded with the African kingdom
of Aksum, so that Aksum
stayed a Christian
kingdom until the 1300's AD.
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To find out more about ivory, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:
Elephants, Ivory, And Hunters, by Tony Sanchez-Arino (2004).
Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture, by Doran Ross (1995).
Ivory in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to the Hellenistic Period, edited by J. Lesley Fitton (1993). Each chapter by a different specialist in ancient ivory.
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